I’m really sorry that so many people assume you don’t have a normal cat sitter and you simply desire to stalk your cat when you’re not home.

(I personally check my pet camera feeds every day wherever I am, at work, at dinner with friends, at home in my bed, etc because I just love seeing my cats, and they are perfectly healthy. And if I’m on vacation, I would not be satisfied with only a few pics/videos from my sitters. Also useful for giving my sitters a heads up that the one of the cats vomited, so they can mentally prepare themselves before their daily visit.)

I have several Tapo cameras and access the rtsp streams through Frigate. I additionally have Frigate added to my Home Assistant, which is primarily useful in my use case to automatically restart Frigate when one or more cameras is unavailable for 5 minutes (sometimes my streams randomly go down for me and a restart magically fixes it… I’m not sure if this is common or just a me problem).

Home Assistant is exposed to the Internet with my domain using the cloudflare tunnel addon. I access Frigate through the Home Assistant app.

However, this took me overall a few hours every day for about a week to get setup properly. You can skip the Home Assistant step as long as you have a reliable way to restart Frigate if it crashes (or maybe your setup will be more stable than mine and it never crashes!), and access it using Tailscale VPN without a domain.

I agree that a house is not a home, but what do you tell people when you’re buying a “house” but it could actually be a condo or a townhouse? When I say house, people assume I’m talking about a single-family house with a yard, driveway, etc. Is there a better word to encompass different property types that can become your home?

The Emperor’s New Groove