Cara

Creeping fig will take over completely given a year, so plant it knowing you are signing up for regular trimming. That is a fine trade for a tank that looks alive in three months rather than twelve.

Counterpoint for the Pi, since nobody has made it: if your library is already in a format your clients handle natively, direct play is the norm and the Pi 5 with NVMe is genuinely lovely. Silent, tiny, boots in seconds. I ran exactly that for two years. I only moved because a family member started watching on a work laptop that could not handle anything.

Also confirm the clock on the machine is actually being synced. A Pi with no battery backed clock and a broken NTP config drifts, and I have seen a box sit an hour out after a power cut because it restored a stale time and never corrected. timedatectl will tell you in one line whether NTP is active and synchronised.

Second thing to rule out is DHCP. Some ISP routers hand out short leases and the Zero 2 sometimes fails the renewal after a sleep, then sits there with no address while everything else on the board carries on. Give it a static reservation on the router side, not a static IP on the Pi, and see if the pattern changes.

Worth adding a slice of mushroom or a piece of squash on the substrate for a few days. It concentrates the springtails visibly and gives you a real sense of whether the population is establishing or not.

I used a sheet of acrylic cut at a hardware shop for a few dollars and left a two inch strip open at the front. Went from 45 percent in the afternoon to a steady 75 and never looked back.

The state trigger detail people miss: trigger on from not_home to home explicitly, not just to home. Without the from clause, any attribute update while already home can re-trigger, which produces the same duplicate behaviour with only one person involved and is much harder to spot.

And put the alert somewhere you will actually see it. A dashboard card you check monthly is not an alert, it is a museum exhibit.