automation

Showing Posts From Automation

I Made Myself a JARVIS Over the Weekend

With some spare parts, a USB speakerphone, and my Home Assistant server, I was able to make a competent JARVIS for my home office over the weekend…and the exciting part is that it’s only going to keep getting better! Last year was the “Year of Voice” for Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform, and the team accomplished a ton of work that enables Home Assistant users to make their own voice assistants.

Automation

The macOS Privacy Settings Deleted My Backups

The other day I logged in to my NAS to find that all of my backed up media files were gone. No errors, the drives were fine, the directory was there, but the files were gone. Thankfully it wasn’t a freak out moment as I had my originals and my other backups, but it was a mystery.

What’s New in Shortcuts - Issue 55

Thank you to Matthew Cassinelli for giving my Post to Mastodon shortcut a nod in the New Year’s Eve edition of his “What’s New in Shortcuts” newsletter. If you’re interested in Shortcuts or macOS/iPadOS/iOS automation, this is a newsletter worth checking out.

Automation

Posting to Mastodon via Shortcuts

The best thing to come out of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase (and then backing out of the purchase, and then purchase, and then massive layoffs, and allowing crazies back on Twitter, and whatever happened today) is that Mastodon has been so much fun! One extremely minor annoyance has been the lack of good Mastodon clients, and while TapBots is hard at work on that right now, it makes posting on Mastodon a little bit harder than it was on Twitter.

Automation

Hacking an Aqara Door Sensor into a Dead Bolt Sensor

Here’s an exciting home automation project for you: Can a door sensor work as a way to tell if a door is dead bolted? Yes…but do you have any paperclips? I’m a big fan of home automation, especially since working from home, and I’ve been experimenting with the Aqara sensors. Their door, temp, water, and vibration sensors all work great for me, but what I really need is a way to check if the back door of my garage is locked.

Automation

Ventura + Keyboard Maestro + iCalBuddy = Confusion

Early this year I setup a bunch of calendar related automations with my Macs, Keyboard Maestro, and the iCalBuddy script and they’ve been very successful. I have a button on my Steam Deck that shows when my next meeting is, and I have serval automations triggered when I’m currently in a meeting such as turning on a red light outside of my home office door.