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.
Read moreThe 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.
Read moreWhat’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.
Read morePosting 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.
Read moreHacking 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.
Read moreVentura + 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.
Read morePosting to Hugo from Drafts
I’ve recently been playing with the popular Drafts app (macOS, iOS, and iPadOS) and I think I get it. It’s not yet essential to me, but the actions are quite powerful and I can Drafts becoming essential after a little while. Earlier this year I setup an automation to post from Craft (my long term text app of choice) to C33Tech.
Read moreA Fully Automated Home Office DND Solution
It was almost two years ago when I created a custom “Do Not Disturb” button for my home office that allowed me to tell my family that I’m in a meeting and please don’t casually pop in. I wrote a post about it, but the up shot is that I cobbled together some parts I had around, 3D printed a case, and wrote some code that so that the button, connected via USB to my computer, would act as a keyboard and fire a keyboard shortcut.
Read moreGlanceable Time Zones With Keyboard Maestro and Stream Deck
We’ve really embraced working remotely within my Studio71 Technology team, to the point that now I have people that I work with every day across seven time zones. There are challenges and benefits of being a distributed global team, but I wanted to solve a quick challenge today and that is to quickly glance and see who is available right now.
Read moreRethinking My Email Workflow
My previous email workflow sucked and I’ve been working to find a new system in 2022. I knew the old workflow sucked as it was based entirely on unread status, a notoriously shaky foundation. In short, if I forgot to get back to you about something last year, I tried my best but it was probably my workflow’s fault.
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