Welcome

My kid loves the Story Pirates podcast, and listens to it as she goes to bed. I used to manually download new episodes and add it to my media library, so she could listen to it on the Sonos speaker in her room. It took very little time to download the file and add it to my server, but I thought, it’ll be easy to automate this.

For years I’ve used a smart plug with my old, dumb printer. I used an Alexa or Siri voice command to turn on my the smart plug, and another automation at 11pm to turn off the plug. This worked great with no complaints from my family. Of course, I wasn’t satisfied with this solution, and wanted to automate the voice command part out.

My wife and and I both work from home. We enjoy it, but it’s not without it’s issues. Using Home Assistant, I’m trying to create automations that make our work day smoother. The first automation turns on a light to notify us if we have an upcoming meeting.

Originally an April Fool’s joke, Drop and Stack Overflow released the second version of their compact macropad, The Key v2. I missed the original run of The Key, but I preordered the v2 and recently received it.

I recently added an Apple TV to my bedroom TV. The Apple TV interface is so much better than the ten year old LG Smart TV software. The one issue I have is using the sleep timer. When the TV’s sleep timer turns off the TV, it doesn’t always stop the Apple TV. This led me to look into Apple TV sleep timer options.

I really got interested in epaper recently and wanted to do a project with an epaper display. Using an extra Raspberry Pi Zero W I had lying around, I was able write a little Python to display upcoming meetings from my Google Calendar.

I have a perfectly good printer. It’s cheap to own and meets all my printing needs. The one thing I wish it had was AirPrint. After a lot of effort, I was able to setup my Raspberry Pi as an AirPrint server so I can easily print from my iPhone.

I’ve owned a Flic smart buttons since they were an Indiegogo project back in 2015. I use them as a light switch for my smartlights, but I wished I could use them to control more of my Homekit devices. Luckily there’s a Homebridge plugin that adds Homekit support.

Other than running Homebridge, my Raspberry Pi has been mostly untouched since I setup my Sonos Volume Automation. I’ve been seeing what I can do to make my devices smarter using my Raspberry Pi as a bridge. I’m starting with AirPlay for my older Sonos system.

I recently upgraded to MacOS Monterey. It’s ok. The most exciting thing is that MacOS now supports Shortcuts. A Redditor in r/shortcuts asked if there was a way to set a timer with Shortcuts on a Mac. This started my quest to figure it out.