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After adopting a "wait and see" approach toward whether Elon's Folly would go through with the threat to cut off all free API access (and smiling a knowledgeable smile when the threat was walked back to some degree,) and determining, as best I can tell, the status lights are still working properly, I had another idea of something I could get my external brain to do for me instead of requiring me to both remember and be motivated to do it. I have a book of excerpts and quotes that I have been meaning to use more as meditative prompts, and I added looking in it at a random page as a tickybox in my daily spread. I wasn't getting consistent results, based on a host of factors, most importantly whether I had time to do the thing as part of my morning routine or before going to bed. So, rather than relying on my internal brain to do the habit thing, I thought it might be possible to make the external brain do it. If the external brain could pull a random quote from a quotes file, and then sling the selected piece of wisdom to my tablet at some point during the day, I'd be more likely to examine it and meditate on it.
( And here we go, once again, into the rabbit hole. )
This is the end of this particular adventure in automation, getting an external brain to remind me of things to do, say, or contemplate throughout the day. It's probably not something in the specification or original conception of Home Assistant as a thing that can monitor IoT devices and then issue commands to them based on the data inputs and rules that I set up. Because Home Assistant is flexible, modular, and extensible, though, when I get wild ideas like this in my head, it turns out that there are pathways to implementation that I can find, code snippets to examine and reuse and modify, and as I try to make it work the way I want to, I learn a little bit more about the systems, their limitations, how to format things, how to construct queries, troubleshooting errors and issues, and more. It probably also helps that I'm going at it with the understanding that I can conceive of what I want in my head, that I have been successfully tinkering with machines and their configurations since the MS-DOS era, and the real difficulty of the task is finding enough material so I can create or modify code in such a way to make it work.
It works. There are things I want to do to improve it, but it works, and that's what's important.
( ETA: Postscript Victories )
( And here we go, once again, into the rabbit hole. )
This is the end of this particular adventure in automation, getting an external brain to remind me of things to do, say, or contemplate throughout the day. It's probably not something in the specification or original conception of Home Assistant as a thing that can monitor IoT devices and then issue commands to them based on the data inputs and rules that I set up. Because Home Assistant is flexible, modular, and extensible, though, when I get wild ideas like this in my head, it turns out that there are pathways to implementation that I can find, code snippets to examine and reuse and modify, and as I try to make it work the way I want to, I learn a little bit more about the systems, their limitations, how to format things, how to construct queries, troubleshooting errors and issues, and more. It probably also helps that I'm going at it with the understanding that I can conceive of what I want in my head, that I have been successfully tinkering with machines and their configurations since the MS-DOS era, and the real difficulty of the task is finding enough material so I can create or modify code in such a way to make it work.
It works. There are things I want to do to improve it, but it works, and that's what's important.
( ETA: Postscript Victories )
