Adventures in Home Automation #12: Source Data Switching

At the moment, most of the automations and controls that have been put in place for the Home Assistant are stable. There's a fair amount more of things to teach to the remotes so they can do more control matters in the rooms they're in, but for the most part, there hasn't been a whole lot of need to add more functions or figure out a method to do a thing that has been requested of me. (Which just means that a new thing hasn't caught our attention at this point and I haven't been tasked with figuring out how to make it work.)

What that does mean, however, is making sure that the things that are in place, the duct tape and string holding it all together, is still strong and properly reinforced. Sometimes that means making sure the glue script for turning a TV on and off over the MQTT/CEC bridge still works and has been put properly into place when the attached SBC changes to a different operating system. (And finding out, delightfully, that a different method of controlling the screen works just fine even if one of the libraries is tied up in the bridge.) Sometimes it means shuffling some methods over to make sure that there's still good remote access for when you want to do work on one of the other computers without disturbing the person who is in the room that's there. (Because the library you had been relying on to do that upgraded itself and the program that worked with it didn't upgrade to the new version.)

For this particular situation, though, it was the announcement from one of the API providers that I've been using for weather and other data saying "We're shutting down the always-free, needs no payment methods on file API access and moving all of you over to the still free for a limited amount of calls, but after that we charge you access instead." At which point I said, "Well, that's a service that I'm no longer going to be using." What that means, though, is that the one service that I was pulling weather, Air Quality Index, and Ultraviolet Index data from needed replacements. I was about to find out how good I had gotten, and how good my design of automations was, because I had to do some wholesale data source replacements.

( And the replacement is on )

Having found new sources, then I just had to rewire all the appropriate automations and commands to use the new data sources, which didn't take long, just repeatedly having to change from one source to another in all the places where it had been. And within the last two days, all of the automations that were running on new sources fired correctly, did their actions, and informed us about what was going on in the world and what might be a good action to take for us. So it's good to know that the things I have set up were set up correctly so that I could plug new and different sources into them and still have them work correctly. It gives me confidence both in the way the Home Assistant is set up and in my own abilities to get it to do what I want that this kind of source change was the work of a day to find, add, and rewire everything to run on different sources. This seems like another one of those situations where it looked easy to me and that may have involved more skill than I think it did.

My Happiness Is Not Your Church's To Command.

One of the several churches I go by on the way to work had an interesting message on their advertising sign: "It's time for you to be happy again."

I found it interesting mostly because this is, I'm guessing, a Protestant-aligned Christian church showing this message. (A cursory glance at their website says they're Christian, yes, and their values and beliefs strike me as people who would happily call themselves evangelicals.) They bill themselves as the "happiest church in the [area code]," so this emphasis on happiness is put into their design as well as their marketing. And…I'm kind of interested to know where they got this idea from that it's time to be happy again, because I thought Christianity was not generally a belief system that promoted happiness as a core tenet or a thing to achieve in life. Quite a bit of the parts that are the Christian part of the Christian Foundational Writings are concerned with the eternal happiness and reward of heaven after life, and the happiness that comes from living a life according to the tenets laid out for you, and what is supposed to be happiness that comes from suffering for your beliefs or the persecution that comes from them. The parts collected from Judaism are a little bit better about temporal happiness and happiness without additional conditions attached to it, but there's definitely a desire in some strains of Christian thought to make differences between temporary temporal happiness from external sources and the more internal and lasting happiness or joy that comes from that security of your faith or from enduring trials in life. The former is something that's a blessing, but not an end in of itself, the latter is what Christians are exhorted to strive for. So, as usual, there's the need to ask exactly what's meant about "happy" in "It's time for you to be happy again."

( More musing under the cut. )

To say "It's time for you to be happy again" is, in its most charitable, a reminder that despite the terribleness of the world around us, there are reasons not to give into despair and to make time for us to refresh ourselves and do things that make us happy. At its least charitable, it is a demand that we ignore the things around us or consider them to be mere artifacts of the past and focus on making sure that we are happy because we are secure in the reward that we will receive and nothing else matters. I think, perhaps, this message needed a few more thoughts before being deployed to the hillside.