Keeping an eye on my “weight loss”

People talk about the covid weight gain, I fear that mine has been well before covid even started. So to keep an eye on my weight, we had purchased a Withings (now Nokia) weight scale and in all good things it connects to the internet. With the dashboard setup and me used to keeping an […]

The sun will still rise every morning

A few things we have learnt over the years; the sun will still rise every morning and will set every evening. A good metaphor around the challenges and hopes around our day to day lives, but also the fact that I needed to make things turn on and off in the house. Now that is […]

Someone needs to tell me the battery ran out

With all the various sensors in the house, my lazy behind did not want to check the battery level on each one of them. Time to automate that as well! I wrote a script which polls all the devices once a day, and if anyone’s battery is below 15% it will let me know which […]

Monitoring the house using my dashboard

With all the automations in the house coming along just fine, like any developer, I knew my code might have some bugs. So to see what the status of the house and lights are, I leveraged the webcore dashboard. It comes as part of webcore and each “routine” which they call piston can have its […]

Night light dilemma – when sleeping in the dark is impossible

Simple things unknown about my wife to the general public, is that she cannot sleep in the dark. This normally means that we need to have a night light in the bedroom which to my luck has always been on my side of the bed. This normally has been too bright for me and also […]

Setting up motion sensing lights

It seems like the house is getting used to the automations faster than I expected as now lately I got a request from Dad, saying “Can you put motion sensor lights on my way to the washroom and kitchen, so that I don’t have to stumble at night?” and I said “DONE!!”. As I did […]

Programming the away mode

After a while of not flipping switches, whenever we left the house we got used to saying “Hey Google, turn off all my lights”. But then again, having to say that everytime sounded like repetition to me and we also had to remember to say that. It got me thinking – “If only there was […]

Adding weather into the mix for automations

Being from a brown family, my parents are very careful about their money. This became more apparent as mom started complaining that the kitchen lights are being turned on even if it’s broad daylight outside which was her way of saying I was wasting energy. She suggested that I change the settings so that it […]

Setting up house modes – How to deal with the bright lights

Well, having the lights controlled via the sensors for a month now has been fun as we all forgot how to turn on the lights in the major rooms, so mission accomplished! Now the challenge was that late at night you would have to wake up to have bright lights in your face. That was […]

Christmas lights setup – The “Honey I love you” post

Today’s blog was brought to you by – “Honey! I love you”. Those words have always been a warning sign that something will be asked of me. For those who follow Elma’s Instagram, (insert shameless plug to her Instagram account @elmamirandamirza), she put up the Christmas trees and decorations around two weeks ago. And yesterday […]