 Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Palm. This is episode number 754 for December 8th, 2022. And I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week, our guest is developer Casey Liss of the Accidental Tech podcast and creator of the iOS apps Masquerade and Peek-a-Voo. Peek-a-Voo, welcome to the show, Casey. Hello, Peek-a-Voo to you too. Well, I got close, I got the point. Well, I really wanted to talk to you on the show because on an episode a while back of the Accidental Tech podcast, you talked in depth about an automation you created to be able to tell if your garage door was open and it was hilarious. And I thought it might be fun to talk about those automations we create that are maybe overly complex and there's a much easier way to do it or maybe ones we don't remember why we even created them or why they work. I just thought it'd be really fun to kind of talk about the fun automations we've made. Does that sound fun to you? Yes, definitely. Do you want me to start or do you want me to start? I do, no, I want you to start with the garage door. Right, so I live in a pretty safe part of our suburb of Richmond, Virginia, which is in and of itself not a terribly unsafe city. And yet, nevertheless, I feel like it was not infrequent that I would go to bed and my garage door would be left open. And typically almost always, in fact, this was my fault, but I wanted to have some sort of a system or mechanism to figure out whether the garage door was open or not. Now, my bedroom, the primary bedroom in the house is directly above the garage, but because it's directly above the garage, I obviously can't see the garage from the bedroom. And I asked my wife, Aaron, if I could just drill a hole in the floor so I could see whether or not the garage. No, I'm just kidding. But she didn't go for that, but I actually didn't ask. But I wanted some mechanism by which I could know if the garage door was open and it would alert me if it was around bedtime. And the problem with this is, even though I'm a pretty boring guy that has a pretty reliable schedule, there are occasions that I stay up past 10 o'clock at night. I know this lies in the wild, but I know, right? So I wanted to do something that was kind of actively passive, which I know that's an oxymoron, but I wanted something that was just kind of ambient. I guess it's a better word for it. And so I decided what I thought I would do is I wanted an LED light that was sitting somewhere in my room. And as it turns out, I have it at the top of our headboard, but I just wanted an LED light that when it's off, that indicates that the garage door's closed. And when it's on, when it's glowing, it indicates the garage door's open. So the theory is if I'm coming to go to bed and I enter the primary bedroom, I climb into bed and I see this light on, I think, oh, I gotta turn off, or I gotta close the garage door. So there are sane ways of handling this, and then there's the casey way of handling this. And this was early on in the pandemic, and for better, worse, or otherwise, we were pretty locked down. We have two small kids, and this either even irrespective of that, this was before any of us could get vaccines. And so we were really not seeing anyone really not going anywhere. This is like April, May, or something like that of 2020. And I needed a project just like everyone did. And so I thought, well, why wouldn't I just use a combination of two different Raspberry Pi's in concert and a little bit of hardware, because that is clearly the right solution to this very simple problem. And so- So like an app on your phone for Smart Garage Door that you could look at that just showed you- No, no, of course not. No, that would be too easy. And part of the reason, I know you're both joking and serious, but part of all kidding aside, part of the reason I didn't wanna do that is because our garage door opener is by a company called Linear, which I'd never heard of. And when we had it installed a few years back, you know, the company that installed it was like, oh yeah, you can control it via your phone, blah, blah, blah, which is true. But because no other human on the planet apparently has a linear garage door opener, it doesn't work with like the Chamberlain MyQ out of the box. I could add, I could add like aftermarket, but it doesn't do any of this like out of the box. So I decided what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get, shoot, I should have looked up the name of this. It's, I'm gonna get a sensor, it's one of those sensors where you put the two terminals close to each other and it closes the circuit. And then when you separate the two terminals, it's like a contact sensor or something like that. And that's not the right one. A lot of company makes, Ring makes them and Wise makes really bad ones. Yeah, but I wanted again to go the harder approach. So I just took literally one of the sensors that's you know, $3 on Amazon, maybe even less, maybe 30 cents on Amazon. And I put one of those at the top of the garage door such that there's one on the house and one on the top of the garage door. And when the garage door is closed, it comes, you know, it doesn't literally contact the other, you know, the two sensors don't touch, but they're close enough that it closes the circuit. And so that you can detect that the garage door is closed. I'm gonna interrupt you here. We had a lot of trouble with that exact kind of thing because the tolerances on garage door open, garage doors are huge, they move like an inch. So we had a lot of trouble getting things to align or you were able to get it to align up? Yes. So I was able to get them super close, although remind me and I have a story about this in a little bit, but part of the reason I think that worked is because this garage door is just like three or four years old, right? Because it was actually had, I was at WWDC back when WWDC was in person and my wife had sent me a text or called me or something. It was like, hey, the garage door just kind of imploded. I was like, I'm sorry, what? And I guess, you know, it's a series of different panels, right? I guess two of the panels just kind of fell in a little bit. And so when I got home, I had the pleasure of dealing with that and we ended up needing to get a new garage door. And so the garage door only being four or five years old or something like that, it makes these sorts of things more possible. So I have this contact sensor at the top of the garage door. That, the wire for that gets run all the way on the like chain, the chain housing or whatever, all the way back to the garage door opener itself. There at the garage door opener, I have a Raspberry Pi Zero WH, which basically translated into English. That means at the time, it was the crummiest Raspberry Pi you could buy. It was like 10 bucks or something like that, but it has Wi-Fi on it and it has the header. That's what the H means. So you can plug things into it. Generally speaking, the Raspberry Pis are, there's no terminals to connect. Well, there's no terminals sticking off the board. There's places you could solder, but there's no terminals sticking up the board. And so this has the little pins that you can stick stuff onto, right? And so I have the Pi Zero WH sitting there connected to the sensor. And so I have the Pi Zero, the garage Pi, as I call it, that just pings away literally every second asking, okay, is the door closed? Is the door closed? Is the door closed? So it's pinging the sensor? That's right. And I'm sure that there's a way I could do this like interrupts or something like that, but it was just the easiest way to make it happen. And so it asks itself once a second, is the door closed, is the door closed? Simultaneously, there's a web server running that will either respond with one, I forget which way I had it, but either one if it's open and zero if it's closed or vice versa. And so then I have HomeBridge, which if you're not familiar is a software package that will let you bring things into HomeKit. I have HomeBridge with a, like a custom, I forget what it's called, I can look it up if you remind me later, but it's a package that basically it says, all right, I'm going to act like a garage door opener, or a garage door opener, but you tell me some HTTP endpoint to go hit and based on the results of that endpoint, I will decide whether the garage door is open or not. So similarly, HomeKit every like three seconds or something like that or HomeBridge, excuse me, is pinging away at the server in the garage or that the Raspberry Pi in the garage saying, is it open, is it open, is it open, is it open? And then if it says that if it sees that it's open, then it fires HomeKit or tells HomeKit, hey, the garage door is open now. And that was great, that was a good first step, which was at least knowing it's open or closed in HomeKit. But that's not enough because I don't have my fancy schmancy LED sitting in the bedroom. So clearly the only solution if you have one Raspberry Pi is to add a second Raspberry Pi. And so I got a second Raspberry Pi Zero WH, which is sitting under the bed with no case on it whatsoever. I'm sure it's super safe to do that, but whatever, here we are. It's full of dust. Yeah, it's full of dust. It's just caked in dust. It's been there for a year and a half, now two years now. And golly, I guess like two and a half years, holy smokes. Anyways, and that pings away at the same web server, constantly saying, okay, is it open, is it open, is it open, is it open? And when it sees that it's open, it just, figuratively speaking, it closes the connection on that LED that's strung up to the top of my headboard, thus turning the LED on. And so the only purpose that the one in the bedroom has, is a $15 computer that's running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The only thing it does is ping away at the garage, saying, is it open, is it open? Oh no, that's not, is that how I left it? For a while I was doing it, for a while I was doing it via UDP. So the garage door would broadcast, the garage pie would broadcast when it opened or when it closed and the bedroom one just sat there and listened. I don't remember if that's where I ended up or not, shoot, I'd have to look at it again. I'm amazed you remembered this much detail because once I'm done with something like that, most of the details escape me. Honestly, I'm a little surprised myself, but then that's why I'm a little fuzzy here and there. But anyway, so that was great for all passive things. So I got that working so that I could see the LED would light up and as I'm crawling into bed, oh crap, the garage door is open. But now I have to use their garbage app in order to close it, which is obviously not acceptable. So I decided, okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a relay that's also hanging off the garage raspberry pie. And you can get little boards that are literally teeny tiny boards that have like one or two relays on them. And I'm gonna use that to say, okay, when I want the garage door to close, I'll close the relay, it'll close a circuit that will indicate to the garage door, okay, it's time to close. And the way you typically do this with most garage door openers is that there's a series of like three or four terminals on the back and you just close, you basically connect two of the terminals. So you have the relay connected to two of these different terminals and when the relay closes, you're now connecting those terminals and you do that for like a second and then the garage door closes. Unfortunately, my fancy schmancy garage door opener decided to effectively reboot itself every time I did that. Oh no. So now I don't know how I'm going to actually activate or actuate the garage door. Well, my dad is an amateur geek in the same way that I am. And he came up with a brilliant idea of, well, do you have a spare garage door opener, like a push button garage door opener? The clicker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, well, yeah, why? Sorry, let me have it. I'm going to borrow it for a week. I'll get it back to you. It's okay. He's descended into your madness. So he, yeah, so he takes the garage door opener, opens it up, finds the appropriate terminals that need to be closed or that get closed when you hit the button on the garage door opener and adds a wire that he strung out of the garage door opener that I can then hook the relay to. And so now the relay is effectively hitting the button on the garage door opener. So if you were to look at the garage door opener, and Allison remind me, I can take a picture for you and you can put it in the show notes. But if you look at the garage door opener, up there on top of the garage door opener, I have a Raspberry Pi Zero WH, I have a relay board and I have a push button garage door opener sitting two inches above the garage door opener that I use to actually activate the garage door opener. So in the end of the day, I have hooked all this up into HomeKit and so on and so forth. I have a web server listening for these requests. And so I can say to the Apple dongle, dingus, whatever, hey dingus, close the garage door and that enters into Homebridge. Homebridge makes an ATP request to the Pi. The Pi then closes the relay, counts to one, opens the relay. The relay is closing the connection on the push button garage door opener and that either opens or closes the garage door. We're like 45 minutes into the show. It's been great talking to you. I gotta go, I'll see you later. So are you so glad you asked? Are you so glad you asked? That is epic. And so you could have bought something to do this, but clearly you were really bored during the worst of the pandemic times. I really, really was. So yeah, so that was my garage door opener and I can give you one other if you want to spend the time, but if we need to move on. Oh no, no, no, no, no, this is fun. I think my, we don't need to make time for any of mine. I was just gonna swap stories with you, but I don't think I could come close to anything as epic. Well, I don't wanna, I'm trying to use a gentler language than I would have in my youth, but it is a bit of a banana setup. Let's go with that. And if you're judging me listener as you're listening to this cockamamie story, can't blame you. It really doesn't make any sense at all, but all snark and kidding aside, it was a really, really interesting learning experience and I learned a ton doing it. I had only soldered once or twice before when I was in college 20 years ago and I had to do a bunch of soldering for this. I had to deal with hardware, which as a software person isn't terribly fun, but yet as someone who's educated as a computer engineer was super fun. And I really, really loved messing with hardware. Like I learned a lot doing this, but it was bananas top to bottom. I definitely think that is one of the reasons that I enjoy going down these rabbit holes of weird automations that I do. And like I said, none of them are as complex as yours, but when you try to do it one way and you run into a stop and then you try it another way and you run into a different stop and then you realize, hey, that just taught me something I can use in the first stop, but you still don't get through. And you start building together these pieces and then next time you go to do something, you've got another tool that you can start to deploy that you'll still get stuck again, but you're gonna learn something new. Yep, yep, exactly right. And there have been some instances where I've had to use some of this knowledge in, I can't think of a specific example, but I've had to do some of this from time to time. And all of this stuff, that all the code that I was writing for like web servers and stuff like that, that was all written in Python, which I have at best a passing knowledge of Python. So learning another language is also another tool, my tool belt, which is really great. So that was, it was a fun project mixed with a lot of pain and suffering that was completely self-imposed, but it was a lot of fun. I am self-employed, which is awesome in a bunch of ways in almost every way. But one of the things that it's not great about it is that it gives you, it affords you the time to do stupid projects like this. One of the best parts about it is that I make my own schedule and I enjoy an afternoon siesta every day. I just like, I think it's fun. It gives me a little refresher before the kids come home, makes me happier, makes me a little well-rested, better rested, I have small children. It makes me more willing to get down on the floor and play with them instead of just grumbling about how tired I am. So I'll take like a 20 minute nap most afternoons. I know if you have a regular job like a regular human being, this is very frustrating. My co-host, Mark Warman, would talk about his naps when I still had a jobby job and nothing made me more angry than hearing about this. So I apologize, but I bring all this up because every time I put my phone down when I tried to take a little snooze, I always tried to look at the clock because I wanted to know how long did I sleep? And does it matter? No, but I just wanted to know. But we all do. Same reason you look in the Kleenex after you blow your nose. You just need to know. No, not exactly. You just need to know. So it occurred to me, I could probably automate this. So I wanted to write an Apple shortcut that would take notes of when I put my phone on a charger. And more importantly, when I take it off the charger, how long had it been charging? And I think there are ways that you can like dig into different information and settings to figure this out, but I wanted an automation to do this. Well, this is all well and good, but there's no real state to shortcuts. Like the shortcuts don't really have a state to them. They run and they're done. Shortcuts are awful. Shortcuts are really awful. They're wonderful and amazing and awful. And so what I ended up doing and I Googled about like, how can I save the state of the world with inside shortcuts? And I think that there are apps. Simon, something or other, I forget his last name, right? Wrote like data jar or something like that. I've never actually used it, but I've heard very good things about it where you can like store data and it has a shortcuts like API. But I just wanted to do out of the box shortcuts. So when my phone is placed on a charger between the hours of noon and three in the afternoon, which is the time that I would typically take a little snooze. The phone will basically save a text file to my iCloud drive. And then when I pick the phone up off the charger, if it's between the hours of noon and three, the phone will then go look at the file creation time, either creation or it created or modified. I forget which one. But anyways, let's call it the creation time of that file and say, oh, okay, it was created at one o'clock. It's now 1.35. Well, you took a 35 minute nap and it will do all that math and it'll send a little local notification to my phone that says your nap was 25 minutes long or whatever the case may be. This is frivolous, stupid, a bit entitled, and bananas, but I love it because now I don't have to worry about remembering what time I put my phone down. When I wake up, I pick up my phone and it says, hey, good job, you took a 20 minute nap. Or today it was like a five minute nap because our dogs just freaked out for no reason all of a sudden, but you know what? That's the price I, that's what I do for you listeners is I take a five minute nap and I still show up to record this on the same day. So you are welcome. So those are my two utterly bananas shortcuts or automations and if you have, if you're willing to share at least one of yours, I would love to hear it. Well, I'm gonna share one that I think the audience has heard me refer to before, but it's especially funny now because I was thinking about that we were gonna be talking and I was on clockwise yesterday and one of the format of clockwise is it's four people, four topics and the four people get to make up their own question. And the question I asked was what silly frivolous automation have you created? And it was so funny because Micah Sargent had the exact same stupid automation that I did. I had Rosemary Orcher wrote me an Iowa shortcut that would tell me what the next episode number is. So right before I talked to you, I created the opening of the show notes and I press a button on the side of my phone and I say, what's the next chitchat across the pond? And it tells me the show number. And the reason I have that is because I am incapable of adding the number one to the previous episode number. I can't do it. I've messed it up hundreds of times. I mean, it's ridiculous how many times I've gotten it wrong. And on clockwise, the answer that Micah Sargent gave was, well, I had Jason Snell write a shortcut for me that adds one to my show number. So now what is it? I wonder if you guys compared, I wonder if there was like one genesis of both of these shortcuts. Like either Jason wrote it and sent it to Rosemary or vice versa. And that would be hilarious. It really would. Now, he wants some more adaptations to it than I need. I just need to know the number, but there was something else he needed. And I said, well, you're on a show with Rosemary. You could ask her how she did mine. Right, right, right, right. That's so true. That's wild. That's really funny that the both of you have the effect of the same shortcut. Add one. That's incredible. Cannot add one. The one I think is that I've done recently that's so funny and I wrote this one up was I use a tool called the Noun Project to get PNGs, well actually it has SVGs and PNGs and JPEGs, but icons. And I use them to make little artwork. And if I don't have a good image for the, what do they call it? The featured image for a blog post, I might combine a couple of them to make a little picture. Like cord cutting, I got a pair of scissors and a TV and a cord and put it together. That's a funny thing about, if you look up TV icons, they always have rabbit ears on top. Because otherwise it's just a square, right? Exactly. It doesn't look like a TV. So it has to have rabbit ears in order to do that. Kids ask your parents. So anyway, I was building these and the app for the Noun Project creates some of this transparent PNGs. And so I was making them my featured image and I put them on Twitter and one of my listeners wrote back and he said, hey, that looks terrible on dark mode. And because it's just black on like dark gray, it doesn't look like anything. So he wanted non-transparent PNGs which meant that I needed to put back the alpha channel. And it turns out there's a lot of tools to remove the alpha channel. I couldn't find any that would put them back. So I started with Keyboard Maestro. By the way, you can open a PNG in Preview, check the box to or check or uncheck, which is it. You have to uncheck the box for the alpha channel and then hit save. So you literally open, click, save. That's all you have to do. So I spent like eight hours trying to automate this process because I didn't wanna open them and click it. And it was a roundabout through, I spent some time in shortcuts which are awful and I couldn't figure out how to do it. And I eventually used image magic at the command line to come up with the command and then put that as a bash script inside Keyboard Maestro. And then the next time I needed it, I couldn't remember what Keystroke I had told Keyboard Maestro to use and I did it by hand with Preview. So now for what it's worth, I know you're not looking for advice, but here I am. And I'm a nerdy guy, a nerdy white guy says what we do for better and worse, mostly worse. You could put that bash script in a shortcut and then I don't know actually on macOS if there's a way to like open a file, a PNG with shortcuts in the same way there is on iOS. But if for what it's worth, you could just make a shortcut that has that bash script in it. We're gonna talk about how I did a little bit of that hopefully later if we have time. But you can run bash scripts inside shortcuts and it does mostly work last I tried. I'm not saying that's better, worse or whatever, but it's something you could consider. You would waste more time so it fits into the model. You absolutely waste more time so that you got that going for you. My goal is to find, to create a shortcut that actually solves a problem for me and I end up using. I did find one that I use, but I didn't write and it's just called email myself because I use my email as a to-do list just like you're not supposed to. So when I see something, I have something I need, I just hit a button that says email myself. That's the only thing I use. Oh, plus Rosemary's. Naturally, naturally. No, that makes sense. I don't have a ton of shortcuts that I use, but well, so I probably have like 42 shortcuts according to the Shortcuts app on Mac OS. Of these, I probably use four, maybe five on a regular basis, but all of them have a purpose. I should probably go through and call most of them. But nevertheless, I find that shortcuts for very specific use cases, it is extremely useful to me, but I think it writes a check that it can't cash a lot of the time if that makes sense. Like it promises a lot and delivers not as much and that's very frustrating, but that's okay. You wanted to talk about a couple other categories of shortcuts and whatnot. And if you let me keep running my mouth, we'll never end this episode. So what other things did you wanna talk about? I wanna talk about mystery automations. When I went into Google Drive to start writing up my questions for you for the show notes, I saw that I've got it sorted by like the newest ones and there was a list since 2017 of every episode I've posted of the Nocella Cast. So it's just line by line by line by line. It's being collected somehow. I have no memory of having ever written something that caused this. My only suspicion is I remember playing with IFTTT a long time ago, but this is like five years this thing has been running and I forgot all about it. Do you ever, do you have anything like that? Yes, coincidentally IFTTT is exactly where my shortcuts, my automations go, not to die, but to be forgotten. We, for ATP for my podcast with Mark Warman and John Syracusa, we do, we blatantly stole from upgrade the idea of you could tweet a question and put a particular hashtag in and it would, there's an IFTTT automation that will collect all of these tweets and put them in a Google Sheet. That one I know is there, but I have like three or four other automations that darned if I know what's going on, I think it might still be collecting all my Instagram posts and putting them in my Dropbox, maybe, I'm not even sure. And there's definitely one or two others that I think are still lingering out there that I haven't looked at in probably 10 to 20 years. I mean, I was an early-ish adopter if this and that and I never really used it for much, but I was at least on it quite a long time ago. So who even knows what's there at this point? So I just checked, I don't even have a login to IFTTT. Or it's so old that it predates whatever your password management is. Yeah, well, it's only five years ago that it started doing these. No, okay, maybe not. Yeah, goodness knows, do you have any computers that are plugged in that you did not realize were plugged in? Maybe, I gotta check. I mean, I suppose I could do a password recovery to find out where it is. Or I wonder if I logged in with Gmail or some nonsense like that. Those are the ones that always throw me. Yeah, I figured. That's funny that it's IFTTT also. I liked it, but I've got it there. If I could just have it add one for me, I'd be sad. That's true. No, I totally hear that. As far as mystery automations go, I think that that's the only thing I can think of. And the random cruft that I still have lingering and shortcuts that I should probably call at some point. Well, HomeKit's been crumbling for us a lot recently. And I don't understand, I've been in our Slack community, a whole lot of people have been talking about, yeah, one day none of my automations worked and I had to get rid of them all and start over. That's happened to me recently. Yeah, that happened to me somewhat recently as well. I've heard rumblings. I cannot confirm or deny this because I don't know, but I've heard rumblings at a recent either iOS or a TVOS update really hosed up a bunch of automations. Mine, the almost worst part about mine is that they sometimes work and sometimes don't. It would almost be better if they just flat out stopped working entirely. Yeah, because you keep trying to find a pattern. Right, exactly. And there doesn't appear to be one. Nope. My husband went through and re-did a whole bunch of automations he had for things like the lights and what time the, we keep our sparklets contained, we'd like cold water, but we only need cold water certain times of the day. So he's got a smart switch on that. So it's not constantly cooling water when we don't need it. And they all fell over in a heap. So he went back in and he put them all in, but then there's some that are running and we can't find them in HomeKit. Oh no. But they're running fine. There's nothing wrong with them. They're doing just what they're supposed to do, but the two of us said they're going, we have, it's four, six, 12 years of college education between us. And we don't have any idea. We can't figure it out. We don't know. So we don't want to, you know, I don't want to jinx it because they are working. Now that's deeply alarming. And yeah, I have had, actually, okay, this is a good one that I just thought of. So we got a new TV, Cyber Monday of 2019. This is right before the pandemic. And I'm going to mess up the details, but I found that after a few months, the TV would constantly turn itself off always around the same time a day, but it never seemed like it was the exact same moment, but it was always around the same time a day it turned itself off. And long story short, I forget exactly what the scenario was, but I had set up some sort of like scene or automation in HomeKit or something like that, which involved, I think it was, I was turning on like the living room lamp. And maybe I accidentally included the TV in that or something, but as part of the automation, it turned the TV off because our TV is connected to HomeKit. And so for the longest time, I thought our TV is just busted and it would just, it just turns itself off for no reason. There's a brand fricking new TV and it's busted. And it turns out, no, the thing that's busted is me because I somehow slid it into an automation and had no idea. How did you get your TV into HomeKit? It's new enough that it has HomeKit support. If you're willing to put it on wifi, which I know a lot of people disagree with the whole premise of giving your TV internet access. Now that being said, the only thing you can do is be an AirPlay receiver. You can change the input that it's on, which I thought would be super convenient, but honestly, I almost never do. And you could turn it on and off, which is lightly convenient. Like I don't regret having gotten a TV with HomeKit support, but it is not the panacea that I thought it would be. What brand of TV is it? I just did not know. It's an LG C9. The C series is like, I think there's second best TV within the normal human category. I think they make bananas like $50,000 TVs or whatever. But in the normal human range, if memory serves, I think it's a G series and then the C series is next best, I think. And then C9 indicates it was a 2019 model. So now I think the current equivalent is a C2 because it's a 2022 model. And I love the TV. It's a great, great, great TV. It's even better when you don't have it turn itself off every evening at like six o'clock or whatever it was. That is hilarious. I love it. All right, what about some automation that you're really proud of? Like just really brings you joy? A couple. One is more of me being bananas about my garage door. It keeps failing and I don't know why and it's not presently working and I haven't cared enough to go debug it. But I wanted to, when I leave the house, I wanted to get a push notification whether or not the garage door was closed. I don't know why I'm this bananas about my garage door. It's almost never a problem. But I've become, it's become like the compulsion for me. I don't know what my problem is. Nevertheless, I wanted to have a push notification that told me the garage door is open or the garage door is closed. And like I said, I haven't had this working for months and I'm fine. I feel like I'm weaning myself back from all of this bananas behavior. But anyways, how do you do that with shortcuts? And it turns out it is workable but not easy. So what I did was you can have a shortcut that's cued or an automation that's cued off of when you leave your house. That part was pretty straightforward. You can have it figure out whether or not a garage door and home kit is open or closed. That was pretty straightforward. Where it all gets dodgy is how do you have it fire off a push notification? So separately from all this I subscribed to and I haven't brought it up a lot in any of my podcasts but I really, really, really love the app Pushover. And what Pushover is, it's an API and a mechanism to send yourself push notifications. So there are some applications that will integrate with Pushover and so you can give them like your API key or whatever. And when that application finishes a task it'll send you a push notification. Well, what I had figured out is I wanted to be able to via the command line send myself a push notification when just random and sundry things finish. So let's, for example, transcoding a video because I'm a big FFMPEG fan and I wanna know when that's done. Well, I wrote a very, very short shell script that would send a push notification when something's done. I can say, you know, I can send myself a message but the way that works is it actually makes a call to my public web server and it very, very well obfuscated, I think I got that right, URL. And it will then take the payload of that request and send it over to Pushover, Pushover sends it to my phone. So what I have the shortcut doing is making an HTTP request to my web server on the public internet that with the payload that says either the garage door is open or closed. This worked for a long time and then it stopped working, I don't know why. Just have to keep getting back to, I have a MyQ garage door and- Which does all this for you. Yeah, and it tells me when my, so I know when my husband comes home so I know when the garage door opens, if I don't hear it or if I'm not home, I know he's left, I know he's come back. It seems to work pretty good. Yes, because you are not utterly bananas and you are much smarter than I am. So that's why you've chose that path. It makes me actually kind of sad that I did it the easy way though. I mean, I kind of admire you really on this. Well, I'm not sure that, I appreciate that. I don't know if that's the right approach. But the other one very briefly that I really like, I had actually written, so I'm an iOS developer by trade and I had written myself an app that would look at your most recent weight and health kit and it would let you enter a new weight very quickly and easily. And the coup de gras or whatever the piece de resistance of that app is that it would look at your prior weight and health kit. And so let's say, I can't use a good example because someone will be offended, but let's say 150 pounds. And so let's say you were 155 pounds at your last weigh-in. So what the app would do is it would say, okay, I'm going to pre-populate the text entry field with one five and then all you have to do is hit three or seven or two or whatever and hit enter and then it would save off your weight to health kit. The idea being you've already populated two thirds of the particular numeral that the number that you might need because typically, unless you happen to be hovering at like 150, 160, 170, 180, typically you're just going to be in a range of 150, 160 or what have you. I wrote the app and I didn't love it. It was fine, but it was a little clunky. And then it occurred to me, well, crap, I can do all of this in shortcut. And so sure enough, I have a shortcut that will look at health kit, grab your most recent weigh-in, it'll basically lop off the least significant digit, pre-populate a push, not a push notification, but I guess it's a push notification. I don't remember how it's held together, but it will pre-populate a notification that just drops down from the top of the screen and it says, okay, what is your current weight? And if you're 153 today, then you just hit three, save, and it saves off an entry into health kit. And the whole thing is one, two, three, four, five, six entries, though there are the six steps, the entire shortcut is only six steps. And so this- How did you give it access to health kit? That's their shortcuts that health kit offers. Yeah, you just have to give it permission at the one time, but this is all built in to shortcuts. There's no like bearded ATIs or anything like that. And it works really well. And when I'm a good boy, and I remember in the morning, I'll go ahead and use that. But this six line shortcut replaced a like probably, you know, 1,000 line custom bespoke app that I had written that was nowhere near as reliable or as robust as the shortcut is. So what are you gonna do? So where does it store the data? In health kit. Oh, you said that back in health kit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it works out really nicely to be honest with you. Now it may not be from your cup of tea, but- I'm sitting over there with my wifi enabled scale stepping on and having it do it for me. Here again, this is why you're smarter than I am, but apparently I like to do everything the hard way. The important thing is that I've tried weighing myself even twice a day and it still doesn't make you lose weight. That is true, I have also attempted that and it does not make anything change. And in fact, oftentimes it goes up during the day. I obsessively weigh myself, I don't ever miss it, but it doesn't help, does it do a thing? Yeah, yeah, I could make an argument it's not healthy to even know your own weight, but that's neither here nor there. Probably, the kind of automations that I've done that make me really happy are the ones that just kind of know, like where I don't do any kind of interaction with them and a lot of them are examples are things that I don't actually do myself, like I drive a Tesla. So I walk up to my car and it unlocks and when I leave my car it locks. And some of those are pretty dangerous. My buddy Ron had a Tesla before I did and he warned me before when I got the car. He said he went on travel and he rented a car and he drove it to Starbucks and he went in to get a coffee and he came out and not only were the doors unlocked, the car was running. Cause you don't have to turn the car off. There is no on off button on a Tesla. You just get out of the car and everything happens automatically. It puts itself in the park and it locks the door and it's off and so, but I realized those are the ones that make me really happy. So I've really gotten into a hue sensors because they're super quick reaction. So we can walk into the family room now and the lights come on if it's nighttime, if it's the middle of the night, they come on super dim so that it burns your retinas. And then if you come on when there's daylight because the sensor also senses ambient light, they don't come on at all. And it's those that you just walk in and it works and you stop even noticing that it's working till maybe the housekeeper turns the sensor and it doesn't see you when you walk in. Those can be annoying, but those are the ones that I really like. I built one for my live show set up. So I do my show live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time. And I have an automation that I can trigger that does things like it runs my home kit scene that turns on the lights in the room. It turns off our landline phone because we have a landline because we're old. And then it quits all my cloud syncing of Dropbox and Google Drive and I cloud all that kind of nonsense. It turns off wifi and it launches all of the apps I need for doing the show recording. The mistake I made was somewhere I set it to happen automatically. So if I don't do it by quarter to five and I did it by in Keyboard Bystro you can just type into the ether like not into a text field or anything you can just type. And so I told it to type the words live show. And so I'll be writing along in a message to somebody and all of a sudden it'll type live show into the person that I'm writing to them. And then all of this stuff starts firing off and I've lost wifi and everything. Whoops it upside. That's actually a very interesting and clever idea to just have it input text. I can see how that would be dangerous but I like the idea of it because you're gonna notice if all of a sudden random text is showing up on your screen that you didn't type. It's like go poop it's quarter till. I gotta get ready for the show. Yeah I'm not sure that one was the best choice that I made but I didn't wanna have to trigger it was something. I wanted it to be time-based so. You know it's funny you bring that up. I'm stealing your thunder and I'm looking ahead in the show notes and you have as the next section. Darn it these just make me happy automations which I love. And I alluded to this earlier. So I record two different podcasts regularly. I have ATP with John and Marco and then I also have Unreal AFM analog with my dear friend Mike Hurley. And these are recorded, ATP is recorded basically this time of day in the evenings and analog is recorded in the mornings. And it occurred to me after every single time I record a podcast I will go into the folder that audio hijack stuff's all the recordings in and I will then go and manually move that file to the particular part of Dropbox that it belongs in. And what with audio hijack whatever version we're on now I don't even remember. But whatever the new audio hijack is you can have or it can fire shortcuts. I think that's right. No it can do JavaScript. I always get it backwards. I think it can run JavaScript. Runs JavaScript yeah. Yeah okay thank you. So it can run JavaScript when a recording stops or recording session stops. So and I stole this idea I think from Jason Snell and Dan Moran but when the recording session stops it runs a bit of JavaScript. That JavaScript then calls a shortcut. The shortcut then looks at the current time of day figures out am I likely to have just recorded ATP or analog and based on what time of day it is it will look for the most recently modified file in my particular folder that audio hijack drops files in and then move that to the particular location it should be within Dropbox. So the moment I stop recording that file is already moved to where it needs to be. And so far I say as I knock on wood that has been extremely reliable and has worked perfectly and it's such a silly dumb thing because it took me five, 10, 15 seconds every week but I'm doing this every freaking week and so to have it just taken care of I just find that to be utterly delightful and it's really as again as silly as it sounds it's been a quality of life improvement. Like it's so dumb. I will be the first to tell that it's dumb but it makes life nicer. Those are, that is a very specific category that I really appreciate. I use Hazel for a lot of that stuff. So I have Hazel set up to watch my podcast files and I store my no-cellicast files with NC underscore year month date and chitchat across the pond CCATP underscore year month date. And when the files of that structure age out over say like two weeks old it scoots them over to my Synology and actually deletes them locally. That's awesome. And when I started doing that because I was spending all this time triaging when I go, oh man I'm out of disk space now I've got a huge drive but in the old days I didn't and I'd be running out of disk space and realize all this stuff is stacked up and I don't even need to save these files because they're on the internet. I've got them elsewhere but I just like having them and that's got to justify having a Synology, right? You need stuff to store on it. And so I do it with that but I do have audio hijack and it's audio hijack four. I do have that set to open the folder as soon as I'm done and then I drag it. And I do have the folder where I need it to go right in the sidebar. So I'm moving it about maybe an eighth of an inch but clearly I need to get some JavaScript going on this and do that. Can I just steal yours? Yeah, well so yes is the simple answer but again what I'm doing is JavaScript is just calling a shortcut and I'm doing all the real work in the shortcut. I think you might be able to do, you might be able to do this in just the JavaScript part. I don't recall whether or not audio hijack has a very robust API for JavaScript stuff. Like I'm not sure if the JavaScript API is just for audio hijack or if it's more broad than that. And so I think the reason I went to shortcuts is because the audio hijack API is just for controlling audio hijack and then it has this one feature to go off and call a shortcut but take that with copious amounts of salt. I might be blatantly lying to you for what it's worth, I don't mean to be but you should check my work on that, I'm not sure but I'm happy to. No, they think about it I might as well just do with Hazel because those files are also named or you know, it's mostly for chit chat that I would need to do that but that reminds me of another one that's a mystery to me is I have a Hazel script that looks at my downloads folder and if it's over a certain age it puts it in the trash because I'm pretty good about if I need something I move it immediately out of there but if it's not something I need it just keeps cleaning up for me but a lot of times I'll download something from the internet that I actually need like I don't know like I think I download like my SSH keys or something like that I downloaded them and they're gone. I just don't, I know it hit it again. Where is it going? I can't find it, oh man. It's cause it's an old file and when every time it bites me it takes me a good 10 minutes to remember oh, you automated that dear. Yep, that would be me. I would do the exact same thing. Just very briefly, another one that I really like is so the way our family works on a weekday is my wife will get out of bed first she'll go downstairs, take a few minutes to herself and prep the lunches for the kids and then I'll come down a little bit later and we'll start making breakfast either for each other or for ourselves and then a little bit after that the kids come downstairs particularly when it's super dark in the morning like it is now. What we were doing is, Erin would come down she would be pitch black downstairs and she would turn on a lighter too and then when the kids come down they would turn on a lighter too and it occurred to me we're very consistent as a family for the most part and the same stuff is happening every day why don't we just automate this? And so now when Erin comes downstairs in the morning the pendant light over the sink is already on at like 30 or 50% or something like that and then just before the kids come bombing down the stairs at the same time once they're like little wake up lights come on which is not an automation that's just a device that turns the light on at a particular time. Anyways, once they're about to come bombing down the stairs will make the pendant light go to 100% brightness so it's kind of an indicator that they're about to come down and also because it's usually It's a warning light. really wake up. Yeah exactly. Here they come. Yeah, and then the living room which is where they'll come down and my son at least will get changed in there will turn that light on at like 50% in order to get it staged for him to come down. Again, this is not remarkable this is not the earth shatter I really dig what you were saying earlier about having the like presence IR sensors I think I need to start thinking about how I could integrate one or two of those into my world but leaving that aside since we are consistent as a family you know I have this kind of like staged wake up process going on and this is new as of just a few weeks ago and again it's a stupid, stupid thing that I genuinely think has made my life just a little bit better because it just happens magically and I don't have to think about it. Yeah those really are the key ones that just happen that not I can trigger this thing and then this thing happens it's just it's doing it in it knows I'm gonna wanna do this and so it's just gonna do it for me. Ed Tobias, good friend of ours and listener to the show has he's a big home assistant fan and I really played with it you can lose your life in that one. So very quickly I did look into that around the time that I went all in on Homebridge and I'm not sure if I'm a dunce or if it's just that home assistant didn't click with the way I think but I looked at it I couldn't make heads or tails of it and I feel like I need someone to like hold my hand and take me down the home assistant rabbit hole because I think I could have entirely too much fun with this given all that I've talked about with my bookstore and whatnot. It seems perfect for you. Yes that's the other thing I'm scared of it right? Ed did spend the hand holding he spent a good hour and a half with me going through showing me how to do different things and I still have trouble getting my head wrapped around it but he did a really interesting automation that I love I think he did it through Home Assistant between HomeKit and Home Assistant and other automations his was that when his wife comes downstairs she may forget like maybe the middle of the night dog decides the dog wants out but the alarm is set and so they've had the alarm go off in the middle of the night because somebody opens the door so what he did was he's got the if the alarm is set he put strip lighting underneath the cabinets and it glows red if the alarm is on if it senses presence it just glows red so you've got a visual indicator that oh the alarm is on and I thought that was a really slick one because red is gonna not bother your eyes if you get up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night so I thought that was a really fun one. That is super cool and it's not unlike my garage door opener except that one actually serves a really good purpose whereas mine is just because I'm a lunatic but what are you gonna do? Well there can't be a better final statement from you I think than that. Before we cut out though tell people about the apps that you've written. Yeah so very, very briefly both of the apps were inspired by my kids peak of you was written first I was written a couple of years ago shortly before the pandemic when my son turned five in late 2019 the four of us went to Disney World my daughter was like a year and a half at that point and she was really, really into looking at pictures on my phone which is fine except that I was just petrified of the thought of her figuring out what the garbage can icon did and just going oh delete, delete, delete, delete and so peak of you is a very, very simple app that basically gives you a read-only photo gallery and you can choose if you pay for the one time in app purchase you can choose what album to look at or what pictures to look at or what have you but the point is there's literally no way to delete anything from within peak of you and doubly so and actually this is a perfect set brings us back to shortcuts you can even optionally set up a shortcut that says okay every time you open peak of you start guided access and if you're not familiar guided access is a thing where it locks you in a particular app until you provide a password to leave that app and so at that point the combination of the two you can hand your phone to a client a prying eye adult, a child, a toddler and you know that the only things they're looking at are the pictures you've allowed and the one thing that they can't do is delete anything so that's peak of you now is that in app purchase did you do the new $10,000 in app purchase that you're allowed to do? No, no, no I did not and I think I need to ask for permission on that one I'll get right on it I think it's five bucks if I remember right and then I also wrote based on my well both my kids it was an issue with my son first because he's older once he turned about four years old he stopped being a mush and started being an honest to goodness person personally at least that's the way I thought of him and it occurred to me that I feel like if I'm gonna put his picture on the internet I should be getting his consent but at four years old he doesn't know what the crap I'm talking about and so what I started doing and it wasn't my idea first but I've seen other parents do this is I put an emoji over his face so you may see his body but you're not gonna see his likeness if you will and I felt like that was a good happy medium and that's not particularly fun or easy to do on iOS and so Masquerade, M-A-S-K-E-R-A-I-D Masquerade is an app that lets you quickly put emoji onto pictures but the real piece de resistance here is that it will automatically detect faces and drop an emoji over people's faces by default and then you can remove them or replace them or whatever the case may be but if you have four or five faces in a picture it will automatically detect all of them and put emoji on top of all their faces you can do this for free with just the standard smiley face and then it's a one time I think $3, I'm pretty sure that's right in that purchase in order to change to any of the emoji that almost any emoji under the sun and that's really nice for parents but it also can be fun if you have somebody who looks like they're flatulating and they put the little, I think it's Dash is the official name of the emoji but the little like the air cloud coming out of their hind quarters or whatever the case may be and so that's Masquerade. You're a combination between an old man and a 12 year old boy. Yes, that is absolutely accurate, 100% true and so that's Masquerade that's also available on the App Store. If anybody listening is involved in the Foster Child program one of the things you are not allowed to do is post pictures of foster children and so I thought of this because my niece Molly and her husband David have several foster children and have foster children and they were always putting little emoji over them and I keep trying to find somebody who can get this app to the attention of the people who run the foster children program. So if anybody knows somebody who's involved in that who could maybe get that out there that hey, to adults, you know, hey, here's an app that can really help you. You take a picture, it's really easy, tap this button. I think it's a great solution and it's a sensitive one, I really think it's cool. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. Yeah, and it's funny because when I wrote the app I had parents in general in mind but I got a lot of feedback from foster parents saying exactly that and there were a couple other interesting pieces of feedback including a Boudoir photographer which was very interested in it which was not a bad thing but was very surprising. I did not see that one coming. But nevertheless, the foster parents for sure were one of the big markets that I just didn't even think about because I don't know barely anything about it. But yeah, it's exactly what you said, you know, they're not allowed to post pictures and so on and it's a perfect fit for that sort of a scenario. Right, right. Well, you can find Casey Liss at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S so that's Casey Liss who doesn't sing along to that song. And you're also on Mastodon and I've got links in the show notes where people can find you there and on micro.blog at micro.caceliss.com. I really appreciate you coming on. This was a lot of fun. I enjoyed hearing about you, lunacy. You really are nuts about this stuff. Yes, yes, I know. I'm sorry, I am a, I guess a sob story, a case study and what not to do but I had fun doing it so I mean, no regrets, right? That's what it's all about. All right, thanks again for coming on. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chachat Across the Pond. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the Podfeat podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeat.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button you're gonna find different ways to contribute. If you like to do a one-time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button. Or another way to contribute is to record a listener contribution. It's a great way to help the NoCillicastaways learn from you. If you want to contact me for any reason, you can email me at alison at podfeat.com and you can follow me on Twitter at podfeat. Maybe you want to talk to other NoCillicastaways. You can do that in our Slack group at podfeat.com slash slack. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.