I’m a big fan of automating as much as I can.

• Lights automatically turn on when someone enters the room, but only if it’s dark enough to need lights in that room at that moment. Turn them off automatically when presence is no longer detected (not just IR based motion detection).
• My old washer and dryer alert me when they’re done thanks to vibration sensors.
• Media downloads when added to a watchlist.
• Regular backups locally and to the cloud.
• My phone enables/disables rotation lock based on the app I’m currently using.
• Phone also opens various playlists when connecting to my car stereo based on date/time.
• Various “scenes” to turn devices on and off, control brightness, volume levels, etc. This includes controlling devices that are IR, RF, Bluetooth, and Zigbee based.
• Game servers that update when new versions are released, but only when no players are connected. If anyone is connected, sends a message to a discord server (that is also connected to Matrix) alerting everyone to the available update and asking players to log off at their earliest convenience. Players can also check on game server status with bot commands in the game’s channel on that server.

Everything runs locally and has a manual backup so I can still control everything the old fashioned way if my phone is dead or if my non tech savvy parents are over and need to operate any of it.

At my first job, they hired me to do some really boring, repetitive stuff, but they weren’t too particular about how I did it. So I taught myself how to get real good at Excel and VBA and automated most of my work. They noticed and then they made that my job.

Ten years later, after several organizational shifts, most of my work was back to being boring, repetitive stuff. My workload was split evenly between running manual reports and maintaining old, bloated projects. But this time it was worse because my manager was hostile towards me and literally could not understand what it meant for me to write code in VBA. Like, no matter how many times I showed him what I could do, he still thought I was just clicking “record” and automating things that way. Ultimately, he just didn’t like me. My performance reviews weren’t getting better, and there was no more future in the role.

So I automated the reports and didn’t tell anyone. It bought me several hours per day to work on whatever I wanted, like my resumé. When I eventually left (for like a 60% pay raise), I sent all the automation to the other person on my team who ran those reports. I don’t know what she did with it.

Automatic backups of my most precious data. Photos, project work, important documents. Some are backed up weekly and some monthly but all automatic. Archived onto a separate partition, copied to external HDD, and then uploaded to cloud storage.

Conscious habit building, I automate myself, lol. Helps keep discipline with self-study, language learning, and fitness!

Using rsync in a bash script to backup my files.