It’s been a very busy day today – a trip to the gym, a funeral, a volksmarch, and a committee meeting, along with the usual cooking and eating.

Well, not quite the usual cooking – one of our trivia friends (and a fellow IBM Almaden retiree) took a trip to Greece last year and liked the Early Harvest (“agoureleo”) olive oil he found there so much that he had a little sent back to his house. 40 liters, in two convenient 20 liter boxes. He invited us over to taste the oil – it’s very buttery at first, but then there’s a good bit of pepper and bitterness at the end. It’s quite distinctive. He gave us a bottle of the oil to take home with us, and I used it tonight in One Pot Tomato-Basil Pasta. The recipe only calls for one tablespoon of olive oil, so I can’t say that I really tasted the difference, but we enjoyed the meal!

The drought broke today – there were raindrops on the bag holding the morning newspaper and I had to use my wipers for almost a full minute this morning. I’ll bet we got at least 0.001 inches of rain!

Today’s mail brought a Chase debit card to replace one which is expiring soon; when I called to activate it, I was greeted by a recording telling me that I had been “specially selected” to receive a special offer on medical alert devices. This seemed weird, but banks have been known to do weird things in the pursuit of money. A few seconds later, I was connected to a person breathlessly telling me about the great opportunity I had to get their medical alert device – I tried saying “no” twice and then just hung up the phone.

It turns out that I had put an extra “9” in the number. I called the correct number and activated the card with no further ado.

I don’t actually carry the debit card with me – I add it to the wallet on my Apple Watch and use that at the ATM. I hoped that getting a new card wouldn’t cause problems at the ATM, but I didn’t want to rely on hope, so I visited my local branch and tried my luck. The ATM told me that my card had been deactivated and I should use my new card, which, of course, I didn’t have with me. I deleted the card from my watch and phone – and then realized I couldn’t put the new one in, because I didn’t have it with me. When I got home, I logged into the Chase app and was able to add the card to the watch and the phone – no need to enter any information; being logged in was sufficient. I’ll find out if it really works the next time I visit a Chase ATM!

I spent much of today trying to integrate my Indigo system and Apple’s HomeKit. I’m much of the way there, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

So far, I’ve:

• Installed “HomeKit Bridge” on Indigo
• Discovered that there’s no way to change the “ownership” of a HomeKit “home” to a different Apple ID
• Rebuilt my HomeKit “home” on a new Apple ID – it was simple but tedious
• Discovered places where HomeKit Bridge and Indigo don’t play well together – in particular, I can’t expose the door/window open/closed information from my alarm in Indigo to HomeKit
• Discovered the Indigo “Masquerade” plugin, which is a shim to solve the previous problem
• Started creating shim devices for all the door and window sensors – it’s tedious, so I’ll have to do more tomorrow.

The UI that Apple provides in its “Home” app is much better than the one in Indigo, so it’s going to be worth the trouble of wiring this all together, even though I expect to still use Indigo to do most of the automation.

This afternoon, we went to Silver Mountain Winery for a pick-up party – it was almost like a pre-pandemic event. We shared a table with another couple, we were able to go to the bar to get wines to taste (instead of having a set of 4 pre-filled glasses delivered to the table), and they provided a cheese and fruit platter for each table. But because of the pandemic, each couple got their own knife. :-)

The winery is in Santa Cruz County and the event was outside, so there were no mask requirements; we still wore ours when we went in to pick up our wine, though.

They had some of our favorite wines on sale at $12.45 per bottle, too – their 2012 Alloy and 2012 Tondre’s Grapefield Pinot Noir. We had to buy a case of each to get that price, but we were willing to make that sacrifice!

We missed the first few minutes of Torah Study this morning because the Mac had gone to sleep, even though I had set the “don’t sleep” option in the Energy Saver preference page and had Amphetamine running. This has been happening for a few days, and I was getting irritated.

Fortunately, Rabbi Gottlieb hadn’t actually started the discussion yet, so we got to participate in the whole session, which was centered on the discussion of Shabbat in Exodus 31:12-17. What does it mean to be Shabbat-observant today? We, of course, didn’t come to a conclusion, but there was general agreement that doing things other than one’s normal work was appropriate.

As soon as Torah Study was over, I used the remote control to turn off the TV and the receiver – and I noticed that the Mac had gone to sleep. I turned it back on and started looking at the logs; it looked like something had pressed the power switch right after Torah Study, which was physically impossible.

And then it hit me. Last week, I decided to program the remote control (a Logitech Harmony) to put the Zoom commands to turn the mike and the camera on and off on buttons. To do that, I had to add the Mac to the “Use Computer” activity so that the remote could send Bluetooth keystrokes. And when I added the Mac, I had to specify what would happen to the Mac’s power when I started and stopped the activity. I had taken the default, which was to turn power on when the activity started and turn it off when it ended. And how did the remote turn off the Mac? It sent the Bluetooth command to turn off power, which actually puts the Mac to sleep.

I had found the guilty party; it was me. I changed the activity to leave the Mac’s power alone, and all was well.

We celebrated by taking a walk and discovered that our neighbor’s tulips are already beginning to bloom!