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.