I went back to working on the home automation migration today – and made a little progress, despite my best efforts.

I’ve installed Home Assistant and Insteon-MQTT in Docker containers on my Raspberry Pi. Once I have everything operational, that’ll be great – it’s easy to update the software to a more recent version without messing up my configuration. But right now, it’s a pain because it’s not easy to see the actual code that’s running in the container.

Today, I wanted to check to see if the code that I was running had the most recent fixes applied – so I copied it into my configuration directory, which is shared with the actual computer so I can use an editor to look at it.

I didn’t want to keep the extra copy of the code around, so I issued the Unix delete-everything command: rm -rf *. Unfortunately, I was in the wrong directory, and I deleted my entire configuration. Which I hadn’t backed up.

Most of the files in the directory were created by the software, but there was one file that I had had to edit by hand to include information about all of my devices. I wasn’t looking forward to doing that, but I saw no alternative.

I opened my other text editor – it already had one window open, and I was delighted to see that the configuration file was there – so I saved it where it WILL be backed up, then got back to work and got another few automations converted.

Progress!

I was Toastmaster of the Day at the Silver Tongued Cats today. During last week’s meeting, our President asked me what I’d like as a theme for today; since it’s our first meeting of Spring, I chose “Spring Cleaning” and put it out of my mind.

Until last night, when I had to assemble and email the agenda, and I suddenly realized I didn’t have anything in mind to say about the topic. And it was late enough that I didn’t want to do any more preparation, so I went to bed.

But not to sleep, at least not well – I kept thinking of things I could talk about if only I had some information. And I didn’t want to get out of bed and do any searching. So I tossed and turned and eventually fell asleep.

This morning, I raced over to the computer as soon as I got up so I could do my research. Did you know that 78% of Americans plan to do spring cleaning this year, up 10% from last year? The American Cleaning Institute does! And Fantastic Cleaning told me that there’s an official Spring Cleaning Week in the UK and that 2-5% of the UK population are compulsive hoarders. They also talked about the Chinese custom of cleaning for the Lunar New Year, and that you’re not supposed to sweep for the first few days of the year to avoid sweeping away good luck.

The meeting went smoothly; I had things to talk about, and we had excellent speakers and evaluators (none of whom talked about cleaning, though our Table Topics Master did ask about various aspects of cleaning). Next time, if I pick a topic out of the air, I think I’ll do a little research before going to bed the night before the meeting!

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