I took a break from working on home automation software to work on home automation hardware – in particular, I installed a new Ring Doorbell 4 to replace the old first-generation Ring Doorbell we’d had since 2016. The old one’s battery had deteriorated to the point that we were barely getting a month between recharges – and there are no replacements available.

Of course, the new doorbell has a different mounting system than the old one, which meant I had to drill more holes in the house. And that meant finding the drill and recharging its battery. And so on and so on.

Eventually, I got the new doorbell mounted and removed the mounting plate for the old one. And I think I’ve convinced all of the software to use the new doorbell.

We decided to celebrate Purim and Norooz tonight by ordering takeout from a favorite Persian restaurant, Negeen. When I got home with the goodies, Diane told me that UPS had just delivered a surprise package from Green’s Bakery in Brooklyn.

I hope it freezes well, because we may not be able to eat it all before Pesach!

We went to the Farmers’ Market and took our usual walk this morning – it was a good way to start the first day of spring.

I continued to work on Home Assistant and Insteon; I made a lot of progress, but ran into a bug in the documentation page I found yesterday – the examples that I wanted to copy had a small indentation error which was enough to keep the Insteon-MQTT server from starting. There were fairly clear error messages, but they were in a window that I’d covered and didn’t uncover until after I’d figured out what was wrong and fixed it.

After that, I got a couple of automations set up before I ran out of time – it’s looking hopeful!

I did fix the TiVo problem I mentioned on Friday – I restarted the TiVo and it was able to successfully play the recordings that were blank before. I have no idea what’s going wrong, but I guess I should start looking at alternatives; I don’t want to buy another TiVo.