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!

I made pretzels again today – this time, things went smoothly. I let the butter soften for a long time and distributed the dry ingredients a bit more carefully before putting in the water, and was very cautious in adding a little extra water to incorporate the remaining flour. I hardly had to clean up any flour dust, and the dough hooks came out almost clean. The dough wasn’t too sticky when it came time to roll it, either. Practice makes better, right?

Our long-delayed volksmarching award booklets arrived today; I’d sent them in for processing just before the first of the year, so I expected them to be delayed by the holidays. Then the AVA had some issues with their postage provider which were only resolved last week – so the booklets went into the mail on Monday and arrived today. I couldn’t really say that the delay was critical, though; they’ve been ready to send in since 2002!

And Diane’s new iPad mini came in; we’d ordered it on January 10 and been given a delivery window of February 15-22. The first indication of progress came yesterday, when they sent a shipping notice and UPS tracking number showing expected delivery today. I guess they bulk-shipped the units from China to California before sending out notifications (unlike previous purchases, which I followed every step of the way from Shanghai to here).

We had a few glitches in getting the new iPad set up as a clone of her old one, but it’s done now; once Diane’s sure the migration was successful, I’m going to turn the old iPad into a hub for HomeKit. Not tonight, though!

We got an update from our travel agent telling us about changes for the flights for our Alaska cruise this summer. The return flight from Vancouver had been changed – instead of a nonstop to San Jose, it was now a nonstop into San Francisco. Flying into San Jose would require a change of planes in Seattle (or worse) and would add a couple of hours to the trip – so we’ll fly to San Francisco and be happy.

The news was worse on the outbound flight – instead of leaving San Jose at 4pm and getting into Fairbanks at midnight with a couple of hours layover in Seattle, we were now going to leave at 8pm and arrive at nearly 2am, with only 42 minutes to make our connection. I was not amused.

I found a flight which leaves San Jose at 3pm and arrives in Fairbanks at 11:20pm, nearly the same schedule we’d originally had. But the flight numbers are different, so they have to reissue the tickets. Go figure.

And our travel agent for a 3-week river trip we’re taking next summer in Europe said that he had to move our group from AmaWaterways to UniWorld – details to follow. He promises that the price will be slightly lower and the itinerary will be better. I hope so!

Yesterday’s adventure in booking train travel also meant that I had to update my Tripit/calendar integration program to understand “rail objects” in the Tripit data stream – the hardest part was looking at my code and figuring out what it did again. After that, it was easy to adapt the code that handled airline travel to take care of trains. Most of the changes needed were because the field names in the Tripit data are different for planes and trains; I probably could have made the code smart enough to handle both, but it was easier to make a copy of the airplane code and change it.

At least there are flowers to enjoy!