I sat down this afternoon to define more shim devices in Indigo to let me use the abandoned HomeBridge plugin for Indigo to expose the real devices to Apple HomeKit (and therefore to the Home app). And then I thought about what I was doing and realized that relying on abandoned software was not a good long-term strategy.

Instead, I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi and put real HomeBridge on it to see if getting rid of the indirection through Indigo will work for me. Buying the RPi wasn’t as simple as I’d’ve liked – the chip shortage has made most models unavailable. Strangely, the only one that’s easy to find is the Raspberry Pi 400, which is a Raspberry Pi 4 built into a keyboard. I ordered one from Central Computers in Santa Clara and they have it ready for me to pick up tomorrow.

I spent the next few hours going through the automations I’d set up in Indigo so I can move them into HomeKit when I get HomeBridge set up.

Making life easy is hard sometimes.

It was another hectic day, starting with the Silver Tongued Cats meeting this morning. Our Toastmaster had selected “F. E. A R.” as the theme of the meeting, and she opened with a few possible expansions of the acronym, such as “Future Events Aren’t Real” or “Frustration, Ego, Anxiety, Resentment”.

I was the Inspiration Master for the day. I wanted to play off the theme and come up with something that was Toastmasters-oriented. After a bit of thought, I arrived at “Fair Evaluations Are Rewarding” – an effective Toastmasters evaluation gives the speaker praise and encouragement for strong elements in the speech but still offers suggestions for getting better. It sufficed.

I also put together the minutes from the Ritual Committee meeting I led last night. In the process, I found (thanks to Codegena.com) a solution for a technical problem we identified during the meeting – being able to automatically embed the most recent video from our YouTube channel on a web page without having to edit the page every time. It looks like this:

and it should change every time we livestream on YouTube.

It wasn't the most exciting day, but that's OK!