Dabbling with Home Automation

TL;DR

Kasa smart plugs and light switches work well and are very affordable. If you are curious about home automation, you can experiment with little effort and at a cost of $15-$100. The plugs are super-simple, the light-switches require very basic electrical wiring competency.

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I've begun dabbling with home automation, mostly for lighting. I have purchased the Kasa EP25 smart plugs (4 for $40) and Kasa Smart light switches (<$30) that are well-reviewed by Wirecutter.

One of the light switches is motion-sensitive. I'm still fine-tuning it, but seems to work well. In hindsight, I would say if you think there is any possibility you want motion-detection, get it, because it doesn't cost much more, and you can turn it off if you don't want it.

Setup of the smart plugs was reasonably easy. The hardest thing is the fact that they only operate on 2.4 Ghz wifi, and require the setup device (smartphone) to be on the same band. Since phones will generally default to 5.0 Ghz, this requires going into your router control panel (not hard, but you may not remember how to access it or the password), and temporarily turning off 5.0 Ghz (don't forget to turn it back on).

Installation of the switches was not hard, and I rarely do electrical work. There is one gotcha, which is the volume of the plug is>> than a dumb plug, and you may have a hard time jamming it all back in the box.  I'm sure a pro could manage it, perhaps by trimming excess ground and neutral, but I wasn't up for that. After some searching, I came up with a pretty good work-around: these $5 box extenders.

The Kasa app is pretty good, and the plugs, though not the switches, are HomeKit-compatible.

My #1 need was to provide good & reliable wall-switch illumination of rooms that didn't have overhead lighting. Each room had the typical (1) switch-controlled outlet. So that takes care of one light, and doesn't require any smart stuff to work as expected. That was important, I don't want an over-complicated home where a guest can't turn on a light without installing an app. Then the other lights in the room are connected to a smart plug, which is triggered to go on with the smart switch. All works well, albeit with a ~3-second latency of the additional light to go on.

I also automated the fan in our bedroom that provides "white noise". It is on the floor in the corner, and my aging back dislikes stooping to turn it on and off. So I put it on a timer that corresponds to bedtime + 1 hour.

Similarly, I have a foot-warming carpet in my office that I also have to stoop to turn on. And that I sometimes forget to turn off. So I hooked that up to a smart plug, and put a turn-off schedule for the end of my workday, in case I forget.

Our Christmas tree lights are also very inconvenient to reach, so those also went on a timer (though given they are LED, I think the energy savings is negligible). On that note, these plugs include energy monitors. It is mildly interesting to see how much energy different appliances consume.

Last, I have a Corsi-Rosenthal fan setup in the basement, where the cat lives. I like to run that a couple of hours a day, not for cooling but for filtering. That was easy to put on a schedule

So that's it for implementation experience so far. In the process, I did quite a bit of research--much more than was needed for my relatively straightforward use cases--so I will document that next.

Apple & Subscriptions

I hate the fact that Apple rakes in up to 30% of subscriptions through the app. BUT--they sure do make it easy to monitor and cancel. I routinely check my subscriptions (mostly for streaming services), and set calendar reminders for when I need to cancel. Or if you are pretty sure you just need the one month already subscribed, you can proactively cancel, and you get the service till the end of what you have paid for(!) Quite a breath of fresh air in that regard.

Here's a feature idea: save me the manual step of the calendar entry--let me set reminders tied to subscriptions, by clicking on the subscription. (For extra credit--this is asking a lot probably--create calendar entries as reminders.)

I want a smart light switch that has up/down positioning

I don't live alone. It is absolutely critical that when a person stumbles into a room, when they fumble on the wall to flick the light switch, they get the expected illumination. The smart behavior can't get in the way of that.

Many of the smart switches, including the Kasa ones, don't work this way. They have a push interface that toggles between on and off. But you have no way, just by looking at the switch, to know which is on and which is off. 

This can be made to work nearly the way I want, replicating dumb switches. I simply connect the switch's ON and OFF states to the "toggle lights" scene. So the user who hits the switch to change the state of the lights gets what they expect. But it is still less elegant, and slightly less obvious, than if UP meant ON and DOWN meant OFF.

One counter-argument is that the state of the switch can become inconsistent, if the lights are turned OFF, say, via a smart app. To me, the solution is that toggling the switch DOWN and back UP will solve this problem. That is probably the most natural thing to do anyway. 

Another alternative would be to extend the behavior of the 3-pole dumb switch (2 switches controlling the same light). UP and DOWN don't necessarily correspond to state, but flipping the switch guarantees a toggle. The problematic detail here is what to do if state is mixed, for multiple connected lights.

Business idea: Customized service to notify a fan it is worth watching the game

Recording sports and watching them on my own time & terms is transformational. I think I would watch 90% less sports if I had to suffer through them in real-time.

I am also very much in the anti-spoilers camp. I know not everybody has the same viewpoint, but I am hardcore about it. The downside, though, is you lose the flexibility of entirely skipping a worthless game.

I can imagine a service that uses a combination of machine-learning and user-configuration parameters to notify a user if a given game is worth watching on the DVR. The user could set various parameters such as:

• My team wins (I personally don't include this one, but some people do).
• The score is close at the end.
• The score is close most of the game.
• The game involves a reasonable amount of scoring.
• The scoring is not all on penalty kicks (I'm looking at you, futbol) or home runs (baseball).

Also, the result wouldn't be a pure yes-no, although that would be an option. There would be an overall rating underneath the yes-no. So if you are me, a spoiler hater, you might want just the yes-no, because the score could give something away. But if you are on the fence or particularly busy, maybe you want an indication if it is a really good game, not just good enough to be a generally enjoyable watch.

Then there are all kinds of ways you could incorporate statistical and machine-learning elements, to adjust the rating. Just scratching the surface:

• Higher rating if many other people with profiles similar to yours rated the game highly.
• Lower the rating if you identify that you accidentally found out the result (lower still if you know the score).
• Use ML to adjust the rating based on your own ratings of past games.

Then also enhanced features such as telling you how far to skip ahead, or to skip to the last few minutes.

Email feature Flag R for reply expected

Sometimes when you send an email, you definitely expect a reply. But people's email habits being what they are, said reply does not always arrive. Google actually tries to use AI to remind you of emails that seem like they need a reply but haven't. That's nice, as far as it goes. I would like email to have a feature where you can set a "Reply Expected" flag.

Some E-Commerce Apps Should Be More Careful About Default Stores

Over the years, I have had a few cases where online apps wind up placing my order at the wrong location. I can't universally rule out user error on my part, but I have some clear-cut cases where the app messed up. In one case (can't remember now which app), when I identified my use case as In-Store Pickup, and an item was not available in my default store, but was available in a nearby store, it auto-switched my order to the nearby store. 

Recently with Panera, the app had a flat-out bug.

Either way, I wonder if more thoughtful preference configuration could help. What jumps to mind is asking the customer to identify which use case best describes their needs:

1. I almost always order for the same location. If an order is ever different than my default location, please ask me to confirm.

1. I order for many different locations. Do not ask me to confirm when the location changes or is new.

For extra-credit, AI could probably be brought to bear, to refine the options, or to default them.

Google Calendar Feature Idea: Filter Recurring

 I tend to use Google calendar for a lot of recurring reminders (renew drivers license, perform monthly maintenance tasks, etc, etc). I would like a UI affordance to toggle my view to show All - Recurring Only - Non-Recurring Only.

Central Mexico Trip Report

My wife, adult son and I just returned from a teriffic 11-day vacation in Mexico. Not beach Mexico, but historic, central Mexico. 6 days in Mexico City, 5 days in Morelia--an old, colonial city 4 hours west of Mexico City. We would never have chosen this vacation, if not for the opportunity to visit old friends, who were living in Morelia for 4 months, while on university sabbatical. But are we ever glad we discovered the delights of central Mexico!

First thing nobody told me about is the climate. I vaguely knew Mexico City was at a high elevation, but I never put two and two together. I dumbly looked at a map, thought to myself southern Texas is really hot, Mexico City is way south of that, it must be a blazing inferno. What a misconception! The mile-high elevation means it is very temperate, all year round. Think Hawaii or San Diego, except maybe a bit more comfortable--75-78F and very dry.

The next recalibration I had to make was the Mexico City environment. I absorbed the idea, 25+ years ago, that Mexico City air quality was horrendous. I think that was true, but like LA, it has improved a lot. It isn't great, but it also isn't a smoggy hell-hole. Most days we were there the weather app rated it "acceptable".

It was also very clean for a large city. The various street vendors were always sweeping up in their downtime. Compares favorably to US cities.

Now on to the question of security and safety. We have all read the chilling tales of drug-cartel violence haunting Mexico. It is real, but it is confined to certain areas, mostly near the border. Mexico City and Morelia both seemed very safe. I am sure there are dangerous areas of Mexico City, just as there are in Chicago, but no reason to go near them as a tourist.

Cost-of-living is very favorable for rich-country tourists. We stayed in the expensive part of the biggest city in Mexico, and overall costs were maybe one-third what they would be in the US (granted, the current exchange rate of nearly 20:1 is historically favorable). 

We spoke zero Spanish, and unquestionably stood out as gringos (being of mostly northern European ancestry, and some of us being pretty tall). Nevertheless, the people were very friendly, especially by megacity standards. 

Finding English-speaking service workers was spotty, a bit more than I might have guessed. Google Translate was indispensable. Get familiar with it before you leave, and download the Spanish language pack for offline translation.

We did not even think of renting a car. In Mexico City, like Manhattan, a car is the last thing you want. Uber is as reliable as in the US, and costs maybe one-third as much. For traveling between cities, there are extremely nice first-class buses. A four-hour trip to Morelia cost $33, and the bus was shiny, new and very comfortable.

Credit cards are widely accepted. Not quite as universally as current day in the US, maybe the way it was 10 years ago (i.e., cabs and street vendors don't tend to have Stripe swipers). So you will want to carry some cash. Including 5 pesos for public toilets.

Also, on the subject of currency, be aware they use the $ symbol to denote cost in Mexican pesos. Given the exchange rate while we were there, that meant dividing by ~20.

Bottom-line, central Mexico is a vastly under-rated tourist destination. It would also be an amazing place to snowbird. Or if so inclined, even to fully retire to.