Home Automation Ensuite Automations - Using Home Assistant to Perfect My Morning Routine I'm a morning person, and I usually get up quite early. As a result, I'm the first person up in our house. Once I'm awake, I'll get out of bed, find my way to the ensuite to get ready, and once I&
Home Automation Adding "Smart" to My Tumble Dryer Using a Power Metered Smart Plug. Have you ever wanted your washing machine or tumble dryer to tell you when it's finished by sending you a push notification? I know this sounds like a very first world problem, but I wondered if I could put in place a simple solution to send out a
Productivity Better lighting with an Elgato Key Light and a Stream Deck When the pandemic started over a year ago, like most people, I transitioned to working entirely from home. Over the last year I've made some tweaks and improvements to my home office setup to make remote working a better experience. I have a desktop at home that has
Home Automation Monitoring an Eaton 5SC UPS using Scripts and Integrations Last year I bought an Eaton 5SC 1000i UPS to provide my home office with backup power [https://www.jamesridgway.co.uk/home-office-upgrade-adding-a-ups/] in the event of a short term power cut. The UPS will provide power to my desktop, HP ProLiant G7 MicroServer and
Software Engineering Working with Time Zones Dealing with time and time zones is hard work. We've all been in a situation where we've had to decide on how we process. store or transmit times without running foul of time zones and complications such as daylight saving time. I recently watched a recording
Home Automation Making traditional light switches smart A few months ago I started on a home automation journey with a plan to integrate all of my existing smart devices into Home Assistant, and to continue making the house smart with helpful and practical home automation improvements. The next step in this journey is to make the traditional
Node.js Building an Emoji API I've recently built a piece of software (DevDeck) to allow developers to use an Elgato Stream Deck as a productivity tool [https://www.jamesridgway.co.uk/using-a-stream-deck-for-productivity-a-software-developers-solution/] . The software works on a modular basis, allowing anyone to write a
