I got back and forth with messing with iOS Shortcuts for automation. I have a nice one that let’s me automatically open a daily created file in Dropbox that I’ve had for a while, but now I have two more potentially interesting ones:

• Enabling Grayness - Automatically reduce the saturation on my screen to slow down phone addition (hopefully?) with a timed temporary disable feature
• Timing Reddit - Every time I launch Reddit, set a 10 minute timer to stop using it so I don’t just lose an hour (or more) doom scrolling

So how did I do it?

Side note: I do with Shortcuts had the ability to share a JSON (or whatever) file containing the shortcut rather than only allowing sharing through iCloud. It does appear that you can (used to?) be able to export them as plists, but it doesn’t seem to work at the moment.

But that’s just the Apple way it seem :\ So it goes.

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UPDATE 2025-06-05: And… I give up: Plan B

I’ve been on a home automation kick for the last little while, so what better time than to dust off an old project and put up a home / family dashboard in the kitchen/dining room!

Previously, I had this running off a FireTV and MagicMirror. This worked well enough… but oh man is the FireTV browser terrible. Plus I had to do some crazy things to get it to stay on and never could get it to launch right back into the display on a power outage. So now we have version 2!

In the end, I ended up with:

• An Orange Pi Zero 2W for the brains
• Armbian for the operating system
• Chromium as the browser (I did try Firefox first…)
• Home Assistant for the data, remote control, and UI
  • WallPanel to hide the side/top bar
  • Browser Mod for remote control

Not too bad.

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I spent long than I would have liked setting up a touch of automation for our home media center setup. Specifically, we have a projector, an HDMI switch, and multiple input devices connected to it (Apple TV, Steam Deck, Switch at the moment).

There are a few things that are suboptimal with this setup, but so it goes. One thing that’s been bothering me for a while is that there’s no great way for the switch I have to easily switch devices. It has a remote… but where’s the fun in that? (Plus we lost it for a few months).

So I took this as a chance to finally set up an IR transmitter with Home Assistant, using Zigbee Home Automation!

It was a bit confusing to get it all working, so I’m sharing it half so I can reproduce what I did if I ever need to or so that anyone trying the same can get it working.

A lot of what I did was based first on this blog post.

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