I am a big fan of the technology in the Kindle. I am not talking about ebooks and Amazon’s setup to sell them in proprietary formats, DRM, etc. But the E Ink display of the Kindle, the thinness of the device with high energy efficiency and long battery runtimes. Some time ago I thus used a Kindle Touch to build a Kindle Alarm Clock. There, I am using a HTML frontend, shown in the webbrowser of the Kindle with jailbreak and connecting to a backend webserver, implemented in Python and running on the Kindle, as well. When building it, it dawned on me that one could extract this setup into an app framework to make it easier for developers to develop apps for Kindles. This would allow great reusability of older devices, which are rather cheap and might otherwise end up in trash. A complete waste of an excellent technology. Thus, I set out to create kapps, a framework for apps on Kindle. The following article is a copy of the kapps README at the time of writing. There is also a wiki available with more information on its usage.

In my last post, I showed how I automate the LEDs mounted behind my computer screen to turn on and off automatically, when I log in or log out of the computer, respectively. There is a small caveat though: My computer is a laptop. Thus, it is possible that it is not in its docking station at the desk, but e.g., with me on the couch. In this case, I of course don’t want to turn on the LEDs. Thus, I need to detect the docking state of the laptop and notify Home Assistant of it. I then can trigger the lights based on the combined input of the log in/out and un-/docked state. This article will focus on a ThinkPad running Windows.

Since my desk is sitting in a rather dark corner of the living room and since I often write posts like this in the evenings, I thought a bit of monitor backlight would reduce eye strain a little. However, turning it on manually seems just too much of a hassle. Also, I use an RGB-LED strip and might like a different color than my wife. So clearly, some automation is urgently needed.

I live in an almost 100 year old rental flat. I don’t have a smart doorbell and do not have the option to install one. Nevertheless, I would like to reap the benefits of a smart doorbell, especially being notified on multiple devices. This is e.g., useful when wearing headphones alone in home office and the post is outside, trying to deliver a parcel. I have missed that more than once.

I have recently been getting more and more into the topic of home automation. It find it to be a very family-suitable topic, since once setup, it is easy and fast to integrate another sensor or add a new automation. This allows to also maintain and enhance the system if one only has rather short amounts of time.

A year or two ago, our 36 Euro vacuum cleaner died. While I managed to revive it a few times with self-built filters, tape, and some rewiring, we eventually decided to abandon the zombie cleaner and go for something nicer: A Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner. We went with the V8 as it was the first one with the additional filter after the motor and a lithium-ion battery. As this was already an older model, we managed to get it used for a good price with a number of accessories from a classifieds platform. We bought some more accessories we occasionally use (Car Cleaning Kit), of course from a classifieds platform as well. However, as probably every Dyson owner knows: Storing this vacuum with its fancy charging station and all the accessories is not quite straight-forward. Even when screwing to a wall, there is still no nice way to store the accessories. In this article, I will show the stand I built from wood scraps I had lying around from another project. Here the final setup for motivation: