I’m gonna assume you’re not using Home Assistant yet.

There is an app for Home Assistant but from your comment I’m assuming you’re talking about something like Smart Life.

Home Assistant takes all these different companies and creates a central hub for them all. So we have Hue bulbs and Nest cameras all talking to each other via Home Assistant.

If you’re already using Home Assistant then disregard and have look into PIR and Mm Wave sensor.

I’ve moved up a level and recently made a bed sensor.

I’ve just set up Uptime Kuma in HA.

I was using it to get email notifications but it was just an endless barrage! I figured that instead of hearing the instant my pi (in my bedroom) can’t see my server (in my kitchen 4 floors below connected by power line) I’d make HA send me notifications when something is down for 5 minutes instead.

I only get emails if HA is down now, and barely hear anything from anything else anymore.

I run everything on my server and have my Pi for Kuma and a backup adguard just to keep em separate.

I’ve had the opposite experience with the cube, but I use Zigbee2MQTT so I’m maybe that made the difference.

It’s a fantastic concept and I think everyone should buy one just because it’s so cool and so fucking useless at the same time.

So you have turn like a knob function, then changing sides, a knock knock, a slide and a drop sensor.

I programmed the drop sensor to toggle my room lights then showed a bunch of 40+ year old kids, who had great fun for a full 5 minutes playing epileptic catch.

The problem is that it has all these functions, but you only know what they are because you spent the time programming them. So it’s fucking useless to anyone else, and by the time you’ve set the thing down you’ve forgotten what you set it to do yourself.

I’ve had the turn like a knob set to brighten and dim my lights, then decided it should control the volume on the speaker when it’s playing music too, which lead to a little project in node red. But nobody else in the house even knows that’s what it does.

I should stop this wall of text, get one, it’s useless!

I hear you, I’m 40 and never gonna compete. But I still compete with every solve I do, with myself.

The serotonin dump I get when I get a PB is enough for me to spend time learning a new alg here and there. I was trying to learn a new alg a day at one point, then just a new one a week, and it’s since dropped off a bit and my solves have plateaued.

So the decision to spend some time teaching myself better look ahead was exactly the kick up the arse I needed to care a bit more about cubing

I may not get the best times, but I do know that I was excited to be getting solves under a minute using 2 look and now I’m excited to be getting some in the 20-25 range.

The fact you’re getting sub 30 solves without that is quite impressive to me and so i just wonder how much faster you would be with all the algs in your head.

I started by just learning a couple. When those cases showed up I’d get a little giddy and shave loads off my normal times, and that pushed me to learn a few more.

Thing is, some you already know, you just add an extra move or two onto the beginning or end.

Anyway you do you, but I do honestly think you’ll be glad you learned at least a few full algs

I would fully recommend taking the time to learn full OLL or as much as you can.

I used Jperm’s website to learn OLL/PLL it’s a great resource when you learn that you can click on the picture of the case you’re learning to mark it as learning or learned, then go into the timer and set it to just show you cases you’re learning.

I did similar cases at the same time and tried remembering them in the trainer. If you forget the alg you can make it show up move by move with a keyboard press.

I took have tried learning EO but it blags my head. It’s a slow process but kills time

I did it all in Node Red so unfortunately I can’t share the automation, but I can point you at this HACS integration https://github.com/meichthys/uptime_kuma

Set that up and all your nodes will be visible in HA then it’s just a case of “if node X is off for X minutes” - “notify”

I think I’m a step behind you. I use Uptime Kuma for monitoring and it worked really well. Just have it running on a pi separate from my main machine.

I worked out how to get it sending me emails when things are down and up, and now my email inbox is a fucking hot mess of notifications.

So I’ve just this weekend integrated it into Home Assistant and set it to notify me when things are down for 5 minutes or more.

My next step was going to be finding some way of integrating Portainer into Home Assistant so I can restart stopped containers, and maybe Proxmox so I can reboot VMs from HA. Not sure it’s possible yet though.

Ultimately I want to have HA send me a notification with actionable buttons with “reboot container” and “reboot VM” which, when pressed, will sort the issue out.

However this will not help when one of my drives goes down. They’re HDDs plugged in by USB3 which isn’t great and my server is behind the coat rack so sometimes the kids just throw their coats on and it falls onto my server, which then heats up and goes silly.

Slow solves have helped me drastically improve my look ahead though, and taking time to plan my cross. That was hard to start with, I’d plan 3 edges and wing the last one but that took time I didn’t need to lose.

This week I’ve been planning my cross fully and even occasionally (on easy ones) planning my first pair. When I say that, I mean I’d have a pair in mind to start with, but not quite what the orientation of the pair will look like yet.

So next steps are planning first pair into my cross (and learning dot cases I guess).

Do you know full PLL/OLL?

Not full no. I know most of them but I gave up when I felt like I had enough to get good times.

I do know full PLL

Dot cases I don’t know in OLL. I just do a fat Sexy on them and then I can go from there.

I guess I could do with sitting down and learning those when I have one of those mornings when my IBS gets me up at 6am and nobody else will be up until 10…

I tested both out years ago when I was first starting with ZigBee and preferred Z2MQTT, it was just way better. I’ve been using it ever since.

I’ve managed a solve in under 21 seconds this week and managed to get some AO5 under 30!

My lookahead game is improving

Nice! I’ve just set up a couple of daily tasks, and worked out how to get nagged to complete tasks in node red, which basically requires removing the tasks from the to-do. If it’s been ticked then the node errors out, but if it has not then it gets removed, the node completes and I can send a notification saying “You didn’t do X!”

Timers to add tasks sounds like a good next step, I’ll have to look into it

Yeah problem is that your body clock gets synched and you end up waking up early. It’s 7.30 on Xmas eve and I’m up again, although I hear footsteps so it looks like I have company this morning.

Yeah I used to be a Google Keep user. I still am but I used to be too.

Like I say I’ve synchronised Keep with HA now, just my shopping list using a HACs plugin. The only downside was that it required me to use a Docker container to get the Token which was doable but required me to learn how to get Docker running in Interactive Mode in Portainer which I’ve never done before.

If you’re interested there’s a dude on YouTube called FutreProofHomes that’s integrated ChatGPT with ToDo and is doing some cool things with it

Now then, that’s an impressive Lovelace view.

Haha no not anymore but I certainly used to. Now they’re entering teenage years and I have to drag them out of their beds.

It gets better

ESP32 and a pressure strip. Basically this https://github.com/eoncire/HA_bed_presence

I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results

I use Portainer to manage Docker. It’s really easy.

My are stack is just one big docker config except in Portainer it’s called a “Stack”

Personally I think they’re useful for one thing and one thing only, a gig/night out. When you don’t want to have some kind of battery pack to recharge your vape so you have a couple disposables in your pocket, and if you lose it, shrug, it cost a couple quid.

That said, I back this ban wholeheartedly