Automate my life

On March 13th, 2021 in Tech

One of my first non-listed project of this year is to automate the boring stuffs of my life. I have an urge to control every aspect of my life and this makes me create a lot of small, tedious and time consuming tasks every day.

Here I show some of the automations that I implemented on my daily life:

Home

Home Assistant

We automated some outlets at home.

  1. Every afternoon before sunset, the outdoor light turns on. It uses the sun position to determine at what time it must turn on. Not only we don’t need to bother turning on the light, but it also changes automatically according to time of the year (longer/shorter days on summer/winter).
  2. Our electric kettle turns off every night and turn on right before we wake up.
  3. We must keep the humidity level as constant as possible as different humidity levels may cause damage to the piano. I installed a humidity and temperature sensor on the humidifier and set it to turn on or off according to the humidity on the room.
  4. Our Home Assistant setup is not exposed to the internet. It only works on our private network (as planned). Nevertheless, it connects to the internet to control some devices that we own and to send notifications using Telegram bot. So I automated some actions to send me a telegram message warning the status change.

I plan to do many other automations and sensors in the future.

Digital Life

TrueNAS

My digital setup is ready. Our photos and videos are already properly stored and our most important documents are backed up using Backblaze B2 service.

Backblaze

I really enjoy the B2 Cloud Storage. There’s a one pricing table for all regions, you pay only for what you use and it is very affordable.

B2 cloud storage pricing (feb 2021)

I have more than 5TB of data stored on TrueNAS. Most of it are RAW photo files, but all the exported JPEG photos and documents occupy only 200GB.

You can use the Backblaze calculator to estime how much you would pay, this is my situation:

And yes, I’m hunting down subscriptions, but for 1.3 USD per month I can have my most important documents safely stored. I think it worths.

Note: this is not a paid review, but the link is an affiliated link.

Gmail

Every month I open and save all kinds of invoices and other documents I get by mail in my Google Drive. Usually they come as a PDF attachment. Wouldn’t it be nice to save those PDFs in Google Drive as well?

After a few research on Google, I automated it using an amazing Google Script from Andreas Hochsteger. It’s simple, fast and efficient.

Tabula

I’m running a Ubuntu Server VM on TrueNAS it’s running Tabula as a service.

Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.

https://tabula.technology/

It only works on my private network, but it works just fine and makes my life much easier when working with tables.

Tags: automations digital life