Since Covid restrictions are dying down, it is time to start having people over. Parties require music and a way to control it. Let’s walk through how to set up a Home Assistant Alexa System to pump music throughout our house using nothing but our Alexas!

I’ve used Alexa to give me verbal notifications before when I set up my gaming system. However, now we are going to use the Home Assistant Alexa Media Player component in HACS to play music on all of our Alexas at the same time. …

Twitter is an incredible innovation in our public discourse. However, it’s essential to understand that Twitter (and other social media companies) depend on engagement, and thus amplification of polarization is good business.

Roam Research is a tool where everything that you do comes together. Your research, your personal cultural Zeitgeist, and your metadata and notes about your daily life. What about your third-party tools? Namely, what about your To-Do List, like Todoist?

Ian Drummond wrote a great article about using a stack of apps.

He writes about “jobs to be done,” which:

In a nutshell, it’s the idea that product owners should dig deeper than the product and focus on the needed outcomes.

This idea is that we should use a tool for its intended purpose and not force a round peg…

A Zeitgeist is a concept from the nineteenth century Germany Philosophy, meaning “spirit of an age.” Contemporary usage is often to describe a genre or schema of fashion or fads. I’m going to expand that usage to encompass our shared cultural experience in an expansion of Georg Hegel’s usage. We are going to start collecting the data for our personal Zeitgeist from Hulu and novels. Starting this journey will help us create our own recommendation engines.

For most technology companies today, the need to build better and better personalization algorithms is critical for their financial success. With that information, they…

Over the past year, Knowledge workers have become increasingly isolated. With Zoom calls, remote meetings, and work from home, it becomes harder to retain context with what we are working on because of the uniformity of our current work environment. How do we build this context in our Knowledge System?

I have become ever more dependent on notes, task lists, and online research to meet my work needs. I have created a personal knowledge system with Roam Research. To date, my graph has:

Lately, I have been interested in creating a Second Brain as a complement to my current goal to build an automated life. I intend to create a repository of the content that I consume, add my notes to it, and make it searchable. This will allow me to surface content as I need it and create a repository of information that I have previously vetted. As anyone who has looked into building an AI, the first thing to do is that you need data. I don’t have enough time to read all the articles I come across. So, I need…

Recently I discovered that I was sleeping through my morning alarm and set out to suggest the sound on my Google Home. The idea was that I had become familiar with my current tone. Unfortunately, my partner didn’t like the sound I chose. Frustrated with the limited selection of alarm sounds, I set out to create a random playlist.

Since I have Home Assistant running my smart home, I figured a smart place to start was there.

Helpers and Sensors in Home Assistant

Presence Detection in Home Automation is the holy grail. Knowing that particular members of the household are entering a room allows you to customize certain aspects. Each member of the family would want different temperatures, light schemes, TV inputs, etc. If you knew when those members entered or left, you could automate the environment.

But how do you decide whose wishes to prioritize when there are multiple people in the same room? More importantly, how do you get each member of the family to cooperate with your artificial system?

When you search for an answer to this question, the usual…