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Showing posts from March, 2023

What I learned from automating my house during the pandemic

An empty mind is an engineer's workshop. That saying is as old as time. Two things happened simultaneously in 2020 - The Pandemic hit, causing many jobs in IT to move from working from the office to working from home. We were expecting a baby and therefore had to take additional precautions, which meant a complete disconnect from human civilization, barring the occasional video calls. The second thing during this period was moving into a brand-new flat. As you scour through manuals from Ikea, you start understanding the patterns. You can see which manual is copy pasted from other manuals; you can empathize with the manual-making team and how overworked they are to churn out new assembly guides for every new piece of furniture in the market. That was when I looked at the house carefully and asked a pertinent question, why in the 22nd century, do we need switches? The light control is a stone-age activity; you move from your position, drop what you are doing, reach this non-descript ...