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For the past six weeks or so I’ve been playing around with home automation. It’s a rather large and complex subject and I’ve only just started, but thought it might be worth writing up what I’ve found so far.

The adventure started when the kids gave me a new Raspberry Pi for my birthday near the beginning of May. I installed Home Assistant on it and, a bit later, Node Red. Then, over the next few weeks, much to my wife’s dismay, I purchased 10 smart light bulbs, a few motion sensors and half a dozen smart plugs – gradually changing the house into a version of HAL. Each time she would come home from work, some wall switch or another would stop working as it did… She’s been very patient!

A year ago, I was told to vacate the office and start working from home. I expected it to last several weeks or a few months, at most. I also expected it to be fun. Working from home is fun. Conducting every meeting, every discussion, every personal interaction of any kind, for months on end, through the virtual keyhole that is Zoom is a bit less so.

I’ve adapted surprisingly well, in some respects. I talk to my children more frequently now than I did before the pandemic, for example, and I’ve slowly assembled a very comfortable working environment in one of our spare bedrooms. But I can also count quite a few costs: I’ve lost a year in my seven-year-old granddaughter’s life. I miss being able to hug my kids, something I now realise I did far too infrequently before the pandemic. (Let that be a lesson: Hug while you can.)

I’ve been volunteering for a couple of years with the Jesuit Refugee Service, which aims to support refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. I’m a volunteer “social visitor.” Before the lockdown, that meant regularly travelling out to the Immigration Detention Centres near Heathrow, Europe’s largest. (There are two centres, next to each other, called Harmondsworth and Colnbrook.)

Several hundred young men, and a very small number of women, are held here indefinitely, often for several weeks or months, while the courts consider their cases. They are usually alone, with no family or friends to visit them. My job is mostly to just talk with them and treat them as people, not cases to be adjudicated.

I’m fortunate to work for a team that gives its developers time to play – a day, every other week, that we can use to learn about or try something new. Over the years, a number of useful stuff has come out of those days. Many of them are small utilities that developers have created for themselves – for example, to automate a task. We’ve gathered quite an eclectic collection of these, written in all sorts of languages and frameworks.

The extended family members are getting together again tonight, on the usual unwieldy, international Zoom conference with too many people on it. In an effort to make it less cacophonous, we’re each being asked to come up with something to share – a piece of music, a poem, or whatever – that we liked. We’ll each get three minutes.

I like the idea, so I thought I’d write my thoughts on my “thing” beforehand, so that I can make the best of my three minutes.