Incantations 86 - Home Alone Automation

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Hello there, [NICKNAME GOES HERE],

This week I have temporarily moved country. For those that know me I spent around 7 years in Colombia, got married and had a son. I recently had moved back to the UK but we've taken a month vacation to sort out some paperwork back in Colombia. The uncertainty of long travel, temporary accommodation has certainly given me a sharp reminder over how useful automation is and maybe how AI can help. Since it's about that time maybe we look at how it could be used for vacations.

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Away from Home

Home automation is a large topic itself but I think where it can shine is when you're not there. You can keep things ticking over and also keep to routines you have when at home (opening/closing curtains, switching on and off lights for the appearance of occupancy, you could even water your plants).

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Aside from tasks and keeping up appearances just security and peace of mind in general could be helped if you have a modern video doorbell and security camera system. Home Alone would have been a very different and shorter movie if Kevin's mum had simply got notified of movement in the house.

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Going Away

I'm fond of checklists and another surefire way if Kevin's mum had been fond of them too is to make sure you haven't missed anything. You could make a start by asking ChatGPT to give you a typical vacation or leaving home checklist. For your own circumstances, you would want to amend it but once you have something that fits you, that can become your template that you use in future. There is a wealth of automation opportunity too when it comes to checklists, tasks lists and automating them for priority and circumstance. I highly recommend Omnifocus for that as the endless potential tool for task management. Not so great at sharing tasks (which is where it's helped out by automation).

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Keeping on Top of Travel

I've been using the TripIt app which is great to give an overall view of things when travelling from flights to stays to other bookings etc, and I'm sure behind the scenes there is a lot of machine learning going on in order to auto-populate those things by scanning your email etc. But it's still a chore searching for flights, hotels etc. This is definitely where large language models like ChatGPT would really help. Especially when the web browsing gets added back in. There's a lot to improve but we're not too far off from getting good results to not only ask for an AI agent to find best deals for our tastes for something like flights but also arrange the entire itinerary and book it for us! I look forward to that day to save money, time and hassle.

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Keeping it shorter this week as I settle in and still get over jetlag. Let me know if you do anything automated or found a way to use AI in your travels and vacations (or even staycations).

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Until next week,

Andrew

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