Okay. Now back to our regularly scheduled program...
Lately, I've been spending a lot of time looking into ways I can upgrade my life through automation. We don't have readily available self-driving cars (yet), but we do have a smoke detector that will talk to us instead of shrieking. It's so kind, it'll even text us to let us know if it detects smoke while we're away.
Do you want to be able to control the lights and other electronics in your house while you're on vacation? Or maybe, like me, you're one of those who has to turn around and head back home just to make sure the curling iron was turned off. Never fear - WeMo is here!
Unfortunately for me, my disposable income doesn't allow for much more than the occasional tube of lipstick these days. It will be a while before my home is on its way to sentience.
In addition to gazing endlessly at all of the lovely gadgets I can't afford, I've been tinkering with "recipes" on "If This Then That" (IFTTT), a free service that allows you to create simple programs to automate things across some of your favorite websites and apps.
I know, I know. "Programming?! Buh!!!" But I swear it's easier than you think!
IFTTT programs (or "recipes," as they're called) only consist of 2 elements: a trigger and an action. If something is triggered, then there will be an action.
To give you an example, here is one of my favorite recipes:
How does this recipe work? If it finds a picture on Instagram that has a particular hashtag, then it will save it into a folder in your Dropbox account. In other words, it allows you to save all of the pictures your guests post onto Instagram of your wedding (or whatever type of party or event). All you have to do is ask them to add a designated hashtag to all of the pictures they post of the party, and IFTTT will do the rest.
One of the cool things you can do with this particular recipe (in addition to making an awesome scrapbook) is to have a laptop connected to a projector or TV at your event and have it play a slideshow from the synced Dropbox folder. You and your guests will be able to enjoy the pictures throughout the course of the party.
Before you can start creating recipes, you'll need to activate all the "channels" you'd like to use (a.k.a. give permission for IFTTT to access your apps). Once activated, you'll have access to each channel's various triggers and actions so that you can customize your recipes. By activating the weather channel and the Phone Call channel, for instance, you can have IFTTT give you a wake-up call with the day's weather forecast every morning. Or use the weather channel and the WeMo Light Switch channel to have your porch lights (outfitted with a WeMo Light Switch) automatically turn on at sunset and off at sunrise. The possibilities are endless!
Here are a few of my own:
You may ask, Why? Is it really so hard to click a few extra buttons and do these things yourself? No, it's not. But it is tedious. That's what automation is all about. It's not there to make you lazy; it's there to make you more efficient. Why waste your time and energy doing tedious things, when you can use that extra time on other work or being with your loved ones? If you're anything like me, you could probably use that extra time to just relax.
