Novelty Projects

These are scripts, projects or ideas that I’ve come up with that serve no practical or productive use, but are fun to use nonetheless. I love using technology to automate away menial tasks.

I host a simple website titled ‘Say Hi’. If you press the switch displayed in that website, you will turn on a physical light-bulb in my bedroom. I thought it would be fun to explain how I set it up in this post. A little bit of backstory One fine evening, I had a crazy little idea. I get quite a lot of visitors to my blog. What if there was some way for these visitors to ‘Say Hi!...

I use the Sleep as Android App to track my sleep every day. It’s an amazing app with a great UI and integrates with a lot of stuff like Tasker and Home Assistant. Since I run a Home Assistant instance at home, I decided to go with the later. Integrating Sleep as Android with Home Assistant is done using MQTT. We setup an MQTT server in Home Assistant. If you’re running HassOS, it’s as simple as installing the MQTT add-on from the Add-On store....

This is a fun little script that I wrote one evening. It makes use of whatsapp-web.js. The script will update your ‘about’ to Day <number_of_days_since_you_were_born> every day at midnight. Here’s a link to the Github repository: https://github.com/JohnKuruvila/whatsapp-about-automation Displaying the number of days I’ve lived seemed like a cool idea. But I did have a few other ideas too: Display my current real life status. I could fetch data from my Home Assistant instance and dynamically change my WhatsApp about based on my location, current activity or something similar....