More tech drama. Have I mentioned how much I loathe Apple HomeKit HomeShit?

If I haven't (let's be real, I definitely have) then you should probably know that my hatred is very real, and has now reached such depths as to send me into a rage just thinking about it. As I wrote yesterday I awoke to find that on the first day in this Year of Our Lord, 2026, 3/4 of my "smart" home devices were offline and half my Automations were missing. Now, when this happens I can usually get most of those devices to come back online if I power-cycle all my hubs (nothing can be done to bring back the automations). It's for this reason that I have non-HomeShit power plugs on all my iPod minis and AppleTVs.

And so, before I left on an errand I had to run before work, I sat in my car to power off all the hubs. Then, when I finished my errand and made it to the office, I turned them all back on. Three hours later as I ate lunch, I pulled up Apple's HomeShit app on my iPhone... and... there were stil six devices which hadn't recovered. Which means I'm going to waste time removing them then resetting them so I can re-add them before re-writing the Automations that got trashed somehow.

Easy.

Just time-consuming.

And here's a new wrinkle... the re-written automations do not work!

No idea why. I can test them. They test as expected. But they don't work.

For exmaple... I have it so when one of the lights in the guest bathroom is turned on, the other light turns on too. Turn one off, they both turn off. It's incredibly basic, but important because otherwise it's not light enough in there.

Absolutely no idea what I do now. After dinner I'll delete them all and try re-writing one more time. If that doesn't work, I guess I have to try removing devices and re-adding them. If that doesn't work, then I guess I have to completely reset absolutely everything and start over from scratch.

If that ends up being the case, I can say goodbye to my weekend.

Which brings me to a decision I have to make...

1. Waste two days resetting everything and hope it works.
2. Give up on HomeShit and save my money to replace it with something that actually works.
3. Give up on having a "smart" home completely, and go back to the dark ages of having a dumb home.

I gotta tell you... Option #3 is looking very appealing to me. If I waste two days and the shit is still broken, I'm going to be angry and never get over it. If I trash HomeShit and start over with something else which ends up broken, I'm going to be angry and never get over it. If I just end up giving up completely on having a "smart" home, I'm totally going to be angry.

But I'll get over it.

I just have to go back to remembering where all the light switches are and figure out and possible have to re-think some lighting in a few places. Like the guest bathroom.

In other tech drama, I'm slowly getting all my data transfered from my QNAP NAS to my UGREEN NAS.

This is taking a while because I have a metric shit-ton of photos to copy. I always took a lot of photos when I traveled. Then when the charity closed and I wasn't traveling as much, I ended up with Jake and Jenny and started taking a metric shit-ton of cat photos. You know how it goes.

My problem is (and always has been) that I don't sort through photos after I take them. I snap! snap! snap! snap! take them with the intent of keeping the best images and tossing the rest. Except I never have time to do that. Maybe I'll commit to sorting through 50 photos every morning when I wake up and see if I can whittle down the number of photos in my archive by half. Or, if I get serious about it, whittle down to a quarter of what I'm sitting on. Which should be easy because there's just so many pictures that are practically identical. There's AI software which is supposed to make the task easier, but I've not looked into it. And maybe I should.

In the meanwhile, I guess I save my money for a new pair of hard drives, given the ones I have are all older and probably not very reliable. They will likely be giving up the ghost soon.

Like myself.

Or like my patience with HomeShit, which has now evaporated.