automation

In April 2024 (roughly 7 months ago), I installed a set of four Hiseeu Solar Powered Wireless Security Cameras. They're mostly mounted in semi-protected areas, under eaves, or protected from the wind by the wall they're mounted on. I placed the solar panels to catch most of the available sunlight - none of the panels get full Michigan sun.

Surprisingly, maybe, the cameras have pulled just enough solar power each day to stay topped off, with each camera's indicator showing a full battery even in the morning.

A script that ran happily for about a year suddenly stopped working last week. From the stack trace, it was apparent that the script was stumbling on Python's smtplib>sendmail command. Here's the error:

OSError: [WinError 10013] An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions

The offending code:

if you frequently have to toggle between two network adapters in Windows, it can become a hassle to keep opening the Control Panel widget, right-click, disable/enable adapter, etc. For example, you may want to turn off your wired connection and connect to wifi, then switch back to wired, etc.

I find that I frequently (many times daily) have to send files as email attachments. Depending on the task, the files can be located in a half-dozen or so places on the Windows file system. I found myself browsing (from Outlook's "Attach File" function) to my Documents, Downloads, Desktop, or one of several network drives for the file I just saved there a few seconds ago.

I've found this tool to be very powerful and helpful...and I almost couldn't find it again after recently upgrading to a new computer. To prevent future heartburn, I'll document it here.

From the csvkit web site:

csvkit is a suite of command-line tools for converting to and working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats.

This post outlines a method I came up with to use a single AutoHotKey script to auto-load any number of scripts in a sub-folder. It also allows every script to have its own autoexec section, and to hook into a timer for event-type functionality.

AutoHotKey scripts that are 'persistent' need to be loaded into memory by Windows just one time. If you have several of them to load, you can get them all individually, but you end up with a system tray full of little green 'H' icons.

AutoHotKey is a powerful Windows automation tool, capable of doing pretty much anything you could do yourself on your PC. I have a number of scripts I run regularly (or always have running) to speed up my work and/or make it more accurate and efficient.

One of my favorite scripts responds to the key combination of Ctrl-Alt-0 (that's a zero). When I press that combo, a couple things happen:

1) First, the script checks to see if the machine is connected to WiFi, and if so, grabs the name of the WiFi's SSID.

I haven't found a way to make my email 'groups' from Outlook available on a mobile device (Android phone). I've tried several email clients, but none of them brings in the groups I use frequently in Outlook.

Recently, I came up with a workaround, using Outlook rules. Essentially, I can set up a rule with the following criteria:

• Sent from my account

• Sent to my account

  I almost never send mail to myself, so this works. If you routinely cc: yourself, you may need to be careful here.

Background

Network drives allow multiple users on the same network to have acccess to the shared folders/files. However, if you have two different sets of network drives (at work and at home, for example), it can be a hassle to manually map drives when your computer 'resumes' on the new network.