Proxify your home

You may have figured out by now that I love to have my computer do things for me automatically. Things like turning on the lights, displaying incoming call information, and reminding me of household chores. My name is Gordon and I am an automation junkie.

Square one for automating tasks is to get acquainted with a powerful and flexible scheduling program. If you're into home automation, you've already got one in the form of Indigo, XTension, or Mister House . Each of these applications let you easily create events that happen at regular intervals or specific times. For example, you might set up an event that has the computer speak "It's garbage night!" every Thursday at 7:00 PM, so you remember to put the trash cans on the curb for emptying the next morning.

But, you might be thinking, that example doesn't require a traditional home automation program. Everything that's happening is within the realm of the computer itself, that is there are no lights or external devices being controlled, so a home automation app is overkill. And you're right, all you really need is a decent event scheduler.

Of course, Mac OS X already has a built-in scheduler called Launchd. It's very powerful but also quite obtuse. I have used it for a few things, such as triggering Tasks Jr to send me a todo list every morning, but I prefer something a little friendlier and easier to manage. If you go the launchd route, I recommend checking out Lingon as an aid for creating the configuration files that you use to control launchd schedules.

I've recently turned to Griffin Technology's Proxi for a lot of my scheduling needs. It's a free application and offers a lot of different ways to trigger events—many of them based on Griffin's products—and almost almost all of them quite handy. Additionally, and most importantly for me, it has a date-and-time based scheduler. The Proxi wiki provides documentation on all the features, and as you can see on the scheduled trigger page, there's a lot of flexibility in the options you can select. One very nice touch, which I've not seen in other applications, is that Proxi shows you a list of upcoming events based on the settings you select. This really makes it easy to see if you're going to get the results you want.

There's a lot more to Proxi then simple schedules, though, and I haven't personally tried everything it has to offer. But I have been using it's ability to monitor and respond to Twitter messages ("tweets"), and this has proven quite handy. As I've written previously, in Twittering Your Home, I have my home automation send me messages over the service. But with Proxi it is very simple to create a Twitter auto-responder. So now, in addition to my home "tweeting" to me and telling me that someone has called, I can send a tweet to my house and have it reply with the current indoor temperature.

If you haven't tried Proxi, give it a spin. If you're already using it, leave a comment the ways you find it useful. In the future, if there's interest, I'll write more about how its become a handy tool around my home and office.