automation

The Sun Has Just Set

Icon for iPhone automation app

I was looking around on my iPhone’s Shortcuts app to see if it would do anything fun. The app has three sections, shortcuts, automation and gallery. I’ve been exploring the automation section. My iPhone’s automation controls let me select an event to trigger a sequence of actions when the event happens.

Last year, I created an event to keep low power mode even if the battery is fully charged. The trigger that I identified is “When Low power Mode is turned off.” I made that trigger cause a “Set Low Power Mode” action to toggle it back on.

When the phone charges to 80%, it normally turns low power mode off. That would activate the trigger for my automation. The automation rule would then execute the action and turn low power mode back on. I could see this on the display: the battery would change color indicating full power and then quickly change back to the low power color. (The trigger and action don’t fight with each other; it doesn’t cause flipflopping between the low power/normal power states.)

After a few days, I disabled the rule because I didn’t like some of the effects of low power. For example, not downloading in the background. It was a fun idea, but not very useful for me. However, it was an introduction to the possibilities.

This week, I created a new event using a trigger in the “Time of Day” section. One option is a trigger on Sunrise or Sunset. I selected the option to “run immediately” at the moment of sunset. I could also select a time interval relative to sunset such as 15 minutes before or 2 hours after.

In setting up actions, I picked the “Speak Text” option, setting it to say “The sun has just set.” (How clever!) I decided to have a second action for the music app play a song. I would have picked “The Sunset” from the Moody Blues album “Days of Future Passed” but I don’t have that on my phone. I found “Sunshine” by Matisyahu which was just as good as anything else.

The triggered time doesn’t match what the astronomy data site https://heavens-above.com gives for the time of sunset at my location. It is 5 minutes early. It might be because heavens-above defines sunset as the sun being 0.8° below the horizon to account for the refraction of sunlight in the atmosphere. If the iPhone is using 0°, it could explain the discrepancy. I couldn’t find online the definition of sunset used by the iPhone.

For Ramadan or the Baha’i 19 day fast, it would be nice to have clarity on how sunset is defined. Similar events could help plan daily prayers planned around the sun’s position.

It’s fun to hear the time of sunset announced.

Closed captioning in an election year

A computer screen with the closed caption logo

In November I was exercising at the gym. At the front of the room, they’ve got four different networks on the TVs. When I’m on the bike machine, it’s hard to not watch the video. Being November, it was time for the renewal of Medicare insurance policies.

It was hard to not want to mock the Advantage plan advertisers which didn’t include captioning. The vendors are trying to reach an audience that has a higher likelihood of having hearing loss, yet their ads are inaccessible to that group of people.

Election year is another time for lots of targeted advertising. Again, the gym is a good opportunity to see how much different candidates or political parties value the community. If they omit preparing captions, they appear not to care about a wide swath of their hoped-for constituents.

Hearing loss isn’t the only situation where captioning is valuable. Just as I can benefit from the captioning at the gym, live captioning of sports events enhances the experience of the game at a bar or restaurant. At family gatherings such as Thanksgiving, the ones who want to watch a game can turn on the captions and mute the sound to allow the rest of us to visit.

Although my hearing is normal, it is nice to have the captions on while watching a movie. It helps when background sounds in the film muffle the speech. My mom has good hearing but prefers to have the captions on as well. Sometimes people talk too quickly. It helps us enjoy the latest Marvel series more.

YouTube and Nebula also have captioning in the videos. In addition, to the presence of captions, the videos, the urgency for captions on new material can come at the prices of accuracy. It’s not easy to create good quality captions. Captions can degrade when the transcriber or voice recognition system isn’t primed with the vocabulary of a technical video. The technology can continue to improve. Some shows acknowledge the service and who paid for the transcription as the first of the captions.

In the teaser trailer for the Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, I learned from the captions that the laughter at the very end is the Emperor. That was an interesting clue that felt like insider knowledge when I first saw the trailer.

I don’t really like to vote for a candidate whose ads don’t include captions. It shows a lack of care and consideration for who they are asking to vote for them. Do they really care about disabled or older voters, or do they just want to win the election as cheaply as possible?

Image “Closed captions” by Oregon State University [CC BY-SA 2.0]