So, I’ve been tinkering with this idea for a while, something I started calling ‘Olivia Home’. It wasn’t about buying some fancy new gadget, not really. It was more about trying to get our family’s digital life a bit more, you know, together. We’ve got calendars all over the place, to-do lists on sticky notes that disappear, and don’t even get me started on whose turn it is to walk the dog.
The First Messy Steps
My first thought was, “Hey, I’ll just grab one of those ready-made family organizer apps!” Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Man, was that a rabbit hole. Most of them either wanted a hefty subscription for features we wouldn’t use, or they were so clunky, getting everyone else to actually use them was like pulling teeth. I even tried setting up a shared digital whiteboard thingy. That lasted about a week before it just became a collection of old doodles and forgotten reminders. It felt like I was just adding another layer of digital junk instead of simplifying things.
- Tried App A: Too expensive.
- Tried App B: Too complicated for the family.
- Tried Physical/Digital Hybrid: Just got messy.
I was about ready to give up, honestly. Then I was clearing out some old tech bits from the garage – you know how it is, boxes of cables and dusty old tablets. I found an old Raspberry Pi and a spare monitor. And it clicked. Why not build something super simple, super tailored to us? No fancy bells and whistles we didn’t need. Just the basics, displayed clearly.
Building It My Way
So, I got to work. First, I wiped that old Pi and put a fresh, lightweight operating system on it. Then, the big question: how to display the info? I didn’t want to get bogged down in complex web development frameworks. I’d been there, done that, and it always turns into a monster project. Nope. This time, I decided to keep it dead simple. I looked into a few dashboard software options. Some were okay, but again, a bit much for what I wanted. Eventually, I landed on using a very basic web page, just HTML and a tiny bit of JavaScript to pull data from our shared Google Calendars and a simple to-do list app we already kinda used (when we remembered).
Getting the calendar integration to work was a bit fiddly, I won’t lie. Lots of trial and error with APIs and permissions. There were a few evenings I nearly threw the whole thing out the window. But I stuck with it. For the to-do list, I just used a simple text file on the Pi that I could update easily from my computer. Crude? Maybe. But it worked!
The ‘display’ part was an old monitor I mounted in the kitchen. Hooked up the Pi, set the web page to load in full screen on boot. And bam! Olivia Home was born. Or at least, version 0.1.
Where It’s At Now
It’s not perfect. Sometimes the Pi needs a reboot. And I still have plans to add a weather widget and maybe a little family photo slideshow. But you know what? People are actually looking at it. The dog-walking schedule is (mostly) being followed. We can see at a glance who has what appointment. It’s basic, but it’s ours, and it cost next to nothing in new parts.
It really showed me that sometimes, the simplest solution, the one you build yourself even if it’s a bit rough around the edges, is better than some polished, off-the-shelf thing that doesn’t quite fit.
Why did I even have the patience for this, you ask? Well, it reminds me of this one time, years ago, I was working on a huge software project for this big company. Not naming names, but they were obsessed with using every new technology, every shiny framework. We had microservices talking to other microservices through ten different message queues, a front-end that changed its core library every six months, and a database setup so complex only three people in the entire company understood it. It was a nightmare to maintain. We spent more time fixing the plumbing than actually building useful features.
Then one day, a critical system went down. Total meltdown. And guess what the problem was? Some tiny, overlooked configuration file in one of the oldest, simplest parts of the system that everyone had forgotten about because they were too busy chasing the new shiny things. It took us days to find it. After that, I sort of developed a real appreciation for simplicity. If you can make it work with less, do it. That whole experience taught me that complexity for complexity’s sake is just a recipe for headaches. So yeah, this little ‘Olivia Home’ project, it’s my tiny rebellion against that kind of over-engineering. Keep it simple, make it work, and then maybe, just maybe, people will actually use it.
