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Make Home Assistant alert messages readable aloud; note the CronJob time zone - #4

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cerebrate merged 1 commit into
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docs/speakable-alerts
Oct 11, 2026
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cerebrate merged 1 commit into
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docs/speakable-alerts

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Summary

In use, the Backup stale alert announced last_success as a raw ISO 8601 UTC timestamp. That's hard to read at a glance, and a smart speaker reads it out as a string of numbers.

  • Backup stale: the on message converts last_success to Home Assistant's local time and phrases it for speech:
    • "No successful backup of postgres main since yesterday at 9:15 PM."
    • "... since Tuesday, October 6 at 11:30 PM." for older timestamps
    • "... yet." when a target has never succeeded
  • Backup failed: the on message, which is what gets sent and announced, is now a short sentence. The long technical error text moves to the card message.
  • Target names are read as words: - and _ become spaces.
  • Time zone: the README and a cronjob.yaml comment now say that the default schedule's 02:15 is UTC, and that you set timeZone (e.g. America/Chicago) to schedule in local time.

Test plan

  • Rendered both templates in a live Home Assistant against the real sensor.dbbackup_*_status sensors, with strict undefined checking, covering the today, yesterday, older-date and never-succeeded branches.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

…ob time zone

- Backup stale: the on message now turns last_success (an ISO 8601 UTC
  timestamp) into local time, phrased for speech: "since yesterday at
  9:15 PM", "since Tuesday, October 6 at 11:30 PM", or "yet".
- Backup failed: a short on message for announcing; the technical error
  text moves to the card message.
- Target names are read as words (- and _ become spaces).
- README and cronjob.yaml: the default schedule is 02:15 UTC; set
  timeZone to your own zone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@cerebrate
cerebrate merged commit 75d834b into master Oct 11, 2026
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cerebrate deleted the docs/speakable-alerts branch October 11, 2026 04:45
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