How to handle unknown or unavailable states in template entities or automations

Configuration
14

I have made wide use of the availability: template. That way, the sensor state is unavailable rather than HA throwing template warnings/errors into my logs, which usually occurs during startup as various components are initializing. This particular one though was throwing a template error at startup, sometimes two 5 seconds apart and was bugging me as I had an availability template for the MQTT sensor and even tried adding utcnow() != 'unknown' but it turned out I simply needed to default the as_timestamp() function…

  - trigger:
    - platform: time_pattern
      seconds: "/5"
    sensor:
      - name: "HASS Agent My PC Idle Time"
#        availability: '{{ utcnow() != "unknown" and states("sensor.lastactive") != "unknown" }}'
#        state: '{{ as_timestamp(utcnow()) - as_timestamp(states("sensor.lastactive"))|float(default=0) }}'
        state: '{{ as_timestamp(utcnow(),0) - as_timestamp(states("sensor.lastactive"),0) }}'
        unit_of_measurement: "Seconds"
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