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Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

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101–110 of 749 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#101
post #23

I used DSP to recognize the commercials in the radio broadcast on my stereo receiver and turn down the volume automatically ("adblock for the radio broadcast"). I described it here: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/02/24/radio-adblock/

This for TV would be great!

Check this:

https://github.com/erikkaashoek/Comskip

It seems the tuning of the algorithm is complex though. There's a dedicated forum for it: http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=effa4b...

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#104

Monthly credit card payments. So money flows from my employer to my checking account to my credit cards. Also of course to my 401K, IRA, Mortgage account, Saving account etc. Which means I don't encounter money much and I like it this way (I generally make sure I live within my means and my money does flow into my investments). Downsides: -I'm not actively thinking about money and hence improved investments -I'm not…

Money-related matters are my primary automation as well. Especially with the fair bit of traveling I do, it largely eliminates something I'd have to keep an eye on and probably get a late fee from every now and then.

Like you, it does mean I need to make mental notes to check into things every now and then so that there aren't charges I don't understand or investments that really seem out of whack.

Pretty much the only other thing of note I do, besides have a lawn service, is some automated plant watering because of the aforementioned traveling. For this and other reasons my schedule is variable enough that none of the usual SmartHome stuff really does anything for me even if it solved problems I felt I had, which I don't other than some remote monitoring.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#105
post #18

I built an accelerometer-based washing machine sensor which sends a notification to my phone when the washing is done. This is useful because the machine itself has no indication when it's done: http://www.instructables.com/id/Washing-Machine-Notification...

My machine has a time remaining feature which is great in theory but it's completely inaccurate. It might tell you there's 45 minutes left in a cycle, you'll come back an hour later and it'll say 17 minutes. I guess I know where the windows file-copy dialog author went to work after Microsoft

I think modern washers weigh the clothes and change their cycles based off that and other information. Mine is similar but seems to always overestimate the time instead, which is probably the better failure state.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#106
post #19

Screen scraping photos of my kids from a kindergarten website. Recognizing good photos that feature my kids and deleting everything else is manual, though. Alerts to my phone if the fridge or freezer temperature exceeds a limit or the humidity under my dishwasher starts rising. Granted, neither are fully automatic and require manual intervention.

I wouldn’t be that pleased with a childcare facility taking photos of my kid then putting them on the internet. I suspect I’m in a small minority though.

It's behind a login and they've asked for parents' consent for each child separately. Everyone with access has agreed not to share any of the photos.

I actually haven't shared my scraper script just because I think someone would then share the pictures (perhaps accidentally).

EDIT: I'll just add that there are no public photos of my kids and I ask anyone who takes photos not to share them outside family. So I do agree with your point.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#107
My son used to ask me every morning whether to wear warm-weather clothes or cool-weather clothes, so I wrote a app that scraped some weather data and served it up in a web page as a temperature graph, along with a recommendation for what kind of clothes to wear.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#108
I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go.

For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android.

Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and corrections is an open source Android app called AndroidAPS[3].

As an insulin I use the fastest available analog Fiasp from Novo Nordisk, that works 10-15 minutes after injection.

All of these combined together has dropped my A1c results from 7.5% to 5.5%, being 90% of the time between 4.0 mmol/l and 8.5 mmol/l, and having no severe hypoglycemias. Basically I got myself some more years to live without any complications and in general I feel much better when I can sleep my nights without worrying and can eat whatever I want whenever I want.

Oh, and a warning to everybody who tries this: Accu-Chek will not cover any damage, there is nobody taking any responsibility of the results from the treatment you get out of the software. For me this works much better than any other treatment, but for others it might be even dangerous.

[0] https://www.dexcom.com/g5-mobile-cgm

[1] https://github.com/NightscoutFoundation/xDrip/

[2] https://www.accu-chek.com/insulin-pumps-integrated-systems/c...

[3] https://github.com/MilosKozak/AndroidAPS/

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#110
I bought an e-reader called reMarkable [0] that I use every day to read technical stuff on it.

At some point, I got tired of the process to sync files: download the document from the browser, open the reMarkable app and drag the file into it.

I automated this workflow, and now I can just "print" directly to the device [1] the article/document I'm reading.

[0] https://remarkable.com/ [1] https://github.com/juruen/rmapi/blob/master/docs/tutorial-pr...

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