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Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

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Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#102

I realise this might not be what the question has in mind, but we have a bread machine. Just buying bread might be more 'automatic', but we've been evolving the process and recipe for the last 6+ months, and honestly the bread is now better than any but the best artisan loaves available locally, and hugely cheaper. To save time, and overcome laziness, we pre-mix 'wet' and 'dry' 'kits' in batches of 6 or 10 loaves at…

You might have just convinced me to buy a bread machine... To add a similar answer, only in the past couple of years have I had a nice rice cooker (we have a Zojirushi) that keeps the rice fresh for ~12 hours. It is irreplaceable at this point (My wife is Asian and rice is a part of pretty much every meal.) Best appliance I have ever bought, gets used every. single. day. and have rice ready-to-eat throughout the day.

We bought a bread machine almost three years ago. Since then we are yet to buy bread in a shop. The machine is amazing. It literally takes 3 minutes to prep. No fancy recipe. Spoon of yeast + 400g flour + spoon of sugar + spoon of salt + 20g of butter + 280ml of water. Quick program and fresh bread is done in 2h.

Highly recommend it. I don't want to advertise but we bought a well known Japanese brand after a lot of research.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#103
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Obsidian recently and I love it. There are all kinds of interesting ways you can graph your posts too.

Wow, can't believe I haven't heard of Obsidian. Thanks for sharing. I'm going to check it out.

Vim. Actually this workflow is what finally got me to start using vim, and now I use vim for everything.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#104
Not quite automation in the traditional sense but I built a pseudo KVM which allows me to switch between my work and personal MBPs. With the press of a button it will switch my 32" 4K monitor's input to the 'other' device as well as my apple bluetooth keyboard and trackpad.

It connects to both laptops through bluetooth and has a LiPo battery making it completely wireless. I 3d printed an enclosure that lets me mount it out of sight underneath my desktop (think up-down controls for a standing desk).

This lets me easily switch between computers through the day without plugging in/re-pairing/etc.

It's still needs a bit of refinement but overall, it's quite nice and makes switching devices painless.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#105
A hacked-together app that I use to curate my Spotify playlists while driving (using my car's steering wheel buttons)

E.g. double-clicking pause/play removes the currently-playing song from a playlist, while letting the song finish adds it to my "liked" playlist

(I also have an IFTTT trigger that continuously pulls songs from r/listentothis into a Spotify playlist, so I can use that curator to save any interesting songs I hear on my drive)

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#106

I use the following in Bash. function notifyme() { MSG=${1:-'Terminal is done'} TITLE=${2:-"Done!"} osascript -e "display notification \"${MSG}\" with title \"${TITLE}\"" } I use it like: bin/start-unit-tests; notifyme

Too late to edit, but was rereading this and i forgot that I made optional args too. For example i sometimes leave my self next instructions

   notifyme "Now you can commit and push code"
   notifyme "Now you can commit and push code" "Tests complete"

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#108
post #97

I have an Amazon Lambda that I can email links to and it downloads the text with Readability-like format simplification and sends to my Kindle. Use it all the time. Love it.

I made the exact same thing haha. I use it all the time now. Would love to compare notes.

How did you make the text readable from the links?

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#109

I use a lot of automation these days, here's a summary: - There's only one bakery in my area that has keto bread, but infrequently. I have a daily bot that scans the bakery page on the Uber eats equivalent webpage, then alerts me when bread is available. - On my phone I get a notification in the morning. When I click it, it copies my daily journals markdown template, opens the note app. Then I paste and write. - I ha…

What do you host your projects on?

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#110
Home Assistant automations have been incredibly useful/powerful, and make life a little more convenient. I have a few set up:

- Play a chime/alert over my Sonos system if a door gets left open for longer than a minute (https://labzilla.io/blog/homeassistant-door-chime).

- Turn off my window air conditioners when I leave my apartment for more than 15 minutes, and turn them back on again when I'm within a block of my apartment (or if it gets above 80 degrees).

- Automatically turn on lights when I come home.

- Play a chime/alert over the Sonos when laundry is finished (I use a SmartThings button to trigger a timer; one tap = 30 minutes wash, double tap = 45 minute dry.)

I also have a few cron jobs to move automatic backup files from my colo server to my NAS at home. I use healthchecks.io to automatically alert me if the job fails to run.

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