Automating menial work of Fax reading/processing in US healthcare by applying the ML.
Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
151–160 of 200 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#152I drop photos (from whatever device) into a folder on my NAS and they get automatically sanitized of EXIF data, and resized/bordered ready for posting to the internet.
It's simply a cron & bash script on a server that monitors one NAS folder, then drops the output into a second folder where I can pick them up and use them.
It uses ImageMagick & Exiftool.
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#153Nothing fancy or involved at all, but in my personal finance spreadsheet, I dynamically pull in Zillow's current estimate of my home value (which I take with a grain of salt obviously). I also use IFTTT to pause my robovac if my doorbell rings. Right now I'm working on a Mint scraper to automate the rest of my personal finance data entry, but running into headaches getting Selenium to work properly on Catalina.
Do you need to scrape Mint when it's just using Plaid?
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#154This might sound a little-bit stupid, but I automate locking/unlocking internet access on my phone and computer. That is to say, every night my computers and phone will lock me out[0] at a set time. Then in the morning I have to log 30 minutes of exercise (tracked by my heartrate on fitbit) to unlock internet access. I also have certain time-wasting sites like Reddit and Netflix locked out until I complete a sufficie…
Interesting. Might be useful to me as well. What software(s) do you use for this?
Its really just two components
- Kaspersky Safe Kids - Does the actual locking/restrictions
- Custom Python Script - Communicates with Fitbit/leetcode/projecteuler/wechall and can update a the restrictions on the Kaspersky website.
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#155Lots of home automation fun with Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io ) * Self-hosted security system that e-mails me when triggered. It arms when everyone disconnects from the wifi and disarms when anyone in the home reconnects to wifi. Totally passive. Also arms at night when the kitchen lights have been out for 5 minutes after a certain time and disarms when motion patterns that can only be someone wakin…
Can you elaborate on the doorbell? Also where do you host your Home Assistant setup?
I hosted Home Assistant on a Pi2+ at first, and then Pi3 for a long time. Eventually I wanted to use the Pi3 for something slightly different and had a low-powered home server at that point so I migrated to that. It's basically just running on a Ubuntu box that I use for NAS and workstation stuff now.
As for Doorbell, it's pretty much like this: https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-my-analog-doorbel...
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#156Lots of home automation fun with Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io ) * Self-hosted security system that e-mails me when triggered. It arms when everyone disconnects from the wifi and disarms when anyone in the home reconnects to wifi. Totally passive. Also arms at night when the kitchen lights have been out for 5 minutes after a certain time and disarms when motion patterns that can only be someone wakin…
Could you recommend some resources to get skilled with such suff? Also what tech stack you are using? (both hardware and software)
Hardware:
* Raspberry Pi (I've since moved to a Ubuntu server, but Pi was perfectly capable on this entire setup)
* Aeotech Z-wave z-stick (for controlling the wireless sensors)
* Lots of z-wave sensors (door, motion, temperature, humidity, flood, one that listens for my smoke alarms going off, a whole house power sensor in the circuit breaker box, ...)
* Lots of z-wave switches (some where I replaced light switches with smart switches, others where I just piggied a z-wave relay between the wall and the thing)
* A few Phillips HUE lights for fun color BS
* an old 433 MHz temperature sensor that the previous tenant left without the weather station (read through a $5 USB TV receiver)
* Another Raspberry pi sitting on my stereo hooked to Snapcast to pipe synchronized wifi audio throughout the house from a single source.
* Mopidy as the central music server to pipe stuff through Snapcast
* OpenWRT router running some scripts for presence detection
* Cellphones via web interface for control
* Also a fun little LED dot-matrix display for fun displays
* A few Amcrest IP cameras (with cloud crap disabled)
Software is very Home Assistant heavy, with lots of little auxiliary scripts, some home-built, many others from other enthusiasts. The central community is the Home Assistant crew. But also:
* MQTT on a remote MQTT broker ($5 VPS) for communicating with external devices (like my mom's house and my cellphone when off-site)
* Owntracks for GPS-driven automations
* Self-hosted e-mail (totally unnecessary, just a hobby)
I think that's about it.
For getting started, yeah just start small. Get a z-wave usb stick and a pi and a few little sensors. Hook it up to your stereo and wifi and start fiddling based on the examples from home-assistants forum and docs. Then it just slowly bootstraps up to something elaborate, if you're enjoying it.
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#157My typing. In my work I tend to type a lot of the same things over and over again. So I automate that with AutoHotKey. Ctrl+Tab becomes RightAlt. Two words become entire paragraphs. Even simple things like "You're welcome" are just 'ywyw' or 'tyvm' becomes "Thank you very much". I know it sounds silly, but while trying to avoid RSI's, the less typing the better. I also use autohotkey to help me remember to Linux comm…
I wonder if it would be possible to build an app that's effectively a self-installed keylogger given access to your entire stream of writing, and after a few days, it starts to recommend candidate strings for automation with Autohotkey.
My Samsung keyboard on my S6 does this.
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#158My typing. In my work I tend to type a lot of the same things over and over again. So I automate that with AutoHotKey. Ctrl+Tab becomes RightAlt. Two words become entire paragraphs. Even simple things like "You're welcome" are just 'ywyw' or 'tyvm' becomes "Thank you very much". I know it sounds silly, but while trying to avoid RSI's, the less typing the better. I also use autohotkey to help me remember to Linux comm…
I wonder if it would be possible to build an app that's effectively a self-installed keylogger given access to your entire stream of writing, and after a few days, it starts to recommend candidate strings for automation with Autohotkey.
Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#159I have a folder on my mail server called “Dead”. If I move an email to that folder then all subsequent emails to the same address as the first one go into “Dead/Match”. It’s driven by procmail and a script. When used with one-off email addresses you get a behavior that’s like unsubscribing, but without having to trust any “unsubscribe” links or processes, and also without having to edit any config files (it’s all dri…
Interesting ... that is superior to my own method, which is to simply add the From: address to my blacklist file:
:0
* ? formail -x"From" -x"From:" -x"Sender:" \
-x"Reply-To:" -x"Return-Path:" -x"To:" \
| egrep -is -f /usr/home/john/.blacklist.txt
blacklistRe: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
#160Lots of home automation fun with Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io ) * Self-hosted security system that e-mails me when triggered. It arms when everyone disconnects from the wifi and disarms when anyone in the home reconnects to wifi. Totally passive. Also arms at night when the kitchen lights have been out for 5 minutes after a certain time and disarms when motion patterns that can only be someone wakin…
> Tones when any outside door in the house opens. Optionally: random Seinfeld bass transitions
Dear Lord yes, that is FUN! I'd love to see 'walk up music' like in MLB, but for anyone and changing randomly from time to time.