I hate paying subscriptions for anything, but I have found Greenlight to be worth it for managing allowances, letting my kids build their financial competency, and keeping an eye on their spending.
Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
151–160 of 179 posts
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have 300+ tasks / notes, I’d look at separating the notes out… I expect there are better note oriented apps. I used to use todoist but now use TickTick- similar but with some extra features. The non-premium is awful though, you have to sign up for a proper workable product (it is cheaper than todoist)
What's awful with non-premium TickTick? I've been considering paying just to support it, not aware of a feature or limitation driving me to.
I really REALLY wish TickTick had a two-way calendar sync with anything. That's the one thing keeping me with Todoist. I think they were talking about implementing it eventually. Did this ever come to fruition?
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#153Not family wide but very personal: MacroFactor. It healed my relationship with food, and helped me lose 60 lbs. Worth every penny ($12/month subscription).
Recently learned that my insurance pays for Noom subscriptions. I've been using that, and have found it to be similarly beneficial for myself. Have you used that one before?
I'd never heard of macrofactor until now.
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's awful with non-premium TickTick? I've been considering paying just to support it, not aware of a feature or limitation driving me to.
I really REALLY wish TickTick had a two-way calendar sync with anything. That's the one thing keeping me with Todoist. I think they were talking about implementing it eventually. Did this ever come to fruition?
It does CalDAV sync, I assume that must be two-way, I've not used it. That might require premium actually.
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#155Not family wide but very personal: MacroFactor. It healed my relationship with food, and helped me lose 60 lbs. Worth every penny ($12/month subscription).
MacroFactor is where it’s at. It is so much better than MyFitnessPal.
MFP advantage I guess is that people from every country added their local brands, dishes and recipes to the database so its not even comparable to other apps.
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because then you're just limited into showing a single calendar. Some stuff you want in agenda-format (next 5 events on the calendar), others you want in a monthly view, others in daily or weekly. And then you have alerts, weather etc that doesn't really fit the calendar format that well.
You are over-engineering this concept. A simple shared calendar absolutely would work. If you want more features, go for it, but that doesn't mean a shared calendar is a non-functional solution.
Look at the sibling comment and the example image of the dashboard they built: https://imgur.com/a/pHSIBcO
How can you do this with a "simple shared calendar"?
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could never bear the stress of being in charge of someone else's photo backups. Especially when the option is just for them to pay $10 or something to a huge company that'll have pretty much 100% uptime and zero chance of lost files.
Its really not that hard. Just don't fuck around with backups, throw them all into Backblaze B2, S3 or what ever else. I have the same setup as the person you're commenting to, initial setup was easy. Just test out your backup strategy thoroughly.
This is a proper HN reply, two counts of "just" =)
If it was a matter of "just" not fucking around and "just testing out the strategy", everyone would just resell B2/S3 capacity with a markup.
Having the only copy of someone's family photos is not a responsibility I'm willing to have. YMMV though and more power to you if you want to do that.
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. Same. > I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner I (we) don't even do that, on purpose. If we want to know, we ask by message or call. > The reason [...] leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device. I agree, it's all about trust. In my mind it's exactly like being a mail server sysadmin: by design you ha…
For point C the new check-in feature of iOS 17 is going to be pretty good: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphc143bb7e9/io...
I mentioned it; it is a very nice safety feature, we tried to use it (we were on the public beta) but it doesn't quite fit our use case, where instead we want something completely unattended, whereas Check In is more intentional, like you plan to do something ahead and set up a dead man switch that will notify people if something looks off.
Interestingly enough when one of us sent messages like "is everything alright?" the recipient got a prompt in Messages to try out the Check In feature.
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. Same. > I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner I (we) don't even do that, on purpose. If we want to know, we ask by message or call. > The reason [...] leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device. I agree, it's all about trust. In my mind it's exactly like being a mail server sysadmin: by design you ha…
> we have location-based automations set up in Home Assistant, and by default there's a geocoded location entity per tracked device, which I disabled, relying only on zone enter/leave events, carefully balancing privacy and convenience. Did you set up location based events in home assistant using iOS devices? I tried to set it up, but it always says that I’m at home, which I think is because I use WireGuard to remain…
Yes iOS.
I tried a similar setup with Tailscale but it disconnects too frequently for such a use case due to iOS VPN limitations, and that's not even considering the fact that it's userland and eats the battery 30% faster when on. Maybe an IPSEC VPN would fare better?
Similarly the iCloud integration suffers from the 2FA issue. There's another third party one that works better in that regard (able to handle refresh tokens or whatever) but these still have a month long lifetime or something and still require 2FA occasionally. Also both are pull instead of push so not too nice on the battery if you want a prompt reaction in zone change.
So I'm simply on the good old public facing dns/https/nginx/letsencrypt, with the phone triggering an internal zone change event to the app, and then the app pushing to the server, and that just works. Maybe I could have used a Tailscale funnel but by then it was just easier for me that way.
Fun fact, I have IPv6 and HASS is self-hosted at home with the AAAA record pointing to it, but my IPv4 is behind CGNAT, so I have a small Hetzner ARM VM, pointed the A record to that, and set up a nginx to hit home over IPv6. To solve the Let's Encrypt conundrum of HTTP challenge not being able to know which machine it'd be pointing to (the name would be resolved to either A or AAAA) I migrated to DNS challenge.
An alternative would be to simply use their Nabucasa cloud thing which serves exactly that purpose, costs money but it makes it super easy, plus IIUC it funds HASS development. I tried it, it just works, but I wanted to do all of the above on Nix as a learning project.
Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
#160Our twist on the family email is to have $VARIABLE@domain.com point to a Google Group that for the moment, only goes to the adults in the room. Makes sorting/labeling things significantly easier. $KID1@domain.com, $PET2@domain.com, $HOUSE1@domain.com, etc.
Does it bother you that the list won't sort correctly when you hit HOUSE10 or are you already padding a 0 on there?
Variables are expanded in this case so the sorting is already lost :-)