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Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

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Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#321

Post by kingkool68 »

tfolbrecht wrote: post #146

One of the biggest automation arena improvements I've made in my life is creating visual cue reminders and systems for a sort of stateful orderliness. When the laundry basket gets full past the painter tape line, I do a load. I load the dishwasher after dinner, and unload it in the morning regardless of the volume. Got a roomba that runs every other day and cries when it's full of dirt. I have NFC stickers that link…

One of the best life hacks I found is to buy those stackable laundry baskets and sort them as you wear them instead of dumping them all in one and sorting right before doing laundry.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#322

Post by mschuster91 »

jldugger wrote: post #241
marvinpinto wrote: post #45

I automated downloading and reconciling my financials from all my bank accounts. https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler

On a related note, I have gnucash set up to autocreate a ton of transactions 90 days in advance. Rent, salary, typical bills, student loan repayment, etc. At some point my plan is to automate the following tasks: 1. Sweep checking into savings based on forecasted transactions. Useful since interest is like 10x more in savings. 2. Update asset values daily. 3. Update autocreated transactions as the invoices are emaile…

> On a related note, I have gnucash set up to autocreate a ton of transactions 90 days in advance. Rent, salary, typical bills, student loan repayment, etc.

Why do you need to do the transactions? In Germany, I can simply create a recurring transaction for rent and loan repayment, and utility/phone bills are directly debited from my bank account.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#323

Post by meroje »

fomojola wrote: post #99
coda_ wrote: post #25

I used a raspberry pi to control my TV using HDMI-CEC and exposed a subset of the controls through a web API allowing me to turn on/off my TV from my phone or voice controlled from a google home. I did this because a chromecast will turn on my TV and set it to the correct input, but it wouldn't turn off the TV. Turning the TV off was the only reason I needed to touch my remote control at all. But just recently google…

Side note: what TV do you have? I've found that most Samsungs and many other TVs don't respond to the HDMI-CEC off signal. Was quite disappointed.

You should be able to enable the off signal within the Anynet settings, but then for it to stick you also have to disable auto updates.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#325

Post by kristofferR »

_tsz4 wrote: post #87

Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...

Man, this is awesome. Now that Firefox has become so vastly better than Chrome (who would have expected that a year ago?) you should port it to Firefox too.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#326

Post by mountainofdeath »

1. In university, my cable provider had frequent slowdowns during busy periods to the point of the connection being unusable. I wrote a monitor script that would try to ping google every few minutes during busy periods and log the output if there was any loss. After a month of doing this and presenting the logs to the provider, they fixed it and I was asked to apply for a job.

2. I automated swiping right on Tinder on a single virtual Android device. I was working on a version that would spin up a number of virtual devices, connect to them and then swipe right en-masse (yeah, because finding an API is much less work).

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#327

Post by zanedb »

mintplant wrote: post #96

I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscrip…

Very interesting and smart system. Could you possibly share this code on GitHub?

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#329

Post by mintplant »

djhworld wrote: post #160
mintplant wrote: post #96

I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscrip…

This is cool. I wonder how effective it is though these days, I'd say 70% of my RSS feeds are either truncated forms of a full article (with a 'click here to continue reading!' link), or just summaries.

That's what the scraper scripts are for. For each site that does this, I have a bit of code which visits the article URL and pulls out the full content.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#330

Post by chestervonwinch »

_tsz4 wrote: post #87

Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...

Cool idea. I will probably highlight way too many unimportant-but-seemed-neat-at-the-time facts from Wikipedia, but I'm going to try it out.
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