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

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

#491

Post by dcc »

gitgud wrote: post #429
siavosh wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I review resumes periodically for my job and it certainly feels like someone(s) already have.

So you can tell which applications were built by software? I was always hesitant to attempt automating job applications

Yes, you frequently can tell. There appears to be a number of people doing some form of automation with different degrees of success. Even though it's a clever use of software and when you're hiring for a software engineer it should be promising, it gets annoying and you tend to discard it. I wouldn't suggest attempting it unless you can do it extremely well if it's fully automated, or use it to help simplify the process, but still complete the last steps manually.

We've had a tendency now to introduce a request for a simple bit of information in the job posting as a sort of captcha to filter out automated spamming of applications.

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

#492

Post by joeyjojo »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

Any chance you could share your recipes?

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

#493

Post by Numberwang »

INTPenis wrote: post #459
anonymous5133 wrote: post #259

I have a robot lawn mower that is wire guided. Instead of the traditional lawn mowers that basically cut the grass in all directions (making a sloppy cut pattern) my mower knows how to cut in straight lines so you get a traditional cut pattern. It also has the ability to dump the grass cuttings into a composting bin. Basically, I put down wire guide cable into the lawn and into the cement as well. It is all powered b…

Just a slight warning if you live in an area of occasional thunderstorms. A friend of a friend here in southern sweden was left with a nasty burn along the length of a robotic lawnmower wire he had buried in the lawn when lightning struck and jumped from a tree to this wire. That was only one wire that I forget the purpose of, perhaps as electronic barrier. I can't imagine the mayhem of a grid of wires being struck w…

My fathers automower got destroyed when a moose decided to stomp it. Also in southern Sweden.

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

#495

Post by ChrisGranger »

patrickk wrote: post #487

Autohotkey is capable of doing some remarkable things (windows only sadly). Here's a cool "launcher" project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv2LAqkmd1c&feature=youtu.be https://github.com/plul/Public-AutoHotKey-Scripts With Pulover's Macro creator, you can literally record actions with mouse and keyboard, get the output in AHK script and tidy it up. You can trivially recognise pixels, meaning you can tell your mous…

AutoKey https://github.com/autokey/autokey for Linux is pretty similar, though perhaps not as popular and well documented as AutoHotkey. It's simple enough that anyone can use it to make text-expansion macros, but it becomes more powerful if you're proficient with Python.

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

#496

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #379

Pushing music onto my phone. I have Termux installed, and can thus run `sshd` on Termux (I have ssh keys copied over), and then copy any music I want into a temporary directory on my desktop and use https://github.com/ehmry/dir2opus to convert everything to 96kbps opus and push it over using rsync and then cleanup the temporary directory: `python2 ~/builds/dir2opus/dir2opus -a -b 96 --delete-input . -r && rsync -av -…

I installed Syncthing[0] on all my devices, and added youtube-dl folder that auto-sync my music as soon as I'm connected to my known networks. It's so easy I've stopped using any cloud things (except for emails).

[0] https://syncthing.net

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

#497

Post by ntzm »

delbel wrote: post #297
A_Person wrote: post #170

Ok, I'll bite! About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that…

If you wanted to re-write that for Chrome or whatever (including headless) I would suggest Selenium or WebDriver suite, including PhantomJS. However, my knowledge (expert level at the time) is a bit outdated and there are probably new toolkits based on the Selenium/WebDriver protocol, it is a good direction to point you to. I have had my bank remove records from my online account, or not have the ledger balance add u…

Wouldn't go for PhantomJS

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

#498

Post by wattengard »

DenisM wrote: post #251
dancek wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I want to keep kindergarten photos of my kids, or why don't I want to manually save them one by one from the website? Why do you ask?

The question was directed at lostlogin, not you. I’m interested to know why people object to have their kids pictures on the sites of the daycare providers.

Kids don't need to be exposed on the internet until they are able to decide themselves if they are okay with it. When that is is up to the parent. I always ask my 8-year old even before I share photos with her grandparents.

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

#500

Post by test1235 »

delbel wrote: post #297
A_Person wrote: post #170

Ok, I'll bite! About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that…

If you wanted to re-write that for Chrome or whatever (including headless) I would suggest Selenium or WebDriver suite, including PhantomJS. However, my knowledge (expert level at the time) is a bit outdated and there are probably new toolkits based on the Selenium/WebDriver protocol, it is a good direction to point you to. I have had my bank remove records from my online account, or not have the ledger balance add u…

PhantomJS has pretty much gone the way of the dodo since Chrome got its headless mode:

https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...

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