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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?

#541

Post by timmywiff »

t0mek wrote: post #23

I used DSP to recognize the commercials in the radio broadcast on my stereo receiver and turn down the volume automatically ("adblock for the radio broadcast"). I described it here: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/02/24/radio-adblock/

I once made a radio adblocker for streams hosted on http://radioplayer.co.uk/ to be run in a terminal. There is also code to increase/decrease the volume on a Mac. It's not perfect but was a fun little project.

For some reason, the data and audio are out of sync but once calibrated it works quite well.

https://bitbucket.org/timwiffen89/radio_adblocker/src/master...

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

#542

Post by Zezima »

tail_risk wrote: post #533

SO was complaining that I never text her while at work. Wrote a twilio app to pull random sentimental quotes from rumi and others, fit it into a personalised looking message spelling mistakes included )"thinking of you" etc.), and send it to her at random times of the day from my number. Weird thing is when I mentioned it was automated, she didn't believe me, so we kept it going till she broke up with me eventually.

This is a reddit comment from /r/Programming is it not?

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

#543

Post by EdCoffey »

brokenmachine wrote: post #404
EdCoffey wrote: post #304

1. When I plug my camera's SD card into the front of my Linux server it automatically copies off any new photos and sorts them into a YYYY/DD/MM folder structure. 2. I wrote a cryptocurrency trading bot because I'm too lazy/uninterested to actually learn anything about the market. It seemed to do pretty well when the market was flat or going up. Hard to tell if it's doing badly now or if it's just reflecting the stat…

Can you share how you do the SD card thing? I'm not sure how to autorun when an SD card is inserted (using ubuntu here).

I used udev to run the script as soon as the drive is mounted. The tricky part was ensuring the drive would mount automatically when inserted, even if I wasn't logged in. I tried a range of different tools, and eventually settled on autofs.

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

#544

Post by marcol1n0 »

My mum did run a B&B, in Italy, on the sea.

Me and my sister do live in different cities. She was quite old, but did not want any help from strangers. She did refuse to use a computer keyboard, since she hated informatization, and her sight was short.

So I did automate a system for her to scan the guests documents, detect the data required by local police for registration via OCR, fill up the form to send those data, and update the web site availability database table. The computer, when powered up, did only show instructions in big text, high contrast instructions, which where repeated by TTS (essentially "please feed the documents in the scanner", "please remove the documents from the scanner").

At the end she got used to using it, and she was quite proud being able to be so independent, since the last days of her lovely life.

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

#545

Post by night815 »

skate22 wrote: post #523

For the first 9 years of my life, my family either did not have a PC or I was not allowed to use it for more than a few minutes. My parents relaxed a little bit and allowed my brother and i to read for an hour to play video games on the computer for an hour. I played an online game called runescape where you could trade items to other players, but it was tedious and required a lot of repetitive typing: "buying chaos…

I wonder if we will ever see support for white-hat botters. I imagine the game publisher/creator would have a separate server which you could request access to. It could have a bug bounty type system where if your account/bot is able to fool the system you will be rewarded for explaining how you did it. I think there are a lot of gamers that would spend time on this so they don't have to put up with so many bots.

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

#546

Post by dolessdrugs »

Numberwang wrote: post #493
INTPenis wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Southern Sweden is a dangerous place for automowers.

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

#547

Post by robk »

patrickk wrote: post #449
robk wrote: post #35

I run a Huginn server which has hundreds of recipes. Most scrape websites and send me updates either by pushover or email for things that matter -- news sites via rss with heavy keyword filtering for news that's important to me like hometown news etc (Google alerts style) -- firmware updates from various devices that wouldn't otherwise notify me like kindle -- posts up voted over X times in a period on smaller, speci…

Nice! Where do you host your Huginn server? I've had trouble getting Huginn running on my RPi, I've to try again soon to get it running. Any chance you'd be willing to share some of your recipies? I know someone who scrapes a certain deals website in my country, and gets Telegram texts for items matching certain parameters, which is cool.

Just on a cheapie $5 a month VPS. Dockerizing makes it very easy to get going.

I've put some recipes on the wiki off Github. Most of them are quite teasy to string together once you just get the right extraction pattern, then they're simple WebsiteAgent -> Dedupe Agent -> (Email/Digest/Pushover Agent)

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

#548

Post by tail_risk »

Zezima wrote: post #542
tail_risk wrote: post #533

SO was complaining that I never text her while at work. Wrote a twilio app to pull random sentimental quotes from rumi and others, fit it into a personalised looking message spelling mistakes included )"thinking of you" etc.), and send it to her at random times of the day from my number. Weird thing is when I mentioned it was automated, she didn't believe me, so we kept it going till she broke up with me eventually.

This is a reddit comment from /r/Programming is it not?

No. true story. circa 2012.

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

#549

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

mosselman wrote: post #438
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…

You might find investing into a Thermomix a good idea: https://thermomix.com/

I imagine the reason you're being downvoted is because you've posted this link multiple times without explaining your connection (if any) with this company. At the moment you look like a spammer.

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

#550

Post by spuz »

staz wrote: post #476
spuz wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of display did you use for the tram-stop times? I wanted to do something similar but worked out that the cost to update the display every minute was too much in terms of battery life even with an epaper display. Also, it was too inconvenient / ugly to use mains power.

Not OP but did a similar project, the display method I used was simply to use 9 led lined up, each representing a stop before mine, to show the current position of the tram. My idea was based on the top part of this display https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXGxPtlXkAA0inj.jpg

Interesting! That sounds like a really nice low-tech solution. I like it.
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