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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?

#551

Post by t0mo »

schappim wrote: post #288
t0mo wrote: post #215

I have FRM01 (relay) in car that powers up Raspberry Pi when I unlock car, so Raspberry Pi has enough time to boot before I sit in car. Raspberry Pi has NodeJS & AngularJS app used as infotainment.

how do you go about shutting it down safely?

I have arduino that knows when car is on/off (reads voltage from steering wheel buttons), and after some time sends Raspberry Pi to power off. Relay leaves 60 seconds for Raspberry to shutdown - if it takes more than 60 seconds, Raspberry will lose power without proper shutdown.

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

#552

Post by jcun4128 »

Moter8 wrote: post #548
jcun4128 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have not heard of that thanks. I just assume you have to rent a number/sms service or put a usb cable into your phone to use your existing phone. Would be cool to interface with it without usb.

Tasker is just an app, there's no need for any cable. Tasker lets you automate stuff on your phone, say send a SMS every day, turn the WIFI on when you are close to your house, etc.

I see. I was looking at it with perpestive of being integrated with a "web coded thing" I don't know how to explain what I'm saying like you wrote something in JavaScript and want to send a message by your phone from JS.

Anyway that is pretty cool what it does.

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

#554

Post by cup-of-tea »

marvinpinto wrote: post #45

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

I've been working on my own classifier for updating my ledger because I struggled too much trying to get other people's stuff to work. I'm getting about ~90% accuracy using a SVM from scikit-learn, but it can only ever be semi-automated. My plan is that every month I'll go through my various accounts and help to update my ledger. One thing that I don't think other software does is automatically remove the duplication when transferring between bank accounts/credit cards.

How does yours deal with transfers between accounts?

I really want a nice auto-completing thing to type in the account names when the classifier gets them wrong (or to add a new account if necessary). The best UI for this is ido or ivy in emacs. But it would be nice to have a tool that runs outside emacs. The best I've found is fzf but it doesn't support tab completion which is a shame.

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

#555

Post by agumonkey »

kingkool68 wrote: post #321
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.

Funny how a bit of sorting makes a difference. Sames goes for trash, I plan to have few bags so you can them dump each blindly.

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

#556

Post by amelius »

jcun4128 wrote: post #516
richev wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://visualping.io/ can do this, although it sends email alerts rather than SMS messages. I used it to notify me of new Hololens events, listed on this page https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebI...

How do you deal with the legality of scraping? I was hired to scrape some economic related pages and build an excel file and email it, I got that done but not sure if I should try to host this and turn it into a service or just set it up for the client and let them deal with it. It's just personal use on their part.

> How do you deal with the legality of scraping?

How did Google deal with it, when they started their search engine business?

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

#557

Post by literallycancer »

fehrm wrote: post #531
artpi wrote: post #102

I have set up a battery of scripts on google app engine and Im pretty happy with it. 1. I have a script to automatically buy small amount of BTC every day 2. For the more knowledge-dense books I read, I write summaries of them ( https://piszek.com/books/ ). I have a script that puts a random book review to my pocket for reviewing every week 3. I have an instagram account of lego minifig ( https://www.instagram.com/le…

Why do you buy BTC every day? Is it cheaper than just buying once?

Helps with the volatility.

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

#558

Post by amelius »

sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

How did she find out eventually?

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

#559

Post by amelius »

sasaf5 wrote: post #537
jcun4128 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome, what was the sms api/platform that you used and how much?

Nothing fancy, I used "Tasker" on my own android phone. Ugliest thing ever, but I managed to hack it during a bus trip, and it worked.

This makes me wonder, how could one implement something like this over a service like Whatsapp?

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

#560

Post by keithnz »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #176
tylerjaywood wrote: post #141

I have a house plant that is watered automatically, but not based on any pre-determined schedule. I have the plant's livestream and its moisture level available publicly on pleasetakecareofmyplant.com and the decision to water is crowd sourced on reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant by way of a daily vote.

What moisture sensor are you using? That's always been a sticking point for me, where soil moisture sensors just don't work, unlike air moisture sensors.

we do this for a ag product

http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/soil-moisture-online/

which can use a number of different sensor makes, but http://www.decagon.com/en/soils/volumetric-water-content-sen... seem pretty good

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