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Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

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Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#91

Post by personjerry »

adastra22 wrote: post #85
personjerry wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sarcasm! I was under the impression that in the US that getting into a good uni is a big deal, and since those of us in tech have the means, then those sorts of advantages for our kids would be great investments.

The way you phrase it sounds like you’re either not American or a first generation immigrant. If so, what’s your home culture? Just curious. My family goes back to the 1830’s on one side, and the 1600’s on the other, so I’m pretty integrated. I don’t think any of that is really in the radar for people in my family. We are relatively well off middle class, and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins went to university.…

I'm Chinese-Canadian, but went to university in Caliornia.

I really appreciate your anecdote, I felt like a lot of the students I went to school with had worked pretty hard (i.e. college prep, extracurriculars, way more than most Canadians at my high school, although I went to a public high school). But it makes sense if I had a biased sample!

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#92

Post by lloeki »

adastra22 wrote: post #64
personjerry wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make sure that your children will go to a top university then?

Was that sarcasm? I’m vastly more concerned that my kids lead fulfilling, happy lives than that they get into a top tier university. Or university at all, for that matter. But also my 12 year old daughter is working on publishing her first iOS app on her own initiative. I’m sure they’ll do fine.

> on her own initiative

My daughter is 3yo so a bit early ^^, but 2 years ago I bought my nephew (then 8, loves to tinker) a Pi 400 plus a couple of kid-oriented introductory programming books (about Scratch and Python, very nicely done I must say, I reviewed them beforehand). Of course he started with playing Minecraft Pi but an hour after he was moving a cat around in Scratch.

Now I heard he's tinkering with Python. Pretty sure the GPIO is going to get some heavy use down the road, bridging the digital world to the physical one (where he tinkers with mechanical and electric stuff already).

There was zero pushing nor action on my part (except showing him how to operate the mouse), I literally just handed him the device and books over, he plugged it in and went exploring his merry way. Curiosity is a powerful engine.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#95

Post by BrandoElFollito »

My own family dashboard. I did not purchase it but wrote myself and it was a life changer.

It is an always-on screen (during the day) where everything family oriented happens: all our calendars merged for today and tomorrow (and important events within 6 days), weather, when kids are back from school, info when I am on my way back from work, various alerts on stuff breaking at home, etc.

When I finally installed it, my wife told me to get rid of this monstrosity. After a few days I just switched it off one evening and the morning after it was chaos at home. Switched back and fast forward to 7 years and there we are.

Probably the most useful thing I built in my life.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#97

Post by MrDresden »

ShaddyDC wrote: post #86
pronouncedjerry wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does !g do?

It lets you search the current query on Google. It's also a bang on ddg

Honestly wondering why you'd send the query through Kagi if it is only going to ping ddg/google anyway? Does Kagi do some filtering on the responses?

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#98

Post by yasuocidal »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #28

Google photos, I have all devices syncing photos to one place and now I don’t need to worry about did in-law A remember to backup their phone when they inevitably lose it at the grocery store. Arguably the only remotely important thing we have on our phones is photos and maybe chat history but it’s not earth shattering to lose that. Despite having more photos of ourselves than any other generation ever, It’s still so…

I have a server, a small project of mine, and i installed nextcloud. Now my whole family and close friends use it to backup our photos. The official app for it is exceptional for syncing (you can set it to ONLY do the sync when charging or other parameters). There are other benefits of nextcloud (contact backup/Calendar/Messaging etc) and you can set it up on a raspberrypi with an external hard drive, throw it near your router (preferably both on a UPS for an "always on" solution) and forget about it. All the management can be done though the web interface (updates, new apps which you could find something helpful to you, etc ) and the installation is pretty easy.

If you decide to go with it, i recommend that you get a domain and set it up as a DDNS through cloudflare.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#99

Post by ShaddyDC »

MrDresden wrote: post #97
ShaddyDC wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lets you search the current query on Google. It's also a bang on ddg

Honestly wondering why you'd send the query through Kagi if it is only going to ping ddg/google anyway? Does Kagi do some filtering on the responses?

Maybe I phrased that badly. You would have set kagi as your default search engine, but sometimes you want to search something on a specific site only. With bangs, kagi will redirect you to another search engine instead of running the query itself. If you append !w to your query, you will search on Wikipedia instead. If you append !g, your query is redirected to Google. There is no advantage over searching on Google directly, but it is much faster than going to the Google page if kagi is your default. And I meant that the !g bang works on ddg as well, though there probably is a ddg bang on kagi too.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#100

Post by theshrike79 »

simbolit wrote: post #43
chasd00 wrote: post #29

We all (family of 4) have iPhones and use FindMy to see where everyone is and when they’re going to be home to time dinner. We also have a family chat on iMessage that really comes in handy.

So you are using FM not as an emergency tool, but generally? Does that mean in your family everyone (potentially) always knows where everyone else is? Is there a rule for when/if it's appropriate to turn FM off? Please don't read this as me judging; if that works for you, great, I'd (as far as i understand it) not want that, but it's not my life.

We have FM enabled for our family too, I move around for work a lot so people can check where I am before calling me. My kid visits their friends and we can check where they are to see how long it'll take them to come back for dinner when we ping for example.

I've got location shared with my siblings and parents too, both ways. And my SO has a similar thing with their siblings and parents.

It's all about trust, people don't stalk or continuously check where others are. We mostly use it to see whether to bother someone with a longer FaceTime call or if they're coming over we use it to check their ETA.

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