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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?

#291

1. IFTTT turns off all of my Hue lights at sunrise (task: turn off forgotten lights) 2. At one point last year, I felt that my mornings were getting slower and slower (causing me to leave later), so I set up a Dash button where I hang my keys. When I left for work, I'd press the button, and the script would log the time to a Sparkfun data feed. After a month, I reviewed it to see just how bad it was (pretty bad). (ta…

The Hue Bridge can do #1 on its own, but I don't think it's exposed with the stock app. You can set up a sunrise/sunset trigger based on your geographical location - I use this to turn my outside lights on and off.

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

#292

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…

How do you make the roomba cry?

There's a bin full indicator light on the back that turns on when it's full. They don't cry... yet.

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

#293
post #58

Don't know if that counts but I have installed automatic switches that turn off TV, blu ray, game console at night. My electricity bill stopped climbing so I guess it works at least a bit.

What network connected power strip are you using for that?

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

#294

Does anyone have a script for integrating with Facebook and grabbing whose birthdays are today? I'd really like to automate it, but this info isn't available via the Graph API, so I kind of gave up on this, but if someone else has done this, I'd love to take a look.

You can export friends' birthdays to an ical feed - see here:

https://www.facebook.com/help/152652248136178/

From there you have a lot of options, but what I did is have it feed into my Google Calendar and read it via the Google Calendar API.

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

#295
post #230

1. My former spouse wouldn't answer the home phone when I talked with the kids during the divorce. I wrote an app that texted her and logged the attempt for reporting to the guardian ad litem. 2. She also wouldn't answer the door when during kids pick-up. The same app texted her when I was outside. 3. To disprove her allegations I wasn't involved in the kids school and activities I used Android's Locale app to trigge…

What is your email address,rrggrr? Or rather would you email me if you do not want to make it public? See my update email address in my profile.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure! its a very simple script: https://github.com/chronick/pinbots

I bookmarked your Github repo and will probably forget about it

Yeah, I should probably do something similar with GH stars

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

#297

I'm fairly interested in the competitive smash bros scene - a common occurrence is that one might record a few hours worth of gameplay after an event and then be too lazy to split the recording into the individual matches, leaving a lot of recorded dead time where nothing is happening. I learned how to use the gstreamer and opencv libraries to automate recording gameplay only when a game is in progress - it is still…

Awesome! Fellow smash player on HN!

GeekyGoonSquad started doing something similar when they were still around/streaming, and automated the uploading to youtube.

Re: automating the player names, on a non-stream set up, I think it will be difficult to get the names from players in a standardised way. My first thought was webcam + the players venue pass to get the competitors name, but even that is a little fiddly.

Best of luck!

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ignore them mainly because it's easier. Facebook alone might send me 10 emails a day begging me to come back. If someone was smart, clicking the unsubscribe link would only validate that the address the mailer was sent to was being used. I suspect that several services do this either via the unsubscribe link or a pixel tracker.

Yeah, but that's now illegal, so only the real reprobates do it.

Trouble is there are just so many reprobates... (See also robocalls)

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

#299
I've got a few things that come to mind:

Hue lights: The Hue lights in the master bedroom turn on at 9PM, since it's visible from the living room it's kind of a "Hey, you should think about going to bed soon" reminder. They turn off at 11PM as a "If you're still up reading you should probably stop" reminder. This is easy to set up with the Hue app.

More Hue lights: The Hue lights outside turn on a half-hour before dusk and off a half-hour after dawn. This needed to be set up by hand[0], but it's very much a set it and forget it type of thing. Once set up it automatically adjusts to the changing sunrise/sunset times.

Home security: I've got a bunch of cheap wifi cameras and Zoneminder keeping watch on my house. There isn't much automation happening here, but it solves a few problems for me.

Cat feeding: The vet was concerned that one of my cats was losing weight, so I set up a camera on the food dishes. Since the camera is hooked into Zoneminder, I can set it up to only record when there's motion. It's very easy see who comes to eat, how often they come, which food they eat, and roughly how much. This has helped in getting the portion sizes adjusted so that the cats are all happy and healthy.

Document Management: While not fully automated, I've found that putting documents into Mayan EDMS[1] instead of paper files has saved me a LOT of time when I need to find things. There is also huge potential for more automation by extending Mayan to do things with new documents based on their OCR'd contents.

I'm sure I've got others, but these are definitely the big ones for me.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26782957/how-to-use-suns...

[1] https://mayan-edms.org/

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

#300

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…

I'm looking to buy a basic 3D printer this week but have no significant knowledge. Mind linking the one you bought?
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