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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?

#81

Post by technotarek »

I first built ATTIC, which aggregated and indexed newly available products from local furniture stores in DC, to serve the personal needs of me and my wife. We were trying to furnish a new home using only locally bought goods, ideally vintage ones. I started with 15 or so stores to save us the time of having to go to each website one by one. It was pretty crude at first, but did the job. It saved us time and in some cases actually gave us an edge in seeing pieces that sell out quickly. Our home has come together well and almost entirely sourced from ATTIC. Mission accomplished.

Four years later it's now available in six cities and indexes hundreds of local independent stores.

https://attic.city

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

#82

Post by kstenerud »

Virtual development environments in LXC and KVM https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

I can spin up a virtual Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, and access it via virtual desktop, from any linux host running LXD 3.0+ (currently Ubuntu 18.04 server). I can go from a freshly installed server to a fully functional, deterministic dev environment in one git clone and build script run.

I also keep a virtual desktop or two around for any long running tasks that require a GUI environment, or for browser tabs I want to keep open long term.

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

#84

Post by dcbadacd »

IshKebab wrote: post #71
dzek69 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't hear often about banks providing API access. Only big companies on special contracts may get something like that, but it is usually very limited - talking from my personal experience, but what I learnt from the internet - it's the same everywhere. But... In Europe thanks to just another EU laws we should have every bank offering an API access for everyone starting from September 2018 IIRC. That would help a l…

I'm going to be so amazed if the API (PSD2 if you want to Google it) turns out to be what we want. I'm fully expecting banks to throw extreme security hurdles and probably registration fees in the way if they can. Hopefully I will be wrong.

Automated GDPR requests for personal data...

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

#85

Post by AmericanChopper »

My AWS rep gave me one of their IoT buttons when those were first a thing. I wrote a couple of lambdas for it. One click would send an email to my boss telling him I was taking a sick day, double click would send him an email telling him I was running late.

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

#86

Post by msangi »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #85

My AWS rep gave me one of their IoT buttons when those were first a thing. I wrote a couple of lambdas for it. One click would send an email to my boss telling him I was taking a sick day, double click would send him an email telling him I was running late.

Out of curiosity, how often are you using them?

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

#87

Post by soneil »

edent wrote: post #14

Most automation doesn't work for me. I don't keep to a set 9-5 schedule, so anything that assumes a routine fails me. Here's what I do use. Tado - a smart thermostat, sets the temperature while we're in the house. Heats up water only if we're in. Uses an app to geolocate us. Lifx - lightbulbs which automatically dimm at 2300 (good reminder to go to bed) and auto switch off a couple of hours after sunrise. Everything…

> I don't keep to a set 9-5 schedule, so anything that assumes a routine fails me. Here's what I do use.

This has been a pet bug of mine for a while. My shifts are never the same 2 weeks in a row, and I feed it all into my calendar. But homekit etc won't consume this.

I've botched together a few scripts to set my heating based on the events in my 'work' calendar, so it sets before I get home, not after, and it does seem to work much better than any geofencing or 'learning'.

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

#88

Post by jsilence »

kstenerud wrote: post #82

Virtual development environments in LXC and KVM https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders I can spin up a virtual Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, and access it via virtual desktop, from any linux host running LXD 3.0+ (currently Ubuntu 18.04 server). I can go from a freshly installed server to a fully functional, deterministic dev environment in one git clone and build script run. I also keep a virtual desktop or…

Wondering what that says about your personal life.

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

#89

Post by matt_the_bass »

jmpman wrote: post #83

I trained a mobile neural network to feed the dog every morning, and his brother to feed it every night.

My mobile neural nets are still in the training stage. Sometimes, they have trouble recognizing when the dogs fifo is full.

Also, though I derive great happiness from this automation effort, I’ve noticed that the processing units are quite expensive and the maintenance cost is also large. After 5 years, I’m certain I’ve spent more time training them than if I fed the dog myself and more money that if I hired a 3rd party DwaaS (dog walker as a service).

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

#90

Post by ngzungu »

I've build a web scraper + web UI in order to create direct links to spotify albums/EPS based on specialized (and well curated) music shops which i use to keep up with new releases, one of them being boomkat.com. I got the idea because i was spending a lot of time on public transport trying to tab + search between the music shops various websites and the spotify app while being on my phone, which I found quite frustrating.
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