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

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141–150 of 749 posts

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

#141
post #11
post #7

My WiFi router is turned off automatically at 9PM. No fancy electronics is needed for this, just something like: https://www.lazada.com.ph/products/24-hours-auto-switch-off-...

Nice, but why do you turn it off?

It enforces no internet before sleep rule. Personally I find it hard to stick to such habits just by my own will. Too often I find some excuse to turn on my laptop just to check one thing, which then turns into one hour wasted browsing random junk.

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

#142
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be that pleased with a childcare facility taking photos of my kid then putting them on the internet. I suspect I’m in a small minority though.

It's behind a login and they've asked for parents' consent for each child separately. Everyone with access has agreed not to share any of the photos. I actually haven't shared my scraper script just because I think someone would then share the pictures (perhaps accidentally). EDIT: I'll just add that there are no public photos of my kids and I ask anyone who takes photos not to share them outside family. So I do agre…

That’s less alarming than I’d interpreted, and I didn’t mention in the first post - your script is a good idea.

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

#143
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this. I’ve consciously refused to install irrigation so I’ll have to go out to the garden and hang around there.

I've often commented that I'm glad I have to water the garden because it's an excuse to just stand around looking at plants. I don't like watering grass because grass is boring and requires a ton of water, so rather than install irrigation, I ripped out all the grass and planted more interesting plants. (Drought-tolerant xeriscaping is common in my area, so this isn't unusual.)

> so rather than install irrigation, I ripped out all the grass and planted more interesting plants.

Nice. A lot of local plants too?

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

#144

Deleting the empty "Email attachments" directory that OneDrive keeps making inside my drive. Systemd timer unit does the trick.

Wouldn't it be better to use inotify than a timer? I forget if systemd supports it or not, but it's simple enough independently: https://superuser.com/questions/181517/how-to-execute-a-comm...

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

#145
post #24
post #6

Funny enough, possibly because I work on embedded software for automating random processes, and also from home, I don't feel the need to automate anything not work related. When you spend most of your day stuck in front of a monitor, it feels good to get up and turn lights on/off.

I can relate to this. I would like some remote control features though but then I always consider what a hacker could do and what's the worst that could happen if the system malfunctions. Quite often the worst-case scenario is a fire, so the little benefit is IMHO not worth the risk. I'm talking about self-made hacks and cheap Chinese hardware here.

Or false positives that desensitize you. Cry wolf too many times and people tune out.

I got my parents a Nest smoke alarm (I can see the alarms too) but a year later it was being triggered by steam.

The folks at Nest actually sent a free new model that's better at not triggering for steam. But I have to wonder if my elderly parents trust it anymore.

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

#148

I bought an e-reader called reMarkable [0] that I use every day to read technical stuff on it. At some point, I got tired of the process to sync files: download the document from the browser, open the reMarkable app and drag the file into it. I automated this workflow, and now I can just "print" directly to the device [1] the article/document I'm reading. [0] https://remarkable.com/ [1] https://github.com/juruen/rmap…

I have a kobo and my intentions was to throw getpocket articles at it but I have hundreds of articles and the kobo barely manages it (and it's too slow, when it doesn't crash and needs a hard reset).

Is the remarkable better in that regard ?

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

#150

My son used to ask me every morning whether to wear warm-weather clothes or cool-weather clothes, so I wrote a app that scraped some weather data and served it up in a web page as a temperature graph, along with a recommendation for what kind of clothes to wear.

How did you automate your son seeing this web page?
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