231–240 of 749 posts
I automated my Investment Portfolio. My investment thesis is to buy high-growth tech company stocks with an upcoming earnings call in the next 90 days. I have a script that scrapes Yahoo finance and tells me which stocks to buy. Surprisingly it's worked well, and I've gotten a return of 44% last year
Also my cat would disagree about who trains whom, but he uses the regular 'throne' in the restroom.
1. some miscellaneous things using IFTTT like cross posting from Instagram to Twitter and Facebook 2. Smart Home stuff like turning on the light on sunset if I’m home, turning off the lights when I leave home and multifunctional wake up calls using light and music. 3. And which I guess I’m most proud of: I’m secretary at my local volunteer fire brigade and one of the chores is to send out a weekly email to everyone w…
4. Vacuuming. My roomba has paid for itself several times with the time it’s saving me
Some of them are connected to the water line, so I use a german commercial solution that irrigates 1-2-3 times a day for x seconds.
I just hacked the electric signal of the valve with a cable, sugru and 3d printed parts to control it with a raspi, so it is dynamic, based on the weather and water sensors, so water is not wasted.
Other plants are not connected to the water line pipe. So I use terracota recipients and a raspi controlled deposit of water to add some water the terracota will absorb by capillarity and irrigate the plants this way.
There is no better system to irrigate plants than capillarity.
I fill the deposit manually once a month or so.
I also brought a bread-pizza mass machine as in some countries there is no good bread like in Spain or France, this way I could design my own custom cycles depending on parameters like the weight of the bread I will make. Automating it was super simple.
I created a book reader-digitalizer, all my books are digitalized, OCR.... The hardest thing to do was flipping pages. At first I used vacuum with a super complex system. A year ago or so I simplified it enormously with just a cheap Chinese electrostatic device.
Ok, I'll bite! About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that…
Hahaha, oh wow, that's a lot of work. I think you should learn Python and some Requests...
Proxy phone number via Twilio or Google Voice for the times when you'd rather not give your real number out.
Audio translations for digital books using espeak + pdftotext + shell scripting. If you didn't know, espeak can output wav files. It's a nice way to read since my commute is 3 hours a day.
Recipe management for putting meals into rotation and generating a shopping list. Check out Gourmet or Krecipes on linux. It could probably be hooked into a grocery delivery service like Prime Pantry or just migrated to one.
General automation with Twilio + serverless cloud functions is pretty good. There's a new Twilio tool for building IVRs (interactive voice response trees, like those phone menus you get when calling a cable company). The super cheap on-demand pricing for cloud functions makes this basically free to run.
I started a personal SMS/Voice service for some of my tasks like what's on [favorite radio station], Bus line directions, shops near me, etc. There's no real point yet but I feel like it could have uses that are actually helpful...
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How about a third option, ads are by definition short and repeat a lot. No fancy ML needed, after a couple of times the filter gets one of these repeating fragments it should be able to block it. Fairness bonus: you get to hear each new ad a couple of times.
The problem you have here is that in order to continue listening to songs more than just a couple of times you'd have to able to classify the song versus an ad. Otherwise once the system heard the song a few times it would start blocking it too.
I wish I could do the same for my phone. Robocalls are out of control now. At least 4 a day, sometimes 20+.
1. Automated indoor gardening. I used a raspberry pi hooked up to x10 devices as a way to monitor the temperature of my garden, and run the watering and light cycles. This meant I only had to worry about my garden maybe an hour a week when changing out the nutrients and reservoirs. This saved a huge amount of time, let me go on vacation for long periods of time without having to worry about things, and saved me from forgetfulness. It allowed for me to enjoy my garden a lot more, and look for real issues, like bugs/pests/nutrient deficiencies. Getting an automated process also made each cycle more reproducible.
https://github.com/cbanek/garden-squid
2. Automated billpay. This changed my life. By not having to worry about missing bills, it really just took them completely off my radar. Downside: If there was a problem with a bill, I might not notice right away, but in general, there was so little that wasn't actually my fault that it didn't matter. Fidelity has a great automated bill pay system that is free to use, and will send out checks and do e-bills for most utility / credit card companies.