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

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251–260 of 749 posts

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

#251
post #248
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Why do I want to keep kindergarten photos of my kids, or why don't I want to manually save them one by one from the website? Why do you ask?

The question was directed at lostlogin, not you. I’m interested to know why people object to have their kids pictures on the sites of the daycare providers.

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

#252
post #19

Screen scraping photos of my kids from a kindergarten website. Recognizing good photos that feature my kids and deleting everything else is manual, though. Alerts to my phone if the fridge or freezer temperature exceeds a limit or the humidity under my dishwasher starts rising. Granted, neither are fully automatic and require manual intervention.

Did you build the IoT devices yourself or used an off the shelf solution?

I'm using a ready-made solution from http://wirelesstag.net . While I think I could build suitable hardware myself, I wouldn't have the skills to make them run on a battery for two years.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha, oh wow, that's a lot of work. I think you should learn Python and some Requests...

I don't think that would make it much simpler (if that's what you're getting at). There's tons of grunt work that just has to be done - eg. calculating expected dividend payments (by automatically matching portfolio details to dividend schedules from corporate websites), and automatically matching those to bank account credits - all through code. Despite the laughs that the VB languages get on HN, VBScript is in fact…

I'm not OP, but I suspect they meant that Python and some libraries would have solved your problem in a few days of work.

This is particularly true in the UK where there's a big push for "Open Banking" where banks must provide APIs for developers.

This would remove your dependency on IE if it was all done from the command line :)

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

#254
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My machine has a time remaining feature which is great in theory but it's completely inaccurate. It might tell you there's 45 minutes left in a cycle, you'll come back an hour later and it'll say 17 minutes. I guess I know where the windows file-copy dialog author went to work after Microsoft

I think modern washers weigh the clothes and change their cycles based off that and other information. Mine is similar but seems to always overestimate the time instead, which is probably the better failure state.

The semi-old one in my building weighs it when you start the load and gives an accurate minute timer. The odd thing is it is always different, almost no correlation to weight, sometimes 50, sometimes 70.

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

#255

Reading ebooks. https://Auditus.cc

For you, has this automated (audio)book discovery by farming it out to visitors of your website? :)

Indeed, everytime the server goes down (every other week), I have to SSH in and trawl through all the amassed epubs...:D

(The files persist until the conversion is fully complete i.e.uploaded to S3 and sent to user)

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

#256

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

So is it more than a screen?

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

#257
post #63

I automated all my piracy. My NAS automatically downloads files as they are released by scene/p2p/pirate groups. Files are extracted (if compressed), renamed, metadata is added, and published on some apps like plex and trakt. Movies, TV Shows, Music.

I got all fancy and hacked together a tinydb backend for transmission-daemon to automate pulling from an rss feed. Was using a simple text file at first (to avoid duplicates) but without proper internet service I needed a way to cache the shows until I could eventually download them. Now I just need to figure out an efficient way to download from them from my Hungarian vps since the cellphone internets are slowwww...

ruTorrent and deluge have many fancy plugins, the latter is also afaik relatively easily scriptable in python.

Transmission is one of the more minimal torrent clients out there, and even the old uTorrent supports RSS feeds.

Only download linux ISOs though ;)

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

#258
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your banking script, are you able to use an API with a limited access token? Or does it use your normal credentials. I don't save my various banking credentials anywhere, not even 1password, as they're so sensitive, curious how you do this.

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…

There is a system for integrating with larg(er) corporate banking software, but here it seems to require a smartcard, likely with a PIN, and no way to restrict it to be readonly. It's horrible XML protocol stuff though.

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

#259
I have a robot lawn mower that is wire guided. Instead of the traditional lawn mowers that basically cut the grass in all directions (making a sloppy cut pattern) my mower knows how to cut in straight lines so you get a traditional cut pattern. It also has the ability to dump the grass cuttings into a composting bin.

Basically, I put down wire guide cable into the lawn and into the cement as well. It is all powered by electricity and has a little docking station. When it is scheduled to cut it simply rolls out, goes to the lawn and starts cutting on. After a pre-determined point, it will go back to the compost bin to dump the grass cuttings before going back to cut the lawn again. After it is done with all the cuts it simply returns back to the charging station.

I am trying to add better features to it like weather detection. If rain is scheduled then it will cut the lawn early and then delay cutting it again until the lawn is dry. I am also working on adding an edger component and a weed wacker competent so it can handle those tasks as well. Pretty much, my goal is to have a fully automated robot lawn mower when I am done with this project. So far it only cuts the grass and dumps the waste. I think this wire guided method is far superior to the autonomous robot mowers because most people's yards are in static arrangements that rarely change. So it is better to just add in the wire permanently so you get a perfect cut every time.

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

#260

Digital archiving of important physical mail is a nice way to go paperless and keep track of documents. Get a good scanner and shredder, then set up a system to track your scanned documents. No more misplacing files and having to stuff cabinets with papers. 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 + p…

Can you give a basic writeup of your physical archiving to digital? A friend did this and I want to do this now

I am doing this too and using ScanSnap. It turns out to be a really good and fast scanner for documents, not really photos. The included manager app works on Windows and Mac, and I have it set up to save bitmap pdf to a network share then run them thru abbyy ocr (also included.) Then I can search from manager's thumbnail browser, the operating system's search facility, or beagle.
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