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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?

#261

Post by dhumph »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #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 b…

Do you have any information that would allow some to build something similar? Would love to see the setup!

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

#262

Post by A_Person »

13of40 wrote: post #249
A_Person wrote: post #170

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…

Honestly curious: Why wouldn't you just liquidate all of it and invest in some mutual funds?

A lot of it is in fully-franked shares in a self-managed superannuation fund. The fund is now in pension mode, which means it pays no tax on earnings. Where I live, fully-franked shares, in a zero tax environment, get a refund, from the tax office, of all the tax that the issuing companies payed on those earnings!! It's a sweet deal, but actually makes me feel a bit guilty. It's all 100% above board (and managed by one of the big 5 accounting firms), but it means I pay less tax than all my friends and acquaintances, all of whom earn much less than me. Reference: Warren Buffet's secretary :-)

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

#263

Post by cjslep »

metaodi wrote: post #189

I created an API for the waste collection (cardboard, organic, paper etc.) of my city based on some CSV that they publish. I always forget when to put what on the street, now thanks to my API and IFTTT and get a notification on my phone to remind me. If anyone is interested, the API is here: openerz.herokuapp.com and the city is Zurich, Switzerland.

Nice! Will see if I can do something similar for Adliswil.

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

#264

Post by greenyouse »

notananthem wrote: post #250
greenyouse wrote: post #236

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

There wasn't much to the paper archiving. I bought a fancy scanner[0] and already had a shredder.

To store the files on disk I keep directories marked by topic/year/month/day. The topics are stuff like taxes, finances, bills, etc. The important documents are in a couple encrypted HDDs that I use for backups. I've been thinking of doing an offsite storage like Backblaze B2 but it's probably overkill.

After scanning stuff in, everything gets shredded. There usually aren't many things to save but once they've been scanned they're there forever.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-iX500-Duplex-Scanner...

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

#265

Post by lgregg »

dhumph wrote: post #261
anonymous5133 wrote: post #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 b…

Do you have any information that would allow some to build something similar? Would love to see the setup!

I second this request.

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

#266

Post by lucasverra »

sav0h wrote: post #182

With gmail you can only auto-forward mail to mailboxes which you can prove you own / have access to (by responding to an email challenge generated by google, sent to that mailbox). This meant that I couldn't automatically forward receipts / invoices from e.g. Airbnb, Digital Ocean, Microsoft etc., to Expensify. So I have a cron job that logs into my gmail account every night at 2am, scans for new mail matching certai…

1)you could buy a cheap domain, create you@domain.sth

2) mail forward setup you@domain.sth -> regular gmail

3) setup gmail forward address test to you@domain.sth

4) validate

5) mail forward setup you@domain.sth -> Expensify's mailbox

6) ^^

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

#267

Post by whatsstolat »

A_Person wrote: post #262
13of40 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly curious: Why wouldn't you just liquidate all of it and invest in some mutual funds?

A lot of it is in fully-franked shares in a self-managed superannuation fund. The fund is now in pension mode, which means it pays no tax on earnings. Where I live, fully-franked shares, in a zero tax environment, get a refund , from the tax office, of all the tax that the issuing companies payed on those earnings!! It's a sweet deal, but actually makes me feel a bit guilty. It's all 100% above board (and managed by…

Fellow Aussie

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

#268

Post by A_Person »

A_Person wrote: post #235
helsinki wrote: post #208

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…

To wafflesindeed (there's no reply button):

> 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.

I wrote software professionally for 30 years. I have a good understanding of the work required to implement a business requirement! I cant really see myself spending 10 years on a one-week task :-)

PS. I didn't downvote you.

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

#269

Post by kw71 »

tgb wrote: post #105
roryisok wrote: post #95

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.

Some industrial laundries do this, but I have heard this over and over again to describe residential HE laundry machines but never actually seen one with a way to measure this. The usual method is to tumble the clothes until the water level in the tub stops dropping. Now they're saturated with water.

What you are probably getting when you start your washer is an estimate considering the steps of the cycle and loaded to capacity. Some machines have turbidity sensors - mine doesn't - this could deliver information that might shorten the cycle. Also the time may go up if it has to deal with suds or stops spinning to rearrange the load if it shakes.

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

#270

Post by pimeys »

liamzebedee wrote: post #242
pimeys wrote: post #108

I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go. For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android. Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and c…

A question from a fellow diabetic hacker - what prompted your switch to the faster acting insulin and how does it compare wrt basal rates? I became aware of it not too long ago, currently using Novorapid on my pump. Have brought it up once and the endocrinologists were apprehensive of switching. Forgetting to bolus and accounting for the dawn phenoemenon are pretty challenging in a backpackers routine. :-)

It's definitely much faster. I'll try everything new I get my hands into with diabetes and my treatment at the time was not that great, so it was pretty easy choice. First I did Fiasp when still with MDI and it's not that great to be honest. Even half a unit can be too much and it's very hard to dose if you don't use a proper bolus calculator.

Of course using it in pump is a different story, especially if you have a CGM with the pump. Right now I'm using the SMB algorithm in AAPS, that can help with unannounced meals by giving small boluses if it thinks you ate something. The same mechanism pretty much evens out my dawn phenomenon.

One thing you should know before trying Fiasp is the molecule size is much larger and might cause stinging feeling when the pump gives you dosage. Try to get a pump that goes slow with the dosing, otherwise the first couple of months might be a bit unpleasant. You'll get used to it though and I don't really notice it anymore.

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