Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 749 posts

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

#281

Post by ClassyJacket »

bytematic wrote: post #247
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…

I wish there was a good recipe website where you could press a button to import it and change it / save it. Could make sharing recpies and searching for them centralized and readable instead of the current system of blog posts and images or shudder gifs.

MyFitnessPal does a not-completely-terrible job of parsing pasted or linked recipes. It's a terrible website overall tho, which hasn't been updated once since I started using it in 2012.

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

#283

Post by beenBoutIT »

roryisok wrote: post #100
stevekemp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have some battery-powered motion-detector LED lights about 1ft from the ground in our bathroom and hallway. Makes walking around late at night less painful. (Children's toys end up everywhere!)

Now that's clever. But I'd really love if someone would invent a kind of roomba that puts away toys

Toys that put themselves away will get here before the Roomba that puts away toys does.

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

#284

Post by DoubleGlazing »

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead.

We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework.

To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains switches attached to the induction hob and the slow cooker. A wooden spoon attached to a 360 degree servo motor hangs above the pot on the hob and can be activated by the Pi for stirring. Initially I tried to use one of those cheap three-legged novelty vibrating pot stirrers, but that didn't work out. Thermocouples feed back to the Pi to help control cooking.

The whole thing is controlled by a messy Python script and 'recipes' are JSON based text files. They just define how long each device should stay on, a max temp to turn them off and how often they should be stirred. I get an email when cooking is done.

I plan to add some functionality over the summer to tip in ingredients as needed. The biggest issue is that it doesn't handle chunky food, it works for soups, chili sauce, pasta sauce etc. I'd love to figure out a way to fry and separate mince as you would with a spatula..

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

#285

Post by dvcrn »

I love automating things!

- Automatic cat food dispenser

- Smarthome with HomeKit for lights, fans and stuff. Using motion sensors and time based automations a lot

- Browser extension to automatically add Japanese words I look up to my Anki deck

- scripts to automatically ocr documents in my Dropbox, run it through classification for automatic renaming and information extraction, then add it to DEVONthink for archiving. Then using a document scanner app to throw things into Dropbox

- ifttt / zapier actions to add pull request reviews to my todo list, automatically translate Japanese messages to English with slack reactions, backup posts/pictures I am tagged in on Facebook, and and and

- AppleScripts to generate random usernames, one time emails (with date and website encoded) and logging generations in DEVONthink

- mini bots to normalize pull Request titles / descriptions, link them to JIRA tickets, assign them to the PR opener, transition to “in progress”

- sieve Filters to automatically bounce expired emails, organize based on website, automatically redirect tracking emails to Deliveries, add flight emails to flight tracking apps

- cli tools to clock me in, clock me out and warn me if I’m under my agreed hours at work

- a lot of workflow workflows on my phone to do things like: navigate me home, find a Starbucks, and heaps of other smaller things

...and probably many more. In general, if I have to do something manually more than 3-4 times and I notice a pattern, I try to automate it

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

#286

Post by mcpherrinm »

roryisok wrote: post #215
psergeant wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with a Thermomix?

I've heard of them, sort of like a pressure cooker?

You're probably thinking of instapot.

Thermomix is more like a blender with a built-in heating element, so you can throw your veggies in and then it blends and cooks them.

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

#287

Post by mig4ng »

nojvek wrote: post #205

When the dog used to wake me up in the middle of the night to drink water and take him out, I had to do to it manually. Now it’s all automated, my body just does it. 90% of brain is asleep. I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.

How did you manage to do that? Is there a book or an article that you recommend reading?

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

#288

Post by masukomi »

oliv__ wrote: post #201
bochoh wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just filter by length.

it's radio. the length is infinite. there are pauses in music. there are pauses in speech. Also, he didn't mention anything about delayed listening. The implication was that it happens in real-time so you don't know how long it will be when you need to start dropping the levels.

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

#289

Post by sushid »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

That sounds amazingly complex and cool at the same time. Have you looked into sous vide machines or pressure cookers? Those two are the items I use the most to get precisely cooked meals done in batches.

I've found that a lot of meals done via the slow cooker tend to taste the same because of the consistently and the type of ingredients typically involved in them.

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

#290

Post by wodenokoto »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

Please do post pictures and videos. It sounds like a real life rube goldberg machine!
Post reply on HN