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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?

#301

Post by zrail »

Finances are almost entirely operationally automated. Most bills autopay from credit cards which automatically pay their statement balance every month. Those that can’t pay from a credit card(mortgage and one insurance) pull directly from our bank account.

Reporting is semi automated. I use Tiller to pull transactions into a google sheet and then use a ruby script to turn that into Ledger transactions that feed into my accounting system.

Investments aren’t automated because the amounts are different every month but I have a script that tells me how much is available for investing.

Other things we’ve “automated” are household tasks like mowing, cleaning, and snow removal. Other people do that stuff on a schedule and bill us.

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

#302

Post by egypturnash »

A_Person wrote: post #228
jacobush wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem. I will need your bank and website passwords... :-D

I've no idea what they are! They're all random strings within the integrated password manager that I wrote as part of the package!

This is kind of perfect.

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

#303

Post by dudleypippin »

delinka wrote: post #111
matt_the_bass wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mobile neural nets are still in the training stage. Sometimes, they have trouble recognizing when the dogs fifo is full. Also, though I derive great happiness from this automation effort, I’ve noticed that the processing units are quite expensive and the maintenance cost is also large. After 5 years, I’m certain I’ve spent more time training them than if I fed the dog myself and more money that if I hired a 3rd pa…

I think part of the problem is the ordering of the canine calorie queue: should it not be approximately lifo rather than fifo? If you are indeed correct, I’m curious to know how the canine has direct access to the caloric morsels at the bottom of the container.

I believe they were referring to the canine unit's output queue, which definitely should be fifo. If it switches to lifo, a trip to the troubleshooting specialist is in order.

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

#304

Post by EdCoffey »

1. When I plug my camera's SD card into the front of my Linux server it automatically copies off any new photos and sorts them into a YYYY/DD/MM folder structure.

2. I wrote a cryptocurrency trading bot because I'm too lazy/uninterested to actually learn anything about the market. It seemed to do pretty well when the market was flat or going up. Hard to tell if it's doing badly now or if it's just reflecting the state of the market. I almost forgot to include it in this list because it's so thoroughly automated that I rarely bother to check it.

3. I assisted the owner of pvoutput.org with adding support for the automated data upload format from my PV inverter. Then I wrote a script that automatically polls my electricity meter using a RAVEn USB device to upload the net import/export of power.

4. Maybe other things that I've forgotten about because they're automated...

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

#305

Post by mehrdadn »

mkl wrote: post #300
mehrdadn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, I've been looking for something like this. Could I ask how you parse your bills? Did you just hack together your own script or did you find a parser online? I tried doing this several times but it seems rather painful to get right since the formats can differ and since copying text from PDFs can sometimes ignore the table layouts and whatnot.

There are no general solutions, unfortunately. Every PDF-generating system will do things differently, so parsing them must be custom for each type. Generated PDFs are usually very systematic, though, and PDF commands are text (compressed). You can uncompress with PDFTK: pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf uncompress Then try grepping or using whatever tools you like (there will be binary parts of the file still, like…

I just tried it on a bank statement and the only text I see is the PDF commands (stuff like "/MediaBox [0 0 612 792]", "/F1 125 Tf", and whatnot). There's no actual PDF content text that I can find, whether it's my name, the bank name, or anything else.

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

#306

Post by tbyehl »

nopcode wrote: 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 think this is the only thing I'm still using RSS for. Plex has become important enough for me and the people I share with that I moved it into colocation space.

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

#307

Post by xor1 »

narrator wrote: post #298
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…

I did this with the healthiest packaged food I could get on Amazon (quest makes pretty good stuff) and doing subscribe and save to get a 15% discount + 5% cash back on the Amazon visa card. It comes every month and I just eat all that.

Do you have any links to what you buy? I'd like to try some.

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

#308

Post by matt_the_bass »

dudleypippin wrote: post #303
delinka wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is the ordering of the canine calorie queue: should it not be approximately lifo rather than fifo? If you are indeed correct, I’m curious to know how the canine has direct access to the caloric morsels at the bottom of the container.

I believe they were referring to the canine unit's output queue, which definitely should be fifo. If it switches to lifo, a trip to the troubleshooting specialist is in order.

Yes I was referring the fifo in the state machine that runs throughout the canine unit.

But I do agree that the feeding mechanism should definitely be designed as a lifo

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

#310

Post by hajrice »

jaredsohn wrote: post #278
hajrice wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock grows/declines severely during earning call. I use that to my advantage/leverage

>with an upcoming earnings call in the next 90 days >quarterly by law I don't think you answered the GP's question. What is the point of looking at the earnings call date if your script just returns a full list of companies? (Or maybe when you said 90 days you meant a shorter time period?)

I did answer it. I will try to illustrate it even further. Public-ally traded companies, regardless whether they're high growth tech or not, tend to have big jumps or declines in stock price on earning calls date.

Take for example Shopify. Their stock is very fast growing, however, you'll always notice a decent bump during earnings calls. I buy 30-60 days before this earnings call, because I anticipate it'll grow in the next 30-60 days (for the earnings call), given the previous growth. I sell on the day of earnings call

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