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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?

#331

Post by Someone1234 »

kilroy123 wrote: post #324

Maybe not what anyone was expecting, but we've automated all the cleaning in the house. The clothes get washed, folded, and ironed. The trash gets taken out. All the plants get watered. How? The oldest form of automation. We pay someone to come and do it. We have a cleaning person come twice a week.

I'd be curious to know ballpark cost (and in which state just for cost of living).

My biggest concern with letting a stranger into the home is theft/trust issues. While I'm sure most people have a good experience and I'm sure you can find a company that background checks, it is more personal paranoia (and it isn't cleaners in particular, I don't like leaving any strangers alone around the house).

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

#332

Post by ghaff »

sushid wrote: post #289
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.

The problem with slow cookers is that the chop a bunch of stuff up, toss them in the slow cooker, and turn it on approach doesn't work all that well. You generally want to brown things etc.--and then you're not gaining that much. But, then, I'm mostly not a huge fan of stews in general.

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

#333

Post by uptown »

mehrdadn wrote: post #42
gingerlime wrote: post #38

The most useful thing I have is a little script that logs into my bank, downloads a CSV and sends me the latest transaction via email daily. Saves me time to login to online banking, and also serves as a useful way to search for previous transactions inside my mailbox from time to time. Besides that I use Home Assistant[0] with a few simple automations. For example, when the lights are on in the bathroom, and it's af…

> a little script that logs into my bank I've wanted to do something like this for so long but it just seems so painful. How do you do this with just a little script when there's so much Javascript involved in the page, as well as random interjections like random extra security verification steps? Do you have a particularly scrape-friendly bank?

You can emulate a user driven browser using a headless instance of Chrome. Look up some “chromedriver” tutorials. Hooks together nicely with Selenium.

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

#334

Post by hajrice »

zrail wrote: post #326
hajrice wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) What capital gains tax? You can run it through a company, which is what I do. 2) Broker fees are $0 as I use Robinhood. Like I said, I made a ~44% return. If a $7 trader fee is your argument for it not being viable then you are most likely not investing enough money, or not getting a decent return.

“Just run it through a company” isn’t the whole story. You also have to qualify as a trader and file an election to use the mark-to-market rules, and then you actually have to do mark-to-market accounting.

Profits that come from Stocks remain in your trading account. You transfer them from your trading account into your business bank account. The actual profit/difference is taxed. I don't understand what's so complicated?

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

#335

Post by Someone1234 »

ronald_raygun wrote: post #323

I once had a long distance girlfriend who lived on the east coast. She would like to see "good morning" texts from me, the problem is that they are 3 hours ahead, so I wrote an On.X bot to do it every morning and pick randomly from a handful of messages

Great job.

Only question I'd have is: Could this go wrong e.g. if you were away (and she knew it) but the bot continued. Also typically aren't good morning texts followed by light follow-up conversation?

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

#336

Post by jpdaigle »

_s wrote: post #109
roryisok wrote: post #102

We use a slow cooker which pretty much automates a lot of the process of making dinner. Just chop ingredients and throw them in. Now I just need to build a robot to chop veg

Food processor? ;)

In French, food processors are even called "robot culinaire"

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

#337

Post by ghaff »

Someone1234 wrote: post #331
kilroy123 wrote: post #324

Maybe not what anyone was expecting, but we've automated all the cleaning in the house. The clothes get washed, folded, and ironed. The trash gets taken out. All the plants get watered. How? The oldest form of automation. We pay someone to come and do it. We have a cleaning person come twice a week.

I'd be curious to know ballpark cost (and in which state just for cost of living). My biggest concern with letting a stranger into the home is theft/trust issues. While I'm sure most people have a good experience and I'm sure you can find a company that background checks, it is more personal paranoia (and it isn't cleaners in particular, I don't like leaving any strangers alone around the house).

I just have someone come every few weeks; she's been cleaning for my neighbor forever (in MA). $100 for a few hours work. It doesn't really handle day-to-day housework but it ensures things get dusted and vacuumed before they get too bad. She isn't nearby but a lot of people get someone local for $30/hr. for cleaning, dog-walking, etc. Not for everyone, but it's not rare.

I have a separate service do my lawn for about $60 every 2 weeks or so.

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

#338

Post by Someone1234 »

EdCoffey wrote: post #304

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 stat…

For #1, do you have any way of detecting dupes? For example if you inserted the same SD Card twice would you get two copies of the photos?

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

#339

Post by mehrdadn »

uptown wrote: post #333
mehrdadn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a little script that logs into my bank I've wanted to do something like this for so long but it just seems so painful. How do you do this with just a little script when there's so much Javascript involved in the page, as well as random interjections like random extra security verification steps? Do you have a particularly scrape-friendly bank?

You can emulate a user driven browser using a headless instance of Chrome. Look up some “chromedriver” tutorials. Hooks together nicely with Selenium.

In theory, yeah. I actually did try Selenium and Chrome several months or maybe a ~year ago. I don't remember exactly what the pain points were but I remember it was really painful to figure out how to get it to work. Everything from figuring out how to inject JS into a page to figuring out how to wait for events, etc. it was just a massive pain. I don't think I ever figured it out entirely.

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

#340

Post by peterburkimsher »

sergz wrote: post #239

I relocated to Germany but never studied German before and at work we all speak only English, so my German knowledge lacks a lot of words, though the grammar is OK. However here one has to deal with a huge number of letters, and there are always unknown words and phrases. So I have created a tool based on tesseract OCR, Qt and offline dictionaries of dict.cc to read letters and all kind of contracts. I also used www.…

Hi Sergz! I'm building something similar for Chinese, https://pingtype.github.io - there are a lot more letters to deal with over here. Do you have a link to your code?
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