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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?

#421

Post by slg »

klekih wrote: post #414
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…

And how much time did you spend automating those things? Is it worth? i.e Is the time spent on cooking minus time spent on automating a positive number?

Your comment reminds me of my favorite Douglas Adams quote:

"I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."

Sometimes it simply isn't about net time saved.

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

#422

Post by albertgoeswoof »

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 old is your dog? After 5-6 months they should not need to go out in the night. Either you need to train them not to or take them the vet to check if they have bladder problems

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

#423

Post by pawal »

koevet wrote: post #420

I have automated a couple of metrics that I like to keep an eye on. Credit card expenditure: since my old-school bank has no API of sort, I trigger via Tasker a daily sms to a bank number that replies with the amount left before I get to my CC limit. I then parse the sms (Tasker again, using JS) and display the amount that I have spent so far on the home of my mobile. This simple warning has dramatically helped me to…

Does this make you avoid reading very long books?

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

#424

Post by acd »

I have automated payment of recurring bills. This was after paying a lot in interest reminder fees and at a period working to much. The billing automation makes me not worry if I paid bills or not.

We have sometimes automated household shopping. We order food online at a grocery chain and the next day it is delivered home.

Automation most of us use washing machine. Cloth drying. Dishwasher. These three automation saves a lot of time.

Cleaning of car through car wash at times.

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

#425

Post by cstrat »

slg wrote: post #421
klekih wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much time did you spend automating those things? Is it worth? i.e Is the time spent on cooking minus time spent on automating a positive number?

Your comment reminds me of my favorite Douglas Adams quote: "I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand." Sometimes it simply isn't about net time saved.

oh man that is hilarious. I am so on that wavelength :)

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

#426

Post by mkl »

mehrdadn wrote: post #400
mkl wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few possibilities. The main PDF commands for text are "Tj" and "TJ", so you can try searching for them. Text commands must also be between "BT" and "ET". Maybe a bit harder to search for are the other two text commands: ' and ". TJ is "Show text, allowing individual glyph positioning" which means strings are not necessarily in the PDF as the strings themselves, but have glyph positioning info mixed into t…

Interesting, thank you for the explanation! I am indeed seeing a lot of Tj's and BT/ET's, but not any TJ's. Immediately preceding the Tj's are a lot of non-text characters that don't look like anything human-readable. Immediately following them are other other commands (Td, Tf, rg, k, etc.) which are preceded by numbers. There are no CustomEncodings. So I guess this means I can't really grep anything?

Sounds like it. The T commands are text related and rg and k are setting colour in RGB and CMYK. You may be able to figure it out by changing a colour, then looking at what is suddenly bright red or whatever you set. Or by changing the string preceding Tj. When editing, make sure you don't change the length of any objects (use space to pad) as there are hardcoded offsets in a table, usually at the end.

The PDF specification, while long, is pretty readable for this kind of thing. You can download the 1.7 version free from Adobe. Appendix A has a table of commands.

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

#427

Post by mehrdadn »

mkl wrote: post #426
mehrdadn wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thank you for the explanation! I am indeed seeing a lot of Tj's and BT/ET's, but not any TJ's. Immediately preceding the Tj's are a lot of non-text characters that don't look like anything human-readable. Immediately following them are other other commands (Td, Tf, rg, k, etc.) which are preceded by numbers. There are no CustomEncodings. So I guess this means I can't really grep anything?

Sounds like it. The T commands are text related and rg and k are setting colour in RGB and CMYK. You may be able to figure it out by changing a colour, then looking at what is suddenly bright red or whatever you set. Or by changing the string preceding Tj. When editing, make sure you don't change the length of any objects (use space to pad) as there are hardcoded offsets in a table, usually at the end. The PDF specif…

Thanks! This was cool info.

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

#428

Post by ioulian »

ramshorns wrote: post #403
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…

Does the wire ever get in your way or trip you when you're walking around the lawn?

I think it's beneath the lawn, buried in the ground.

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

#429

Post by gitgud »

siavosh wrote: post #348
hajrice wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would probably never reach scale for obvious reasons, but someone should productize this. "I'll get you a 20% more high paying job for $1,000"

I review resumes periodically for my job and it certainly feels like someone(s) already have.

So you can tell which applications were built by software? I was always hesitant to attempt automating job applications
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