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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?

#431

Post by msravi »

gopikori wrote: post #395

My internet provider Hathway (in Pune, India) used to throw up a login page every now and then throwing all my networked devices out of gear. The captive portal required doing login via browser to start internet again. I wrote automation scripts on Raspberry Pi to figure out when internet access is gone and then to do auto-login. Here is the detailed blog - http://gopi-kori.blogspot.com/2013/08/auto-login-to-hathway-…

Not as much fun, but you can request them for a static IP for no extra charge, and the requirement to periodically login will go away. At least, that used to be the case until I moved away from Hathway in Bangalore (about 2 years ago).

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

#432

Post by sav0h »

lucasverra wrote: post #266
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) ^^

Ha, yes that would have been much simpler :)

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

#433

Post by vishalsharma »

foolano wrote: post #110

I bought an e-reader called reMarkable [0] that I use every day to read technical stuff on it. At some point, I got tired of the process to sync files: download the document from the browser, open the reMarkable app and drag the file into it. I automated this workflow, and now I can just "print" directly to the device [1] the article/document I'm reading. [0] https://remarkable.com/ [1] https://github.com/juruen/rmap…

This is interesting but not available in India , any similar products you know as an Alternative for India?

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

#434

Post by dest »

Kadin wrote: post #388
t0mek wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I see two options here. First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky. The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database. On the other hand,…

Easier still... in the US, many radio stations transmit the artist and song title that's currently being played, via a low-bitrate subcarrier encoding. (The proper name is "Radio Data System", IIRC.) There were previously some FM to MP3 "ripping" tools that would use the RDS information to tag the resulting recordings -- I'm not sure of the status of them. But it could provide a good way to detect commercials, since…

It certainly works for some stations, but not for many other (from personal experience in France), and it would be trivial for radios to change their RDS / metadata system to circumvent ad blocking.

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

#435

Post by scarejunba »

a_rahmanshah wrote: post #408
scarejunba wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not able to seek on the video he has embedded (using Chrome on Android here). I'd probably have looked for more than 10 s if I could have.

Here you go - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPooW6tqQts

Thank you.

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

#436

Post by carlmr »

dest wrote: post #434
Kadin wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easier still... in the US, many radio stations transmit the artist and song title that's currently being played, via a low-bitrate subcarrier encoding. (The proper name is "Radio Data System", IIRC.) There were previously some FM to MP3 "ripping" tools that would use the RDS information to tag the resulting recordings -- I'm not sure of the status of them. But it could provide a good way to detect commercials, since…

It certainly works for some stations, but not for many other (from personal experience in France), and it would be trivial for radios to change their RDS / metadata system to circumvent ad blocking.

As long as it's only individuals doing this I don't see anybody reacting on a wide scale. Also there's no feedback of listener numbers depending on volume. So there's no way to detect people "adblocking" on radio, so there's no impact on revenue.

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

#437

Post by a1studmuffin »

I automated searching for a rental property across all the major property websites in my country. In particular I was looking for properties with certain attributes (bathtub, lock up garage etc.), in a specific set of areas (GPS-based areas predefined on a Google Map based on proximity to train station, dog park, nearest shops etc. in suburbs my wife and I liked). None of the existing property websites offered anywhere near that level of search and notification customisation, so I cobbled together a Python script that scraped the websites on a daily basis and ran all the results through a filter. Anything interesting was emailed to us both so we could reply by email and have a conversation about it. My wife and I decided to be super fussy since we didn't need to bother manually searching. After about 6 months my script found a winner and we're now in an awesome place that ticks all of our boxes.

I didn't dare automate the application process... I had nightmares of 450 property managers calling me at once saying "Congratulations". :)

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

#438

Post by mosselman »

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…

You might find investing into a Thermomix a good idea:

https://thermomix.com/

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

#439

Post by hangonhn »

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…

Your tone sounds mildly apologetic but what you've cooked up (pun intended) is overflowing with pure hacker audacity and just mad nerdiness. You are a hero!

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

#440

Post by mosselman »

aws_ls wrote: post #415
elvisds wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend is getting such a system to production for Indian recipes with Mechnical Chef [1] The demo looks incredibly cool [2] [1] http://www.mechanicalchef.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBB0ZaN1paE

Your friend is a genius! Any idea, how much is it going to cost? And will they plan to sell it in India?

Building a clunky device that imitates human actions is hardly 'genius'. Resourceful maybe. An electrical coffee grinder isn't a normal coffee grinder with some rotating lever attached to it. An electrical coffee grinder has small motors attached to the grinder mechanism in order to make it move. This contraption is fun to build I am sure, but not 'genius'.

Much closer to genius is the thermomix: https://thermomix.com/

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