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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?

#441

Post by koevet »

pawal wrote: post #423
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?

Not at all, it's just an average. Some books are shorter than 250 pages, other longer.

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

#442

Post by dontstopnowbaby »

a1studmuffin wrote: post #437

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 anywhe…

I'd like to know more about your script(s).

I assume a custom web scraper would have to be configured against some property listing sites.

Is it configured to work on any specific site, Would it work in any part of the world?

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

#443

Post by roel_v »

twblalock wrote: post #317
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…

Has it ever chopped up a squirrel, or the neighbor's cat?

(not OP, have regular robo mower) Animals are no problem, they get out of the way themselves. Children leaving toys out (or socks), or branches that have been blown off trees, or chestnuts - those make for some scary noises.

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

#444

Post by gitgud »

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…

Remarkable is a Markdown viewer right? So basically you open a HTML webpage in remarkable? Is that so you can modify the source?

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

#445

Post by easytiger »

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?

Whilst an impressively ambitious amateur electronics project, this is clearly not productisable and won't work for a whole ton of reasons. A reduced scope project or device however might be.

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

#446

Post by pimeys »

aloisamae wrote: post #346
pimeys wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course a big thanks goes to the European health insurance, who're willing to pay the expensive parts, and to my doctor, who pushes me to do research about my possibilities, having a circle of connections who've helped me out to build my own rig. P.S. Today I built a new widget to my i3 setup, displaying the current glucose and the trend. https://i.imgur.com/VnZ23vO.png

My younger brother has type 1 diabetes and he really liked your setup! Do you happen to have written about it somewhere?

Not yet, but I'm planning to. For him there's some good reading, starting with OpenAPS. AndroidAPS is implementing the research from OpenAPS and the site has lots of papers and documentation to read.

https://openaps.org/

AndroidAPS and OpenAPS do not work with all the same hardware, So you choose your rig based on your CGM and Pump model.

If I'd be him, I'd start by trying to get my hands into Dexcom G5 system or if he doesn't have a good insurance, the Freestyle Libre has some unofficial bluetooth readers available that work with Xdrip. First you get your continuous glucose monitoring working and then start thinking about automating the insulin delivery.

These projects started because we're not waiting. The organization behind is called Nightscout and their website has information how to build the needed hardware:

http://www.nightscout.info/

Now the pump manufacturers are seriously planning to bring closed loop systems like I have here to the market. The only model right now that has some of the features is Medtronic 670g, but in comparison, if you know what you're doing, building an open source rig will give you much more control and features than the commercial offerings. This might change in a couple of years though.

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

#447

Post by stockkid »

I usually rewrite React.js components between function and class. This is tedious and at the same time a common task. Therefore I wrote a program that takes a javascript code as an input, and returns a converted code. It does so by parsing the input and walking the AST.

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

#448

Post by vajenetehais »

We (with the wife) automated menu for the week and the shopping list. A database store all recipes (ingredients, time taken...) and the menu composer chose semi-randomly* into the list.

* : Menu composer takes into account :

- in season vegetables,

- number of reutilisation of the ingredient,

- number of reutilisation of the meal,

- expiration of the ingredients (vegetables can expire rather quickly)

- various parameters (if it is a busy week or not, number of days you want to cook...)

It's really a relief. No need to decide what to cook after work : it's already decided, and you know you have the right ingredients. Time spend for the shopping is very small.

I want to be able to plug that into an online shopping website, but as always, websites don't display there API so i'm trying to hack into it... (and people still talk about API economy...)

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

#449

Post by patrickk »

robk wrote: post #35

I run a Huginn server which has hundreds of recipes. Most scrape websites and send me updates either by pushover or email for things that matter -- news sites via rss with heavy keyword filtering for news that's important to me like hometown news etc (Google alerts style) -- firmware updates from various devices that wouldn't otherwise notify me like kindle -- posts up voted over X times in a period on smaller, speci…

Nice! Where do you host your Huginn server? I've had trouble getting Huginn running on my RPi, I've to try again soon to get it running. Any chance you'd be willing to share some of your recipies? I know someone who scrapes a certain deals website in my country, and gets Telegram texts for items matching certain parameters, which is cool.

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

#450

Post by DoubleGlazing »

elvisds wrote: post #361
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…

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

That's impressive, really impressive.

My system looks like it was put together by a drunk person. That is somewhat true.

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