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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?

#481

Post by pimeys »

anderspitman wrote: post #276
pimeys wrote: post #108

I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go. For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android. Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and c…

For those interested in personal T1D data management, Tidepool[0] is a fantastic (and open source) nonprofit in this space. [0] https://tidepool.org

The problem with this software is that you don't get uploads automatically. I use Nightscout and InfluxDB with Grafana, and just set xDrip and AAPS to upload every new value automatically. Now I can have a browser tab open showing the glucose graph and medication and see changes happening real time.

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

#482

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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.

You just described people working for you as robots.

I understand it was meant to be a harmless joke but it's still not so nice to say.

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

#483

Post by A_Person »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #480
A_Person wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that would make it much simpler (if that's what you're getting at). There's tons of grunt work that just has to be done - eg. calculating expected dividend payments (by automatically matching portfolio details to dividend schedules from corporate websites), and automatically matching those to bank account credits - all through code. Despite the laughs that the VB languages get on HN, VBScript is in fact…

> And I'd still be bound to the IE automation model. Why? You fetch data, calculate stuff and give out reports. Unless there is heavy javascript involved, you don't need a browser for any of this. But now you are dependent on the fragile setup you have created, hopping that VBScript, IE and your datasources will continue to work as long as you live. Becoming independant and gaining a future ground would be a valid re…

All of the websites concerned have strict authorization requirements and none have public APIs afaics. At the start, it just seemed easiest to automatically scrape them. I guess I could have reverse engineer their private APIs and used those - but as the doctors say, the retrospectoscope is a rare and expensive piece of equipment!

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

#484

Post by PurpleRamen »

A_Person wrote: post #483
PurpleRamen wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I'd still be bound to the IE automation model. Why? You fetch data, calculate stuff and give out reports. Unless there is heavy javascript involved, you don't need a browser for any of this. But now you are dependent on the fragile setup you have created, hopping that VBScript, IE and your datasources will continue to work as long as you live. Becoming independant and gaining a future ground would be a valid re…

All of the websites concerned have strict authorization requirements and none have public APIs afaics. At the start, it just seemed easiest to automatically scrape them. I guess I could have reverse engineer their private APIs and used those - but as the doctors say, the retrospectoscope is a rare and expensive piece of equipment!

Is authorization done with some activeX-applet? Otherwise I don't really see what IE is offering that Chrome offers too, but scrapping-libs can't.

BTW There are libs to use chrome programatically for those things. It's called headless-mode or chromeDriver. Similar things exist for other Browsers. So you could probably rewrite your app to become more indipendant without lossing the existing functionality.

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

#485

Post by pimeys »

radiKal07 wrote: post #456
pimeys wrote: post #108

I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go. For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android. Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and c…

Hey man, look into the keto diet.

I've been doing research about keto diet and tried it out a couple of times. I think it's not worth it, food being more expensive and so on. I'm in a good shape, eating normal food and sometimes stuff like pizza. My glucose is excellent, I'm in a very tight control now with the current system. It's much nicer this way than I need to worry about every time I go to a restaurant (in Berlin) what kind of food they serve.

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

#486

Post by taneq »

bochoh wrote: post #194
tga wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a third option, ads are by definition short and repeat a lot. No fancy ML needed, after a couple of times the filter gets one of these repeating fragments it should be able to block it. Fairness bonus: you get to hear each new ad a couple of times.

The problem you have here is that in order to continue listening to songs more than just a couple of times you'd have to able to classify the song versus an ad. Otherwise once the system heard the song a few times it would start blocking it too.

Ads repeat several times an hour, songs very seldom repeat within an hour and even then usually only once. It should be possible (although not sure how practical) to just autocorrelate the current audio with audio over the past hour.

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

#487

Post by patrickk »

Autohotkey is capable of doing some remarkable things (windows only sadly).

Here's a cool "launcher" project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv2LAqkmd1c&feature=youtu.be

https://github.com/plul/Public-AutoHotKey-Scripts

With Pulover's Macro creator, you can literally record actions with mouse and keyboard, get the output in AHK script and tidy it up. You can trivially recognise pixels, meaning you can tell your mouse to click x,y coordinates or a certain button (for when there is no API for something, for example)

http://www.macrocreator.com/

Some genius made a virtual workspace for windows using AHK: https://github.com/octalmage/mdesktop

Some random uses I have for AHK:

* trigger today's date in dd.mm.yy (or dd-mm-yy, or any combo you like) with a macro, useful for when you drafting documents and need to quickly insert the date

* lookup the train schedule from work to home with a keypress

* shortcut to German characters on an EN keyboard

* paste and translate to/from english with dict.cc and leo.org in separate tabs

* "sig" expands to my email signature

* shortcuts to colleagues' obscure foreign names, which I always misspell in emails (saves embarrassment!)

* macro to run common applications like notepad, chrome, powershell (obvious use case)

* macro to open an excel to do list

* Quickly switch between headphone types on a work PC (USB headphones and regular headphone jack needed some fiddly settings to be changed to switch between them) (https://autohotkey.com/docs/commands/SoundSet.htm)

* Tool for popup window, can be used to display almost anything, e.g. your list of shortcuts in case you forget them! - https://autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=100953#p100953

* Huge list of ideas here: https://github.com/ahkscript/awesome-AutoHotkey

AHK has a huge amount of cool projects on the forums, and it runs like lightning since it is very resource light.

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

#488

Post by keerthiko »

I automated work reimbursements.

I drop pdfs in a dropbox folder from any device, and at the end of the month, my home computer combines the pdfs, attaches it to an email and sends it off to accounting. I could have it autodetect which invoices from my email match work expenses, but the hard-to-automate part is needing to upload paper receipts.

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

#489

Post by exodust »

mosselman wrote: post #440
aws_ls wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.co…

Here in Australia, Thermomix was recently ordered to pay $4.6 million in penalties for knowingly keeping safety issues relating to one of their appliances secret.

A malfunctioning lid caused hot liquid to escape from the bowl, giving several consumers severe burns. The Court found that Thermomix knew of this risk but still continued to promote and supply the faulty product.

Beware of genius inventions, you may get burned.

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

#490

Post by catamorphismic »

pimeys wrote: post #108

I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go. For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android. Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and c…

The Dexcom G5 website says you should recalibrate with a meter every 12 hours to ensure accurate readings. Do you really have to recalibrate that often?
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