Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 749 posts

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

#511

Post by pimeys »

catamorphismic wrote: post #490
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?

Not really, but you should really know how the calibrations work and understand when they might be off. It takes time to learn and understanding the basic math behind doesn't hurt.

Always calibrate when you are not sure.

G6 promises a no-calibration mode, but has a hard stop for sensors after 10 days. With G5 and calibrations you can double or triple the sensor lifetime (with xDrip).

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

#512

Post by stevekemp »

cuchoi wrote: post #113

Checking the status of my visa application.

Finland has a central population index, and makes various statistics available online. For example you can carry out a name search to see how many people are called "Steve".

When my son was born I wrote a script which checked the index every day and raised an alert when the number of people in the country with our surname increased by one.

That was the first official recognition that he was "real", so I had a before/after screenshot which was cute to see.

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

#513

Post by nanospeck »

A_Person wrote: post #170

Ok, I'll bite! About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that…

I’m interested to work on it. Can u share the details in nanospeck0@gmail.com

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

#514

Post by gricardo99 »

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…

please add some photos or video of your system in action. It sounds super cool. Especially the "very clunky" nature of it would inspire people to take on pretty daunting projects like this and get a "MVP" up and running. Just your description is inspiring. Thank you.

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

#515

Post by sokoloff »

keyle wrote: post #362
twblalock wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm no expert, but Cats and Squirrels would be pretty good at hearing and seeing danger, even feeling vibrations nearby. I doubt they'd get caught by a lawn mower at walking speed.

I’ve mowed (personally and as a summer job when younger) for almost 40 years. Animals of all sorts seem to avoid the mower when already runnng.

As a kid, I gave our family cat a close scalping. It was late fall and we were picking up leaves with the mower. After a lunch break, I fired up the mower and the cat shot out from underneath making an awful noise and headed for the woods.

We assumed she was fatally injured until two/three days later when she came walking back up the sidewalk, sporting a close shave on one part of her head, but otherwise seeming uninjured. She got plenty of her favorite food that day!

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

#517

Post by stef25 »

greenyouse wrote: post #264
notananthem wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a basic writeup of your physical archiving to digital? A friend did this and I want to do this now

There wasn't much to the paper archiving. I bought a fancy scanner[0] and already had a shredder. To store the files on disk I keep directories marked by topic/year/month/day. The topics are stuff like taxes, finances, bills, etc. The important documents are in a couple encrypted HDDs that I use for backups. I've been thinking of doing an offsite storage like Backblaze B2 but it's probably overkill. After scanning st…

Won't you ever need an original document? Like something with a signature on it.

I'd love to do this as well but I'm sure at some point in the future I'll hear "sorry this won't do, we need the original".

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

#518

Post by martin-adams »

coffeeskull wrote: post #516

I'm a qa tester. Just wrote a reactjs application that takes test case steps and parameters as the input and spits out fully written test cases in .csv format as the output. Has saved me weeks of work.

I did a similar thing using Excel. Just fill in the combination of parameters to test and it spit out the test code.

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

#519

Post by bkor »

UncleEntity wrote: post #139
nopcode wrote: post #63

I automated all my piracy. My NAS automatically downloads files as they are released by scene/p2p/pirate groups. Files are extracted (if compressed), renamed, metadata is added, and published on some apps like plex and trakt. Movies, TV Shows, Music.

I got all fancy and hacked together a tinydb backend for transmission-daemon to automate pulling from an rss feed. Was using a simple text file at first (to avoid duplicates) but without proper internet service I needed a way to cache the shows until I could eventually download them. Now I just need to figure out an efficient way to download from them from my Hungarian vps since the cellphone internets are slowwww...

> I got all fancy and hacked together a tinydb backend for transmission-daemon to automate pulling from an rss feed.

Suggest looking into Flexget. It unfortunately has loads of dependencies, but on the upside it's super smart. E.g. prevent duplicate downloads, etc.

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

#520

Post by martin-adams »

13of40 wrote: post #222
YaxelPerez wrote: post #119

I used Tasker to make my phone vibrate in Morse code. Now I don't have to take it out of my pocket to read a notification.

You should make it so you can reply by bouncing your leg up and down. (Then go have an Edward Thorp weekend in Vegas of course.)

Or tap the phone while it’s in the pocket
Post reply on HN