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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?

#521

Post by stef25 »

LifeofPi314 wrote: post #328
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.

Where and how do you afford this?

In Belgium, the govt set up a system where "freelance" cleaners get paid 15€ / hr and also get health care, pension etc. This is all done electronically / online and works really well.

Normal people don't use cleaning companies but loads of people had a cleaner nevertheless who was paid "in black" prior to this system.

Now everyone's insured, pays taxes, gets long term benefits etc.

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

#522

Post by avoutthere »

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…

Have you documented the build process? If not, can you tell us more about the parts you used and the online resources you consulted?

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

#523

Post by skate22 »

For the first 9 years of my life, my family either did not have a PC or I was not allowed to use it for more than a few minutes. My parents relaxed a little bit and allowed my brother and i to read for an hour to play video games on the computer for an hour.

I played an online game called runescape where you could trade items to other players, but it was tedious and required a lot of repetitive typing: "buying chaos runes 80gp each".

I downloaded an auto typer but i was paranoid of getting banned. I wanted a more human auto typer so i found a tutorial for making one in visual basic. It was more or less copy and paste, and as a middle schooler i really did not understand the code.

I became really interested in botting after that, downloading, modifying, and eventually creating more sophisticated scripts. Automating the game became the new game for me.

I would come home from school to a banned account, think about how they may have detected me & automate smarter.

To this day I will often spend more time writing code to automate something than i save.

Automation is a way to make the mundane work a fun game

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

#524

Post by acalderaro »

skate22 wrote: post #523

For the first 9 years of my life, my family either did not have a PC or I was not allowed to use it for more than a few minutes. My parents relaxed a little bit and allowed my brother and i to read for an hour to play video games on the computer for an hour. I played an online game called runescape where you could trade items to other players, but it was tedious and required a lot of repetitive typing: "buying chaos…

Interestingly I learned Python by creating scripts to automate certain tasks in runescape - although I kept all the money on the account as I didn't want to cheat the game, I just wanted to make a good enough program that wouldn't get caught by their bot detection system.

It's a really fun game - if you're ever bored, you should check it out again! They have an 'old school runescape' which is essentially how the game was in 2007, without the later changes. Definitely 10/10 nostalgia.

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

#525

Post by AlphaWeaver »

A few years ago I used Trello to keep track of my tasks for the day in a Kanban board separated by date. I had a large backlog of tasks and then a "Due this Month" "Due this Week" "Due Tomorrow" and "Due Today" sections.

First I wrote code that automatically moved cards between the different sections, so I only ever had to look at the "Due Today" list.

Then I used Twilio to build a bot that gave me a wake up call every morning. I didn't like the TTS that Twilio used so I generated more realistic TTS via Amazon Polly and played it back. Polly has many different voices so I had seven different personas give me my task list for the day. After it read out what I had to do, it then began playing the latest BBC News update right over the phone.

The final phase of this project was a bot that called my girlfriend at the time, told her the weather, and then called me and conferenced us together so we could start our day saying hello to one another.

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

#526

Post by whycomb »

A daily email digest of changes to a google calendar, so my partner and I can use a shared calendar and keep track of what each other is adding without being emailed for every tiny change. It runs as a serverless Azure function, and has required no maintenance in a year, which is more than I can say about Outlook's ical integration which breaks every few months.

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

#527

Post by failedartifact »

I automated my bedroom lights in a house share. I have 3 lights: the main cieling and 2 more which are a floor standing and a desk light. For sensors, I have a magnet door switch and a PIR sensor to detect direction of travel (enterring or leaving the room) and a photocel sensor to detect day/night).

The main lihht turns on for 1.5 minutes, then the other 2 switch take over for 'chilled' lighting. If i leave, the lights go on a timer for 10 minutes. If the PIR doesnt pick up movement, or i have not returned, the lights go off. When going to sleep, i have an acarde button as a master switch to either turn on chilled lights or off.

The lights are controlled with 5v relay switches. No intrusive adjustment were made to the main light, as i bought male / female bayonet socket to wire/ wire to bayonet socket adapters.

An Arduino is controlling the whole thing, and the wire used is cheap RGB 4 pin wire off ebay which is i belive 24gauge?

Still a bit buggy after refactoring, but ill get there eventually: https://github.com/alfanhui/automated_home_lights

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

#529

Post by criddell »

vishalsharma wrote: post #433
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?

Sony sells something similar:

https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-notepad

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