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

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531–540 of 749 posts

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

#531

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…

Haha that's awesome, there was quite a community for it back in the day. I actually log on to oldschool once in a while for the nostalgia, though I do not bot it anymore.

This is off topic, but I love/hate the system where all new content must pass a community poll. I feel like people are slowly voting for the updates that people hated back in the day (claws, ely, magic dmg % boosting gear). Stat creep is now almost as it was right before EOC, where you can get stacked out from full hp & brewed in one game tic (which kind of kills the hybrid scene)

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

#532

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.

Part of me wants to be offended by that but part of me knows every one of us is just a cog in a machine, some bigger than others but really... not that much bigger.

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

#533
SO was complaining that I never text her while at work. Wrote a twilio app to pull random sentimental quotes from rumi and others, fit it into a personalised looking message spelling mistakes included )"thinking of you" etc.), and send it to her at random times of the day from my number. Weird thing is when I mentioned it was automated, she didn't believe me, so we kept it going till she broke up with me eventually.

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

#534

1. When I plug my camera's SD card into the front of my Linux server it automatically copies off any new photos and sorts them into a YYYY/DD/MM folder structure. 2. I wrote a cryptocurrency trading bot because I'm too lazy/uninterested to actually learn anything about the market. It seemed to do pretty well when the market was flat or going up. Hard to tell if it's doing badly now or if it's just reflecting the stat…

What exchange service are you using in #2?

Bittrex.

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

#535
I automated my phone integration with my car using Automate.

When I leave my wifi hotspot it turns on bluetooth.

When/if it connects to my car it opens Spotify (but it doesnt start playing yet before I hit play on the steering weel).

If it's in my car's handler (there's a NFC tag there) it assumes I want navigation and it also opens Waze.

When it disconnects it turns on wifi again and keep it on for a few minutes and shut it down if it's not connected to anything.

I'm sure android auto can do all this nowadays, but my car has a 7-years-old ford-sync system, and that's bluetooth only.

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exchange service are you using in #2?

And sorry, that folder structure in #1 has no sense

Oops, I meant to write YYYY/MM/DD. I even proofread it before submitting.

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

#537
Turning on my AC when I leave work. I recorded the "ON' IR signals for my remote, and hooked up an IR emmitter on the wall opposite the AC. A Tasker profile (useful for automating stuff on android) pings my ras-pi home server whenever I leave work in the evening, which turns on my AC, so I arrive to an already cooled room. I also have a clunky webpage to manually turn it on/off which I use if I'm not going home directly from work.

And then, auto-downloading TV shows/movies via Jackett+Radarr+Sonarr

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

#538
I automated my bugzilla integration.

As a software maintainer, people sends Bugzilla entry in all different forms: Full link, only numbers, BZ, BZ#.

Of the last tree options, I need to open an random bugzilla link, remove the ID and replace with the sent number. It's like 10 seconds work, but I have to do it 20~40 times a day.

Nowadays, I mouse-select some numbers and press CTRL+B. A 10-lines-python-script is called from gnome. It uses xsel to see what do I have selected and, if it looks like a BZ, it opens firefox will the full link for me.

It's ridiculous simple, but it's a time/sanity saver for me.

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

#539
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a good recipe website where you could press a button to import it and change it / save it. Could make sharing recpies and searching for them centralized and readable instead of the current system of blog posts and images or shudder gifs.

Paprika for iOS took me pretty far in this direction. I bought it on a recommendation from a friend so I could strip out the blog posts and index recipes, but the grocery shopping features ended up making it something I used all the time. You still share with the original URL, but I've got friends who are into cooking on it now and it's just as quick for them to save.

I am a heavy Paprika user as well.

Emailing the recipe formats the content into an email body text and doesn't require the recipient to go to the website. It also includes a .paprikarecipe attachment for direct import into the recipients Paprika app.

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