611–620 of 749 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crock pots and slow cookers are essentially the same, as far as I know. The only difference I can remember is that one is a metal bowl, and the other is a ceramic bowl.
I've always thought Crock Pot was a brand. It's the Kleenex of slow cookers. I call my slow cooker a crock pot even though it's made by some Target brand.
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…
That sounds amazingly complex and cool at the same time. Have you looked into sous vide machines or pressure cookers? Those two are the items I use the most to get precisely cooked meals done in batches. I've found that a lot of meals done via the slow cooker tend to taste the same because of the consistently and the type of ingredients typically involved in them.
Sous-vide much more specialized, but I find super useful not for saving time, per say, but being more flexible about it. It's great when you are doing other things at the same time as cooking dinner, i.e. - leave the steaks another 30 min while I do this chore? no problem....
Digital archiving of important physical mail is a nice way to go paperless and keep track of documents. Get a good scanner and shredder, then set up a system to track your scanned documents. No more misplacing files and having to stuff cabinets with papers. Proxy phone number via Twilio or Google Voice for the times when you'd rather not give your real number out. Audio translations for digital books using espeak + p…
Can you give a basic writeup of your physical archiving to digital? A friend did this and I want to do this now
I then import those pdfs into paperwork in bulk. It has a label system and learns to apply labels correctly, which isn't 100% accurate but rather helpful. It also has rather quick fulltext search, which is nice. All in all, paperwork isn't perfect but it does the job well enough for me.
As a scanner, I got an Epson ES-200 (DS-310 in Europe) from Amazon Warehouse Deals (the packaging was dinged, which apparently justified a 35% discount).
I keep around the originals in a big chronological pile, rotated yearly. If I ever need an original document, I can search for it in my digital archive and find out its date. Then I can binary search for it in the pile.
The annoying part is scanning all your old stuff. Even with a fast feed scanner (mine is about as fast as Tesseract can process it in simplex, and twice as fast as the OCR in duplex, making my CPU -- and not the scanner -- the limiting factor), it just takes a lot of time.
I made a sensor board that has light, motion, temperature and humidity sensors and IR LEDs and put one in every room. I put Sonoffs on the lights and various other devices and wrote a small managing program to coordinate the lot, so lights turn on when you walk into a dark room and turn off if there's no motion or if you turn on another light. The IR LEDs also control the TV/AC/etc. I've also added various other thin…
Using Phillips Hue light bulbs with the Hue API, I created a PHP script that automates a number of lights in the house to perform different actions at different times of day. A light on my nightstand does a slow fade up for easy waking in the morning and then switches itself off about an hour later once my wife and I are long out of bed. There are also a lights throughout the house that flip on at sunset and then switch off at different times later in the evening, signaling, hey, it's time for bed. Yes, I could use a smartphone app (or apps) to do similar tasks, but having direct control in script form is so much easier. Changing times or adding a new bulb into the system is just a matter of editing an array in the script.
We also have a terrible time with water leaking in the basement. The sump pump we have does push out water fairly well when it runs, but it gets overwhelmed easily. Plus, the float doesn't always work correctly, so water can collect in the pit without the pump switching on like it's supposed to. So, using a combination of a TP-Link smartplug, a Wireless Tag water sensor, IFTTT and another custom PHP script linking to the TP-Link API, I now have a system that keeps water out permanently. This particular sump pump has a manual switch that allows it to run, bypassing the float. I leave the switch in the ON position and plug the pump into the TP-Link smartplug. Then I mounted the Wireless Tag water sensor in one of the basement drain pipes. If the water rises high enough to trigger the sensor, IFTTT triggers the TP-Link plug and the sump pump runs. Once the sensor no longer detects water, IFTTT again sends a signal to trigger the plug so that the pump stops. Along with this method, using PHP with the TP-Link API, I monitor weatherundergound.com every 20 minutes and if the current conditions show any form of rain, the script switches the pump on, lets it run for 10 minutes and then switches it off. Just long enough to keep the water level from rising too high. I connected all these water prevention items up a few months ago and haven't had even close to a wet basement since. (Oh and, why not just get a better, working correctly pump? The pump was apparently put in by the city years ago, long before I moved in, and is a cheap "torpedo cylinder" pump. Our plumber said it would take $thousands to tear up the basement floor to install a correct pump and the pump can't just be replaced because no one makes the type of pump any longer that would fit in the current pit. So going the automation route just set me back about $100.)
I made a sensor board that has light, motion, temperature and humidity sensors and IR LEDs and put one in every room. I put Sonoffs on the lights and various other devices and wrote a small managing program to coordinate the lot, so lights turn on when you walk into a dark room and turn off if there's no motion or if you turn on another light. The IR LEDs also control the TV/AC/etc. I've also added various other thin…
Really interested in what sensor boards you used to detect everything. Have you shared any of your code at all? Sounds like a really cool project.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/building-cheap-home-sensorcontr...
I used an ESP8266 with cheapo sensors, the whole board costs like $5 or something. The software is pretty ad-hoc but is not more than 100 lines of code.
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.
I'd be curious to know ballpark cost (and in which state just for cost of living). My biggest concern with letting a stranger into the home is theft/trust issues. While I'm sure most people have a good experience and I'm sure you can find a company that background checks, it is more personal paranoia (and it isn't cleaners in particular, I don't like leaving any strangers alone around the house).
If that doesn't work, and if you're ethically ok with it, you could put some cameras around the house (turned on only during the day when the cleaner comes). Dashcams are reasonably cheap nowadays.
My mum did run a B&B, in Italy, on the sea. Me and my sister do live in different cities. She was quite old, but did not want any help from strangers. She did refuse to use a computer keyboard, since she hated informatization, and her sight was short. So I did automate a system for her to scan the guests documents, detect the data required by local police for registration via OCR, fill up the form to send those data,…
I think people underestimate the power of IoT and automation to make independent living possible much longer. I recently installed the basics of my home automation system at my grandma's. Her keeping her thermostat set reasonably was an issue, and I've got the smoke detector on the system as well. One of the things I'd like to add is the ability to detect natural gas: She doesn't have a lot of gas appliances, but she…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. I see two options here. First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky. The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database. On the other hand,…
> I see two options here. Yes, or perhaps a combination of techniques. E.g. shared database to train an ML system to detect ads. Of course, the downside is that the ad industry will then tweak the ads until they pass the ML test. > I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations. I wouldn't think of it as taking away a source of income, but rather as forcing them t…
Nothing like a little competition to motivate the improvement of ML systems :)
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…
Please do a writeup on this! One of the reasons I've been dragging my feet on home ownership is I'm not a fan of lawn mowing. Now if only you could also automate shoveling/snowblowing.