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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?

#731

Post by roryisok »

notoriousjpg wrote: post #708
nojvek wrote: post #205

When the dog used to wake me up in the middle of the night to drink water and take him out, I had to do to it manually. Now it’s all automated, my body just does it. 90% of brain is asleep. I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.

I've always wondered if there is an opportunity for bidets for babies to reduce the mess of changing a diaper. Thoughts?

They're not that messy, 90% of nappy changes are just wet not dirty. For the other 10% it would be rare (in my experience of four babies) that things get particularly messy, but if they do you can always fill a baby bath or bathroom sink. Having a dedicated bidet for a baby seems like more unnecessary stuff.

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

#732

Post by dragonwriter »

notoriousjpg wrote: post #708
nojvek wrote: post #205

When the dog used to wake me up in the middle of the night to drink water and take him out, I had to do to it manually. Now it’s all automated, my body just does it. 90% of brain is asleep. I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.

I've always wondered if there is an opportunity for bidets for babies to reduce the mess of changing a diaper. Thoughts?

How would a bidet in any way reduce the mess of changing a diaper, much less work for a baby in the first place?

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

#733

Post by alpaca128 »

Jolter wrote: post #720
martin-adams wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or tap the phone while it’s in the pocket

I doubt that software could tell the difference between (a long tap) and (a short tap followed by a pause).

With a long tap the phone would immediately "bounce" back a bit, while holding the finger down would delay that. I'm not sure how reliable that would be, though.

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

#734

Post by coryfklein »

roryisok wrote: post #730
coryfklein wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The automated diaper changes are real. Once you can do it all in darkness (or near darkness) yours hands just learn all the movements and you get it done so quickly you are back in bed and asleep very soon. Sleep still gets disrupted to some degree (you can't drop straight back into interrupted REM), but much less than you'd think.

Provided they're only wet. Please don't try to handle a dirty nappy subconsciously in the dark :)

By the time you level up to subconscious diaper changing the kid is usually past the stage where messy diapers happen at night, but yea if you detect something nuclear down there its best to turn the light on and get it done right. XD

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

#735

Post by petters »

mehrdadn wrote: post #48
petters wrote: post #44

Parsing my monthly credit card bill (PDF), categorizing, and displaying statistics.

Ooh, I've been looking for something like this. Could I ask how you parse your bills? Did you just hack together your own script or did you find a parser online? I tried doing this several times but it seems rather painful to get right since the formats can differ and since copying text from PDFs can sometimes ignore the table layouts and whatnot.

I have just written my own parser. Took some work when my bank switched from txt to PDF.

Then I match keywords in the strings to categorize the expenses. These days, this would be called AI :)

Edit: I use pdftotext, which has a mode that keeps the spatial structure of tables. Works for my bank.

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

#736

Post by aendruk »

fratlas wrote: post #377
aendruk wrote: post #376

My laptop buzzes loudly if I slouch or put my hands on my face. Minimal effort implementation; damianmoore/tensorflow-image-classifier, fswebcam, cron, aplay.

Can you open source this? Sounds helpful

  fswebcam --no-banner capture.jpg \
  && classify.sh tf_files classifier capture.jpg \
    | head --lines 1 | grep --quiet '^slouching\b' \
  && aplay buzzer.wav
Polish to taste.

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

#737

Post by TheDecentTech »

sliken wrote: post #8

Automatic driveway lights via motion sensor. Automatic house fan (when in saves me money on heating or cooling). Light assisted alarm, makes the bedroom lights 10% brighter a minute before the alarm goes off. Pretty amazing how cheap things are these days, an arduino or Pi 0w and some relays can do quite a bit. Just bought a opengarage.io and considering the opensprinkler.

What did you use to accomplish the light assisted alarm?

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

#738

Post by StudyAnimal »

marcol1n0 wrote: post #544

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,…

We normally use the past participle where you use the interrogative. Except in the last paragraph. Two separate people wrote that post didn’t they :-)

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

#739

Post by tabacitu »

Love personal automation.

- found a service where in the morning they bring 3 meals + 2 snacks, everything you should eat for the day; especially during stressful times, it's so so good not have to think about food; you just eat what you've been given; - I no longer trade cryptos myself, I have Shrimpy, HodlBot and Iconomi to do that for me; this may not be "personal" but it saves me at least 10 hours every week, and the performance is a little better than my dumb self; - I found a shirt I adored, so I bought a bunch of identical ones; this in addition to having identical socks and identical underwear makes it that I only have to choose&match my pants and shoes; and mine kind of all match; saves headspace; - I never read or watch news; only read headlines in newsletters I trust; saves time and headspace; - I used Github Probots to automate A LOT of replies issues/PRs; I consider this "personal" because it's tied to my hobby;

In addition, for the past 6 months I've turned a bunch of things I was doing / wanted to do into emails. I've built https://schedulethatemail.com/ for that sole purpose, help me do the stuff I wasn't doing, or that was repetitive (shameless self-promotion, I know). Here are some of the personal things I've automated through email, though some are now canceled:

- I used to forget/postpone seeing some friends I really care about, now I automatically email them to catch up (different intervals 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months); some have no idea it's automated :-) - I always wanted to write a journal, but never stuck to it; now I receive an email from myself each day with a few questions, 8/10 times I answer; works because I use my email as my todo list; push notifications don't work for me; - I have this poem, this mantra, this whatchamacallit that I like to read every day, to remind myself of who I am, my values and principles; especially when I interact with people I don't like, every day, it helps me stay myself, and not change in a bad way; works because I use my email as my todo list; - I automatically email my landlord, accountant, etc to tell them I've done something, or I'll do something within 24 hours, before they even ask; self-applied peer pressure - I'm on time most months now;

I had more, but I forget...

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

#740

Post by coreypreston »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #450
elvisds wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend is getting such a system to production for Indian recipes with Mechnical Chef [1] The demo looks incredibly cool [2] [1] http://www.mechanicalchef.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBB0ZaN1paE

That's impressive, really impressive. My system looks like it was put together by a drunk person. That is somewhat true.

That's how you know its built with quabity!
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