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Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#81

Post by joshschreuder »

schappim wrote: post #62

Example 1 (custom hardware). My wife and I run https://littlebird.com.au and ship 25K orders per year. We found that it was taking too long to fulfil each order using Australia Post. So I built our own custom WebUSB postage scales and label printer. Creating a consignment is now 1-click. This enabled us to take the fulfillment process down from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Across 25K parcels this equals 11-months of work…

Very cool.

I like the auto-lodgement, wonder if anyone's made an auto-lodgement for when Metro misses their monthly train SLAs :D

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#83

Post by schappim »

joshschreuder wrote: post #81
schappim wrote: post #62

Example 1 (custom hardware). My wife and I run https://littlebird.com.au and ship 25K orders per year. We found that it was taking too long to fulfil each order using Australia Post. So I built our own custom WebUSB postage scales and label printer. Creating a consignment is now 1-click. This enabled us to take the fulfillment process down from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Across 25K parcels this equals 11-months of work…

Very cool. I like the auto-lodgement, wonder if anyone's made an auto-lodgement for when Metro misses their monthly train SLAs :D

Haha, Australia Post didn’t! On the day we ran the script for the first time we were 90% of their tickets.

Auspost normally give you the option of a free prepaid satchel or a credit.

Their head of customer service ended up giving me a call asking (paraphrasing): “can we just give you credits instead replying back on each ticket”.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#84

Post by schappim »

heidijavi wrote: post #82

I use textexpander mainly for email support, it saves me ~80 hours per month of typing something I already typed in the past

You might want to checkout Alfredapp.com . I recently moved all my snippets to Alfred’s snippet/expansion system. It is way more powerful.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#85

Post by sebazzz »

Probably not as exciting as the other comments here: I automated the startup routine at my work computer. It sets up VPN, clears out the HTTP proxy settings, clears the routing table to allow local network access, then starts up Visual Studio, SSMS, Outlook, Firefox, OneNote and some other auxiliary apps.

Other than that, I got consumer-style automation with IKEA Tradfri which responds via HomeKit and Apple shortcuts to me turning off my wake up alarm. And I use shortcuts to send a SMS home with my expected arrival time so my wife knows when she can start with dinner.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#86

Post by koonsolo »

zakn wrote: post #78

Shopping for groceries. I made a website which lets my wife and I pick recipes and any "one off" items we need for the week. The code figures out which ingredients it should buy (preferring organic / sale items) and then calls the "APIs" of our local grocery store's website to make the purchase. We then just have to pick up the pre-packed groceries on our way home from work. It costs $5 for the packing service, but i…

I've been thinking about doing the same thing, but I want to automate it in such as a way that it knows what food is still unused in the house. Haven't found a solution for that yet, but maybe with smart fridges and/or image recognition we're not far off. Unless the hn crowd knows an existing solution.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#87

Post by rvdca »

g96alqdm0x wrote: post #63
jonny383 wrote: post #61

I went through a phase of trying to automate _all_ aspects of my life. If I did a task more than 3 times, and it could be automated, I went ahead and wrote some scripts for that. Anyone will quickly learn there is a trade-off between managing the time it takes to maintain automation and the time you would spend just "doing" said task. After this realization, I started manually performing tasks, timing them, and stori…

Would you mind sharing which automated tasks offered the highest ROI, and some information about how you run them all (i.e., do you use cloud services, or an always on RPi that you run the scripts on)? Also, which libraries have you used for scraping?

To be honest, given the description, who would not be interested with that description on the top list?

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#88

Post by Theboda »

gorgoiler wrote: post #55

I have a folder on my mail server called “Dead”. If I move an email to that folder then all subsequent emails to the same address as the first one go into “Dead/Match”. It’s driven by procmail and a script. When used with one-off email addresses you get a behavior that’s like unsubscribing, but without having to trust any “unsubscribe” links or processes, and also without having to edit any config files (it’s all dri…

Would you mind sharing the code you're using for that?

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#89

Post by machiaweliczny »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #44

Lots of home automation fun with Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io ) * Self-hosted security system that e-mails me when triggered. It arms when everyone disconnects from the wifi and disarms when anyone in the home reconnects to wifi. Totally passive. Also arms at night when the kitchen lights have been out for 5 minutes after a certain time and disarms when motion patterns that can only be someone wakin…

Could you recommend some resources to get skilled with such suff? Also what tech stack you are using? (both hardware and software)

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#90

Post by machiaweliczny »

g96alqdm0x wrote: post #63
jonny383 wrote: post #61

I went through a phase of trying to automate _all_ aspects of my life. If I did a task more than 3 times, and it could be automated, I went ahead and wrote some scripts for that. Anyone will quickly learn there is a trade-off between managing the time it takes to maintain automation and the time you would spend just "doing" said task. After this realization, I started manually performing tasks, timing them, and stori…

Would you mind sharing which automated tasks offered the highest ROI, and some information about how you run them all (i.e., do you use cloud services, or an always on RPi that you run the scripts on)? Also, which libraries have you used for scraping?

Not author but I found scrapping super easy with jsdom in node.
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