Hey HN,
I'm curious to know more about what automations people use day-to-day. Either cron jobs or other services?
Does it make your day easier?
Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
1–10 of 159 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#2Most of my automation has to do with personal data backups/exports and various tools I've developed to process it and use [0]. That would be hundreds of jobs scattered across several of my devices.
I have a tool I wrote which is doing periodic searches for specified queries on different sites and generates RSS feeds with new results + HTML reports (so I can find people with overlapping interests, e.g. if the same person matched against multiple queries) [2]. Sort of like google alerts, but much better. So there is some daily scraping for that.
I'm using a somewhat hacky tool which 'compiles' a python spec for jobs to systemd and makes it very easy to maintain. [1]
As for making my day easier.. not always yet, but certainly makes it more fun. I live by the motto "Never spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it" :)
[0] https://beepb00p.xyz/my-data.html#consumers
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#3I created a script to tarball my git server's git directory, encrypt it, and backup to Google Drive if new commits were made that day.
inb4 "just use GitHub"
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#4A dishwasher is great if you can fill over 50% of it. Will save you couple minutes and effort.
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#5For myself, I automated creation of language flashcards.
So I can just type a word/phrase in English, and then it will automatically fill in the target language translation, pronunciation, audio recording, and word-by-word breakdown to show what every word in a phrase means.
Before I would have to use Anki, and switch back and forth between Anki and various dictionaries, and have to create my own audio recording. Just removes a bit of friction myself learning (Chinese).
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#6Housekeeping service, automatic workstation -> synology nas -> backblaze b2 backup system, shared instacart cart with my wife so that our groceries are tracked where we actually order them.
I've found that a lot of personal automation stuff on the computer just isn't worth it. I try to keep things simple and that reduces the need for automation altogether.
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#7One-line cron job using rclone to sync ~3 TB of photos with the other side of the world. Super simple and reliable.
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#8I’ve mostly given up on tech stack automation for my daily life. But I live and breathe on Reminders.app.
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#9I use to spend a lot of time on Reddit looking for conversations that were relevant to my business. Promoting our products in the context of those conversations usually resulted in sales leads.
I built a tool earlier this year that streams comments from those forums, analyzes them, and pings me when a relevant conversation is found. I generally keep it running throughout the day in my local Terminal.
Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
#10Journaling.
I have a shell script that that creates a new markdown file for that day, which I write my journal entry into.
Another script compiles a year's worth of journal entries into an epub.
Another workflow I made is similar, but for tasks. So every day I run a shell script that copies the last day's tasks to a new file with the new day's date, forcing me to evaluate what was done the previous day (if anything). Some days are great, some days not so much.
The tasks also show in my browser's new tab page to further reinforce.