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Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

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Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#21
I used to have a Twilio phone number hooked up to a Lambda function so that people could press the buzzer box at the front of my apartment building and it would automatically send back the required DTMF to unlock it, then text me to let me know someone had been buzzed in.

Other than that, just some bespoke Tasker automations and some hotkeys on my computer. Reading through this thread makes me feel like a rookie, though.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#22
post #5

For 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. Jus…

How do you automate the pronunciation? I’d be curious to know what your process is like.

I have wanted to automate my flash cards with Forvo pronunciations (rather than TTS) for awhile but haven’t been able to figure out how

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#23

Journaling. 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).…

What editor do you use for writing in the markdown files? I've tried org-journal in Emacs but I could never get over the learning curve of Emacs + org-journal.

I've been using Obsidian recently and I love it. There are all kinds of interesting ways you can graph your posts too.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#24
I never found the perfect note taking and/or scheduling software. So I wrote a Python script which combines several tools which together give me what I need. My entire life revolves around it, can’t imagine living without it anymore.

Getting that sort of system sorted out is maybe the most productive thing you can do because it is meta-productive.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#26
post #24

I never found the perfect note taking and/or scheduling software. So I wrote a Python script which combines several tools which together give me what I need. My entire life revolves around it, can’t imagine living without it anymore. Getting that sort of system sorted out is maybe the most productive thing you can do because it is meta-productive.

can you explain a bit more about this? sounds very interesting

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#28
post #24

I never found the perfect note taking and/or scheduling software. So I wrote a Python script which combines several tools which together give me what I need. My entire life revolves around it, can’t imagine living without it anymore. Getting that sort of system sorted out is maybe the most productive thing you can do because it is meta-productive.

Would you mind going into a little bit of details about the tools you use and how automation helps? I am very interested in this.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#29
I automated my desktop environment configuration using Docker containers. I'm able to go from a headless tty to perfectly tailored desktop environment in ~2.5 seconds. First time start requires a ~40 min build, byut thereafter ~2.5s to start afresh. https://github.com/sabrehagen/desktop-environment

I did the same think for my production application environment. One command to go from no infrastructure to production grade cloud application deployment. https://github.com/cloud-computer/cloud-computer

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