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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?

#91

Nothing fancy or involved at all, but in my personal finance spreadsheet, I dynamically pull in Zillow's current estimate of my home value (which I take with a grain of salt obviously). I also use IFTTT to pause my robovac if my doorbell rings. Right now I'm working on a Mint scraper to automate the rest of my personal finance data entry, but running into headaches getting Selenium to work properly on Catalina.

Puppeteer is way better for scraping.

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

#92
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…

This is downright brilliant!

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

#93
Very mundane tasks but it saves me some time:

* Automatically clean Windows desktop from garbage and temporary files that are older than 15 minutes

* Download and parse Ngnix web-logs every day, extract notable events

* Send myself email notifications about certain currency rates hitting certain thresholds

* Backup certain folders on schedule

* Pull data submitted by others from Google Sheets, export it into a database

All this done using EasyMorph (https://easymorph.com) - the visual data preparation and automation tool that I'm working on.

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

#94

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…

Interesting, although I don't have the amount of time required to do these things.

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

#95

Hire a cleaner once every 10-11 days to clean my apartment and do the laundry. Its surprising how much time you have if you don’t have to do dishes.

My house is a mess after a week. How’d you come up with 10-11 days?

mine after a day, with a toddler around. And 10+ old days dishes smell as hell. No thanks, I do dishes as soon as I can, because hygiene first

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

#97

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…

Sounds great. So do you need one raspberry pi per automation ? Or are you somehow linking all these diverse processes with one raspberry pi ?

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

#98

1. I wrote a cron job to auto commit my code to their repos if I haven’t edited a file in 12 hours. 2. I started a while business getting news emails on more niche topics (works better than other services IMO): https://lettergram.net/ 3. Automated emails sent to customers thanking them for feedback. 4. Important emails are texted to me (as determined by my classifier)

How does 1 cope with branches? Also, do you never e.g. leave a piece of code commented out for a couple of days whilst fixing a related bug in a different file?

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Google/Android tracks everywhere I go, sends me an email at the end of the month about it, and still can't silent/remind when I get into proximity of a location bugs the shit out of me. That tracking that's so profitable for them is an afterthought when it comes to my own convenience.

I mean, Google Assistant absolutely supports location reminders. Just ask "remind me when I get to work" and it'll... mostly work. Sometimes it's a bit late, but it mostly works. For silent, I think that'd be more of a Tasker/Automate thing, like OP.

Oh! I did not know that Google Assistant can do that. Thanks a lot. Will try it for sure. #TIL

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

#100

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…

> Ambient jungle noises

I like this.

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