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Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?
Just curious about scripts and things you guys have automated
- todd3834 7y agoI live in a condo complex with a dog and no lawn. We learned after getting our dog that this place doesn’t want dogs going to the bathroom on any of the common area (makes sense but annoying to dog owners). We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week but it was a hassle to swap each time. Also it was disgusting by the end of the week. Then I discovered porch potty. Got the version that is hooked up with a sprinkler system and a drain. Set up an auto timer so it gets completely flushed every night. Saves us a bunch of money and time. Highly recommend. https://www.porchpotty.com/ https://www.porchpotty.com/
- wheelerwj 7y ago> We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week haha, WHAT??
- tsss 7y agoThis has to be the most pointless and wasteful thing I read about all week.
- todd3834 7y agoCare to suggest a better solution?
- dang 7y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
- Retric 7y agoThere are plenty of other ways to do this, but... I have a CC specifically for reoccurring bills. It’s automatically paid off every month and just by looking at that one debit it’s easy to notice if something odd happens and then track down what changed. Plus by adding it all together I tend to trim what services I keep paying for.
- yyhhsj0521 7y agoYour bank has an API for that?
- matwood 7y agoYou don't need an API. Most bills can be put on a CC. Most banks have automatic bill pay. Having all the recurring bills on one CC is the life hack b/c it's very easy to see in the total each month if something requires investigation.
- gandalfgeek 7y agoNot exactly a script, but if I really think about it the largest thing I've automated in my life is investing--- via index funds. No picking individual stocks, no rebalancing (Vanguard and others have "target date" funds that rebalance automatically).
- buffaloo 7y agoDon’t you just end up with a portfolio weighted with half below average stocks? Seems like you could beat this just by buying stuff you’ve heard of. I’m sitting her with my Apple phone, using Verizon internet, burning electricity from a publicly traded utility that probably won’t go broke next week, wearing my Nike shoes and drinking a Coke. That portfolio probably beats your index and requires zero brains or effort.
- tesin 7y agoEvery time you buy your stocks for those individual companies you're accruing fees. You're also extremely susceptible to sudden loss due to lack of diversity. And even if you had the time, energy and knowledge to pick what you think is the best half of the Russell 3000, you still wouldn't beat the index - https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/03/warren-buffett-just-officially-won-his-million-dol.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/03/warren-buffett-jus...
- bitadder 7y agoThe problem isn't always knowing what to buy, but when to sell. For some who don't have the time of researching and rebalancing an index fund or ETF that does it for you is a good value prop. Example where that strategy might run into problems - hindsight is 20/20: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EH6la6VWoAIC0cM?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EH6la6VWoAIC0cM?format=jpg&name=...
- swinglock 7y agoIndex funds don't try to time the market. Which ETFs are you thinking about? Hedge funds?
- 1zael 7y agoBack when Tinder's API was more open, I had a Python script that would autoswipe everyone in the match queue. Then I'd go through all my matches, manually filter the ones I didn't like, and message the ones I did. It was highly efficient, increased my conversation rate, but didn't really impact my end metrics ;)
- peteretep 7y agoYou can pay for Tinder Gold and Boosts, which effectively does the same thing but for money
- nhylated 7y agoLike this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14664415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14664415
- barbs 7y agoThere was a hilarious article a few years back about someone who automated every part of the dating process, including the actual dating using a bot on a segway and automatically ordering sex toys. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
- gadders 7y agoLink below. It was written by Rob Rhinehart, the founder of Soylent: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/engineering-the-perfect-date_b_4319302 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/engineering-the-perfect-date_...
- nell 7y agoI have a list of questions that I like to be thinking about and have an automated system that texts me one of those questions at random during my waking hours.
- SN76477 7y agoI use IFTTT to do a few things like this. Mostly motivational sort of stuff. I like this idea of asking myself questions.
- nell 7y agoYeah, I used to email myself my core life principles, but it felt like unsolicited advice even when it came from me. Questions on the other hand are mostly engaging especially when you don’t know what it’s going to be.
- SN76477 7y agoI like that idea of questions. I do have one that says something like make a list, writer out 2 or 3 things and do them.
- rsync 7y agoI use cron to send myself birthday reminder emails: 0 0 9 11 * /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: Nov 9 is Marks birthday" me@mydomain.com Or just annual reminders or warnings I want to heed: 0 0 1 8 * /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: MAKE christmas St. Francis reservations NOW for good pricing..." me@mydomain.com Sometimes, instead of /usr/bin/mail, I use 'smsme' which is a small script that interfaces with twilio: /usr/local/bin/curl -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken" (that's not the entire script, but you get the idea)
- xyst 7y agoWhat’s wrong with reminder apps that are default with all smart phones?
- hbcondo714 7y agoWhat's wrong is that it's not default, in Android at least: https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/1699815?msgid=1714805 https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/1699815?msgid=171...
- rsync 7y agoI've been building this crontab since 1996. How many phones have you gone through since 1996 ?
- Mathnerd314 7y agoEmails are easier to deal with as task items, and he probably wrote this before smart phones were a thing. Also reminder apps for smart phones suck, just read some internet reviews, e.g. first half of https://www.ipitaka.com/blogs/news/does-your-calendar-reminder-app-suck-i-have-the-answer https://www.ipitaka.com/blogs/news/does-your-calendar-remind....
- flukus 7y agoNotifications/interruptions don't tend to be at a good time and get swiped away, if you get an email you can check it at an actionable time, assuming you disable email interuptions. It's easy to keep in git along with other configs so it survives phone refreshes without relying on third parties who are probably snooping on that data.
- lettergram 7y ago1. 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/ 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)
- n4r9 7y agoHow 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?
- lettergram 7y agoIt’s what ever active branch I’m on. I do a branch per feature / issue, then merge to master. Not really a problem. I also have all critical stuff setup to auto deploy after tests. I’m a one man shop, everything has to be automated or I don’t have enough time lol
- kunalpowar1203 7y agoI've used Automate App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.automate&hl=en_IN https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.a...) to set my android phone to silent mode in office and loud at home based on the wifi ssid.
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoThat 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.
- disillusioned 7y agoI mean, Google Assistant absolutely supports location reminders. Just ask "remind me <x> 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.
- kunalpowar1203 7y agoOh! I did not know that Google Assistant can do that. Thanks a lot. Will try it for sure. #TIL
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoMakes sense I missed it then, I hate using the assistant. It feels like asking someone else to scratch my nose.
- flixic 7y agoFor those on iOS, built-in Shortcuts app can do this as well.
- j45 7y agoI’ll checkout automate.. have used Tasker in the past.
- geocrasher 7y agoMy typing. In my work I tend to type a lot of the same things over and over again. So I automate that with AutoHotKey. Ctrl+Tab becomes RightAlt. Two words become entire paragraphs. Even simple things like "You're welcome" are just 'ywyw' or 'tyvm' becomes "Thank you very much". I know it sounds silly, but while trying to avoid RSI's, the less typing the better. I also use autohotkey to help me remember to Linux commands that I don't remember of are awkward to type. Like 'awk1' becomes "awk '{print $1 }'" and then I can modify it as needed. This has worked extremely well for me for many years. Ymmv.
- SN76477 7y agoAutohotkey doesn’t get enough attention. Great software.
- rolleiflex 7y agoI wonder if it would be possible to build an app that's effectively a self-installed keylogger given access to your entire stream of writing, and after a few days, it starts to recommend candidate strings for automation with Autohotkey.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoThis was the idea behind the Blackberry Android keyboard. Source: Was there, wrote code for it.
- nickthemagicman 7y agosounds like code that could be useful to this day at least the concepts. That's the downside of closed source. It's gone now.
- wyre 7y agoI think it could. It could log words for a certain amount of time, give a list of recommendations, and export it as a AutoHotkey file. It would be a neat project at the very least.
- 7y ago
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoI have a website that tells me when the next train leaves and if I need an umbrella: http://mazu.ai/ http://mazu.ai/ Probably a good idea for a startup actually, a 90s style "web portal" for urban commuters that tells you the weather, transit situation, and downloads some news articles for when you're in the tunnel.
- roland35 7y agoI have a pretty good system for knowing if I need an umbrella! If I forget it at home, it always rains! That is very cool!
- kaeson 7y agoCfcxvvxvxbxbxsvdfvbxgbrf
- louis8799 7y agoReport generation that need to be done through some poorly designed web frontend (even to a point where you abstract the automation process and the return of the data as an api). Have been worked at various companies over the past decade, I found that this kind of automation is the most valuable.
- kaeson 7y agoGhhcnfcrbggbhfjjfjxhgnjf
- shostack 7y agoNothing 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.
- fudged71 7y agoThere appears to already be a mint scraper on github
- shostack 7y agoCan you share a link? My understanding is the one I've found available pulls in transaction data. I actually don't care about transaction data at all. I explicitly just want monthly account balances (including what historic months closed at), and some of the net worth and net income summaries. Nothing I've found yet offers that.
- erichocean 7y agoPuppeteer is way better for scraping.
- jmcqk6 7y agoDo you need to scrape Mint when it's just using Plaid?
- HNLurker2 7y agoMy job is to advertise on classified ads my local business: heard of OLX? I have macros in JavaScript that does that automatically (I only have to sit and write the captcha)
- Antoninus 7y agoHire 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.
- throw03172019 7y agoMy house is a mess after a week. How’d you come up with 10-11 days?
- kevinsundar 7y agoWhat's the pricing like for something like this? Do you use a large service for this?
- lostcolony 7y agoHow do you not do the dishes for 10+ days? That said, my wife and I do the same thing. Plus have a Roomba. All told it means everything stays clean and we're only on the hook for laundry.
- nkrisc 7y agoThe cleaners probably all draw straws to see who has to go to the house with the 10 day old dishes in the sink.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoI had trouble getting a DMV appointment. Wrote a script that would alert when one was available. The site wasn't busy enough to warrant building out the booking. Only used the script once.
- laurentdc 7y agoI use a 20 line Python script to convert Outlook .ics calendars into billable hour count. It looks for a company name (the client) and calculates start and end time. All it needs now is to fill a .pdf invoice template and I can get rid of HR :D
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoUse DocAssemble... it has an API and can fill PDF templates.
- nathan_f77 7y agoShameless plug: I’m working on FormAPI [1], which can help you set up the PDF invoice template. We provide a Python client library, so you can add that to your script with a few lines of code. [1] https://FormAPI.io https://FormAPI.io
- _untra_ 7y agoI automate my garden. In the summer I have it configured with an automatic drop. I still get to play in my garden and there's always more annual maintenance to do, but the general watering and care is easily automated with a drip timer from home depot.
- in9 7y agoAny tips on automating watering herbs in a small apartment?
- acidburnNSA 7y agoLots of home automation fun with Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io 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 waking up are sensed. * E-mails work and personal when smoke alarm goes off or when water is detected in basement * E-mails pic from front door camera when doorbell pressed (yeah, like Ring, but with a ESP8266 monitoring my normal doorbell) * Voice reminder on garbage day * Northern loon call exactly at each sunset * Ambient jungle noises and lights on when I wake up and it sees me * Laundry timer + reminders * Vacation mode random lights on/off * Plays a Ship's bell chime on the hour, but only during daytime (ambiance) * Tones when any outside door in the house opens. Optionally: random Seinfeld bass transitions * Alert for power outage * Alert if my mom's house temperature goes too low in winter when she's away (I've called the plumber to fix the furnace thanks to this) * Turn on A/C if temperature above threshold at 4:00pm in anticipation of my return from work Stuff like that. Loads of fun. Lots of fiddling.
- buzzerbetrayed 7y agoWow that is really impressive. Home assistant is something I’ve been meaning to get in to for a while, but the amount of time it seems like it would take to set all that up and maintain it seems daunting. Sounds fun though!
- sandos 7y agoThe nice thing is, you can start small. Thats how everyone does it really, just add one thing at a time, most of which is fairly simple. Just some hue motion sensors and lights can make for some nice automations. I used Home Assistant to graph my pool temp, and control my pump so that I made most use out of our solar heaters.
- machiaweliczny 7y agoCould you recommend some resources to get skilled with such suff? Also what tech stack you are using? (both hardware and software)
- wetpaws 7y agoMinor stuff. Any logins that require password (git/ssh), all the command line operations that I do more than one time (I start with moving them to text file and when it gets tedious - to shell scripts, saves surprising lots of time).
- Mathnerd314 7y agoI use automatic bill pay and some scripts to fix video player settings, that's about it for full automation. A lot of things are semi-automated, as in I have a script / specialized software to handle them, but I still run them by hand. I have a paperweight suitable for holding down the enter key which comes in handy sometimes. I use the repeating events feature in Google Calendar a lot, that seems to mystify people who think I put them all in by hand. The automation people seem to fall into a few camps: smart home, enterprise data, and vacation. The last is referring to the sort of people who build a business, hire some low-paid folks to do all the work "automatically", and take a vacation. This seems like cheating to me but whatever.
- beernutz 7y agoJust in case you might not be aware (this has caught me out): Google Calendar repeating events has no way to set up a "repeat every x" (day,week,month,etc..) forever. It will stop after something like 1 year with no warning. I use it for an important daily email reminder, and did not notice it had stopped until a day or two after.
- erikhayton 7y agoI automate most things I do more than a dozen times. Marketing for my wife's uncle was a pain, so we automated CL and FB posts to fire from Quickbooks Inventory on a schedule. I'm full-time remote, so I have a spreadsheet that tracks my expenses from a google form, does currency conversions for my location and forex analysis to tell me the best day to pull money from an ATM, tells me how much I have to spend on food each morning... There's a script I send quotes I like to, and it randomly sends me one from the list via Telegram every day at 6am. I'm also a swing-trader who hates staring at charts, so my watchlist generates via news and sentiment, then I run TA on that watchlist to send me alerts if a signal is generated, then all I have to do is hit buy/sell on my inline keyboard and it sends off a market order; it auto-exits after a target or stop loss is hit. Recently formed an agency with a few other automation devs who do similar stuff if you want to check it out: https://weautomatestuff.com https://weautomatestuff.com
- dmak 7y agoI would love to hear more about your trading scripts and your TA assessment. Which API do you use?
- erikhayton 7y agoI write custom scripts for strategies, pulling data from places like Alpaca, IB, CCXT; charting using bokeh, plotly, mpl and other repos; zipline for backtesting... It really depends on the need; and the speed.
- bomberstudios 7y ago> Recently formed an agency with a few other automation devs who do similar stuff if you want to check it out: https://weautomatestuff.com https://weautomatestuff.com Would love to hear more about the business side of this, because this sounds like the ideal side project for natural born tinkerers! It may be too soon in the project's lifetime for any insights, but if there's any wisdom nugget you can share it would be really nice :)
- maxerickson 7y agoI have a motion light at the bottom of the basement steps. I also write scripts to compare OpenStreetMap to external datasets and surface interesting differences.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gorgoiler 7y agoI 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 driven from iOS Mail.) 1/ book your hotel using the email address $RANDOM@yourdomain 2/ receive booking conformation and enjoy holiday 3/ when you eventually get marketing spam, file it in Dead and never be bothered again.
- Theboda 7y agoWould you mind sharing the code you're using for that?
- michaelfavia 7y agoUntil you book again at that hotel chain or third party agent like Priceline and never receive another email again right? I like the premise but the details seem like they would cause more trouble than the solution solves.
- gorgoiler 7y agoThis would be true, but in practice I sign up with a brand new email address each time. I am certainly missing out on loyalty / reward points, but I don’t travel often enough for it to matter.
- davchana 7y agoSame thing happened with me twice. Long time ago I setup workflowy.com to send me emails of daily changes; gmail filter to mark as read, apply label, archive & forward to Trello board. So twice I forgot the password, asked password reset link; & it is not coming to my inbox; because that filter was auto reading & archiving it.
- michaelbrave 7y agoI've been half tempted to build an email client just to have similar functionality to that.
- jonny383 7y agoI 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 storing them in a glorified spreadsheet. Any time automation broke, I timed how long it took to fix, and also put it in the spreadsheet. I deprecated all automation tasks that did not save me either 10% or more time, or tasks that I found at least some enjoyment in (such as messaging my wife when I would be home, reading my child's school reports regardless of their result). I have over 140 automation scripts in tact. Some are software-only (interacting with APIs, emails, SMS, scraping) and some have associated hardware (sensors attached, etc). I have become obsessed with data being generated by this automation, so I now log all events and meta information where possible. This gives me pretty good insight on where pointless items exist in my life (which allows me to just stop doing them, automated or manually) and where important parts also exist.
- g96alqdm0x 7y agoWould 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?
- rvdca 7y agoTo be honest, given the description, who would not be interested with that description on the top list?
- machiaweliczny 7y agoNot author but I found scrapping super easy with jsdom in node.
- jeegsy 7y agoCould you share how you are able to scrape emails in particular?
- schappim 7y agoExample 1 (custom hardware). My wife and I run https://littlebird.com.au 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 time. Being a WebUSB based solution, they "just work" with anything running the Blink rendering engine, even Android phones. You can see the WebUSB Scales and Label Printer in action here: (30 sec video) https://vimeo.com/334547755/c387957a25 https://vimeo.com/334547755/c387957a25 Longer demo: https://vimeo.com/334563934/915a25eedc https://vimeo.com/334563934/915a25eedc Shopify liked the demo and I got to demo it to their CEO and various teams in Ottawa. The minimum order quantities on the Postage Scale hardware was 100 units, so let me know if you'd like one :) Example 2: I've automated the lodgement of "Australia Post Inquiries" to get a refund when they miss their SLAs. The numbers add up quick over a year.
- barbs 7y agoExcellent! Love the name - Checkout Chick :). Perfectly suits the little bird brand as well!
- schappim 7y agoCheers! We were thinking of a rename because only Australians/NZers know what a "Checkout Chick" is. :-)
- radicalriddler 7y agoDamn, I attended one of your Raspberry Pi workshops in Mount Kuring-gai about 3 years ago. Unless I'm completely mistaken, who knows.
- schappim 7y agoAwesome, thanks for coming! We're now in Hornsby (needed a bigger factory/warehouse).
- 7y ago
- DubiousPusher 7y agoThese are a wonderful invention. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079N9FW5B/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_ZwNTDb1XNYY3W https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079N9FW5B/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z... I also use these. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0748RK2XQ/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_nzNTDbMHJQZEK https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0748RK2XQ/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_n... I have made other serious efforts to automate my life and generally found that trying to catch time with homemade Rube Goldberg machines is a bit like trying to catch water with a properly engineered sieve. After your basic appliances, I've found it's actually quite hard to exchange money for time. A great value I've found is meal prep companies. They are expensive but cheaper than a cook or cleaner and they remove many chores. Debating what to eat, menu planning, grocery shopping and actual prep cooking are greatly relieved.
- ProfAesop 7y agoI use Alexa to turn on ambient music and lights. It removes tedious screentime in a place I consider a sanctuary-esc. Worth the $75 rig.
- zantana 7y agoI did the same with Mycroft https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ using the routine skill https://github.com/ChristopherRogers1991/mycroft_routine_skill https://github.com/ChristopherRogers1991/mycroft_routine_ski... and integration with Home Assistant I can have it play my music set up in the morning. I have a goal to eventually have most of my high tech stuff not involve a general screen either being a simple remote or voice so I don't get pulled down the rabbit hole.
- alok-g 7y agoAutohotkey to save PDF copy of a webpage along with a link in the folder currently open.
- jaimex2 7y agoHome Assistant: - Water garden if no rain - Lower curtains as sun sets - Rotate pin codes on door for abnb property when bookings end - Log in correct user when TV turned on nielsentam box
- Ryckes 7y ago> - Rotate pin codes on door for abnb property when bookings end Nice! Is that a lockbox or an actual electronic lock? Would you mind saying which model?
- techolic 7y agoPrevious discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20564687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20564687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875106
- zakn 7y agoShopping 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 it's worth it to avoid the burden of shopping. No more tedious math on which is the better deal. No getting lost trying to find avocado oil. And no lines. I wish I had done this years ago.
- koonsolo 7y agoI'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.
- skiman10 7y agoYou could try scanning the UPC codes and saving those in a database. I guess then you would have to scan them again to remove them which could be tedious. Maybe that idea will spark some inspiration though.
- r0b05 7y agoThis is downright brilliant!
- shelune 7y agoI was trying to do the same (grocery for the office) but the store changed their "API" so there's hardly any way to interact with their catalog anymore. Also how do you deal with the membership and payment process?
- nickthemagicman 7y agoWhat grocery store APIs are you using?
- heidijavi 7y agoI use textexpander mainly for email support, it saves me ~80 hours per month of typing something I already typed in the past
- schappim 7y agoYou might want to checkout Alfredapp.com . I recently moved all my snippets to Alfred’s snippet/expansion system. It is way more powerful.
- sebazzz 7y agoProbably 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.
- gcj 7y agowhat do you use for this?
- dgudkov 7y agoVery 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 https://easymorph.com) - the visual data preparation and automation tool that I'm working on.
- simon1573 7y ago> Download and parse Ngnix web-logs every day, extract notable events Would you mind expanding on this? Sounds interesting
- dgudkov 7y agoNothing extra-ordinary to be honest. The application has built-in tools for fetching weblogs over SFTP and creating business rules for parsing different types of events in the logs - e.g. downloading the installer, reading tutorial, etc. The events are then aggregated and inserted into a database that contains various historical metrics that allow me to get an idea about user engagement and trends. Visually designing the logic provides the advantage of flexibility - I can quickly experiment and fine tune the parsing algorithms and metrics without coding, as well as do ad hoc calculations in order to answer spontaneous questions.
- rovr138 7y agoYou could check logreducer. There’s another tool, but I can’t think of the name right now.
- mister_hn 7y agoI bought a vacuum robot that cleans up daily. I saved a lot of time daily, I do just a ground good cleanup once in a week. Best investment ever.
- buboard 7y agodeleting emails in gmail. It's unnecesarily complex but i can add a marker such as _delete_ in emails or use filters to get them auto-labeled, and then i have to use a google script to delete those after a month. It sounds like something that should be trivial for everyone to do, but it's not.
- neilalexander 7y agoI use Philips Hue for light automation quite extensively. - 6:30am to 7:00am during weekdays, the bedroom and living room lights fade on slowly, emulating sunrise. They switch off automatically when I leave home for work on a morning. - 45 minutes before sunset, the living room lights fade on to full brightness over a 30 minute period. The bedroom lights do the same, but to a dimmer setting. - At 10:30pm, the bedroom lights fade themselves to a brighter but warmer relaxing light setting, in preparation for going to bed. - If I'm not home when 11:00pm comes around, based on the location of my phone, the lights will all switch themselves off again. - The hallway lights turn themselves using a motion sensor on if motion is detected and the ambient light level is low enough - they come on fairly bright during evening hours, but the dimmest possible night light setting after 11pm and through the night. After a minute or two of detecting no motion, they switch themselves off again.
- anotherevan 7y agoWrote a program that tracks Australian movie release dates for movies I'm interested in. Sends a daily email if a release date moves, or there a new movies for me to flag my interest in. Interfaces with themoviedb.org for plot summary, cast and crew info and such. Interfaces with Google Calendar for writing entries for each movie I'm tracking. The code is available although a bit rough. https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule
- anotherevan 7y agoI read a lot of articles by saving them to Pocket and reading via my ereader. I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket and hn.algolia.com APIs that helps me to follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News and track my reading habits. Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.
- anotherevan 7y agoHave an ultrasonic sensor on top of my monitor that's used as a presence sensor to tell the computer when I’m in front of it or not. Pauses the music player when I walk away and starts again when I return. More details here: https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/are-you-there/ https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/are-you-there/
- kdbg 7y agoThis might sound a little-bit stupid, but I automate locking/unlocking internet access on my phone and computer. That is to say, every night my computers and phone will lock me out[0] at a set time. Then in the morning I have to log 30 minutes of exercise (tracked by my heartrate on fitbit) to unlock internet access. I also have certain time-wasting sites like Reddit and Netflix locked out until I complete a sufficiently difficult problem on leetcode, projecteuler, or wechall --- I was just finding it hard to keep myself going to bed at a decent hour when I have no constraints like a 9-5 job and to keep an exercise routine going. So this automation has helped me. [0] My computers are basically totally locked, my phone keeps the phone, messaging, camera, and skype accessible
- nestorherre 7y agoWhat do you use to lock/unlock your gadgets?
- kdbg 7y agoKaspersky Safe Kids. I chose it after experimenting with a bunch of options, it was the only one that wasn't trivial to bypass on my phone. Basic setup is that I wrote a script (against Kaspersky ToS) that can login and change the lock/unlock schedule and enable/disable website/application restrictions. So it unlocks after I tell it to check Fitbits API, and disables restrictions after I tell it to check one of the challenge websites. Locking happens on at a configured time each night.
- girishso 7y agoInteresting. Might be useful to me as well. What software(s) do you use for this?
- kdbg 7y agoIts really just two components - Kaspersky Safe Kids - Does the actual locking/restrictions - Custom Python Script - Communicates with Fitbit/leetcode/projecteuler/wechall and can update a the restrictions on the Kaspersky website.
- majewsky 7y ago[Not really automation, but I'm hijacking the opportunity to tell the story.] I'm a terrible morning person and I noticed that I need much longer to get up and dressed and everything than it reasonably should take. On the order of "taking 1 hour to do stuff that can be done in 15 minutes". I seem to have ADHD (disclaimer: not formally diagnosed, just going off of symptom lists and descriptions from other people), and that in combination with morning drowsiness seems to make me really ineffective at this point. So I wrote down a list of all the things that I need to do in the morning, together with an upper estimate of how long this is going to take. Think something like this: { "tasks": [ { "label": "Make the bed", "duration": "60s" }, { "label": "Morning wash", "duration": "3m" }, { "label": "Get dressed", "duration": "2m" }, ... ]} I built an application for my desktop PC that just runs down this playbook and always shows the current task, together with a timer for the current task as well as the overall playbook, in comically large fonts to fill the screen: PREPARE BREAKFAST Current: 04:45/05:00 Total: 16:45/59:30 There is no "Pause" button, only "Skip" for when a task is shorted than the alloted time. Also, the application can beep to signal "3-2-1-Over" at the end of each task, and each task can have a configurable beeping interval. The whole point of the system is to be breathing down my neck to stop me from procrastinating, and it works perfectly in that regard. Since starting with this tool a few weeks ago, my morning routine has gotten a bit shorter, but I also get more stuff done at the same time. I have a slot for meditation, so I'm now doing that semi-regularly in the morning. (I still skip it too often. Maybe I should make that task unskippable.) I have a slot for preparing a packed lunch, so I don't have to eat out as much and save some money in the process. With the time saved, I've switched my commute from tram to walking. I'm still tweaking the playbook here and there, but it already feels great to arrive at work in the morning knowing that I've already done several positive things for my well-being, rather than the bare minimum as it used to be.
- gield 7y agoI need this in my life. Is the source code public somewhere, or can you make it public?
- majewsky 7y agoI haven't gotten around to polishing the repo enough to make it public. If you follow me on GitHub, you should see it once I publish it. The name of the app is Monastery, so it's going to be https://github.com/majewsky/monastery https://github.com/majewsky/monastery.
- soinus 7y agoI automate my todos. In the best tradition of getting things done, I have a single list for all my todos. It is in Trello and it uses Butler for automation. I have Inbox, Today, This week, Done and Later lists. The Done one gets emptied every day at 2am. Wherever I move a task to Today I get assigned to it and the due date is set to the evening of today. It's not much, but keeps me kinda organized.
- dannyfakito 7y agoI have setup a crawler acommpanied by a discord bot to notify me and my friends about new posts on each faculty class website. These posts usually include stuff like exam results, schedules and other notifications. Really helpful. Stopped us from manually checking each website when we anticipate schedules and results for each exam.
- pards 7y agoPre-authorized payments for bills (phone, gas, electricity etc). There are so many upsides to this: - Zero stress - Avoids late charges - Improves credit rating (see previous point) Edit: formatting
- mxgoddard 7y agoWhenever I turn on my work laptop it launches sites and applications I use on a day to day basis, like Jira (for our ticket), Hacker News (daily dose of information), Slack, Outlook etc. Very simple to create with python and just something I wanted to make.
- lardissone 7y agoI use the same laptop for job and personal work/usage, so I use an app called Workspaces (https://www.apptorium.com/workspaces https://www.apptorium.com/workspaces) that let me setup group of apps/websites/commands that I can launch with a few clicks or using url-schemes.
- ajot 7y agoFor websites, I used to set Firefox start page as different websites separated by pipes, i.e. www.google.com|www.outlook.com|news.ycombinator.com
- jsonbourne 7y agoUsually, my download folder is quite messy. I wrote a rudimentary script to re-organize a folder using a simple cli. It also has a config that can be updated to account for different file types or categories.
- eivarv 7y agoHuman context switching. I'm being cheeky; I mean closing down and bringing up all relevant applications, their state (open windows, tabs, files...) and so on for working on a given task or project. Sort of like a workspace manager for the OS. Releasing an open beta this winter. There's a short, low-res demo that kinda illustrates the basic concept on https://cleave.app https://cleave.app
- tayleeganj 7y agonice, looks pretty cool
- EricEspen 7y agothis!
- girishso 7y agoI built a page poller, that scrapes any web page periodically to check if some particular part of it is changed and then email it to me. Use it to have new xkcd pics delivered to my mail among other stuff. http://pagepoller.r14.railsrumble.com/ http://pagepoller.r14.railsrumble.com/
- superkitty 7y agoAutomating menial work of Fax reading/processing in US healthcare by applying the ML.
- classic959 7y agoI drop photos (from whatever device) into a folder on my NAS and they get automatically sanitized of EXIF data, and resized/bordered ready for posting to the internet. It's simply a cron & bash script on a server that monitors one NAS folder, then drops the output into a second folder where I can pick them up and use them. It uses ImageMagick & Exiftool.
- ydnaclementine 7y agoI use tmuxinator to auto open my terminals and start my services in separate panes in tmux
- drdeadringer 7y agoSimple stuff so far. * I have my browser automatically launch on boot-up [linux]. Saves me a click each time, xkcd's "is it worth the time" be darned in this specific instance for me. * I have scripts that webscrape stock//etf//mutual_fund stock prices for personal financial tracking reasons. I just want the numbers, not all the hassle of getting the information for each stock//etf//mutial_fund for each financial house every single time. * I have a mutable script to download a large swath of a podcast's episode archive so I don't have to "click and save" hundreds of individual episodes. Modify, execute, go take a shower or make lunch, come back and modify the metadata so it works on my .mp3 player. ... stuff like this. Nothing major, but "automating the pain away" type of thing. Note: this is ignoring the "fun programming" I do for myself as per question.
- damionx7 7y agoSending server error via pushover to my phone
- EarthlyFireFly 7y agoBeware of the indulging in ease, avoiding labor and exertion, becoming habitually idle, lazy, inactive, as, an indolent man! The use of manual labor is one which never grows obsolete. Manual labor is the study of the external world. Labor is God’s education. No separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself. (Emerson) The simplicity of life, language, and habits empowers people, but luxurious lifestyle, pretentious language and effeminate habits lead to weakness and death. (John Ruskin) It’s not by meeting your idle desires that freedom can be achieved, but, on the contrary, by freeing yourself from the desires. (Epictetus) People are constantly looking for new entertainments and pleasures, hoping that way to quiet their worries and reach happiness. But this way they can't get satisfaction, because a man looking for his own pleasure is never satisfied: having received what he wanted, he is not settling down, but right away feels the new desires, which are not yet satisfied. (Tolstoy)
- abhikb2005 7y agoIndian here who travels abroad (but within Asia) for work, and we need to submit a lot of documents along with a visa application (invitation letter from a colleague in the host country; NOC from the employer; tax returns etc.) for a business/work visa. The applications are the same, the data is (almost) the same, apart from the dates. So my friend built a small tool to automate the entire process. All we do now is 1. select the country that we are visiting from a dropdown 2. enter the dates that we will be arriving on and departing at 3. provide an itinerary is possible and click a button that says "magic" And automatically all the necessary documents are emailed to the respective stakeholders (read HR and travel desk) in a snap. Otherwise, it is usually a 2-3 day process. Ask the travel desk for documents, email overseas colleague, email HR, collect all, print, write, scan, email, get them reviewed, edit/correct/modify/facepalm and finally submit. We are now making a web app of it and putting it online. P.S.: I realize that I might be a bit of an oddball here because it is possible that a USA passport doesn't require such mundane stuff.
- steffen-lorenz 7y agoI tried to collect all these posts here: https://github.com/steffen-lorenz/awesome-automated https://github.com/steffen-lorenz/awesome-automated
- mk60sboy 7y agoAutomagically chimes and closes garage door after being left open too long