Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life? |
Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life? |
I also wrote a program to pull down all of my favourite comics as they were published. But I can't say I really read them offline much. It was probably more the collector in me wanting a copy, rather than having to go to the site.
Other than that, I think all of my automation is is my work-life.
I built a GitLab pipeline that fetches the current exchange rate thrice a day. Each job pushes result to a IFTTT webhook that I integrated with their Telegram service integration. I then added the @ifttt bot to a Telegram group of folks who are also interested in this.
Now, thrice a day, I get notifications about the actual exchange rate. Works like a charm.
- found a service where in the morning they bring 3 meals + 2 snacks, everything you should eat for the day; especially during stressful times, it's so so good not have to think about food; you just eat what you've been given; - I no longer trade cryptos myself, I have Shrimpy, HodlBot and Iconomi to do that for me; this may not be "personal" but it saves me at least 10 hours every week, and the performance is a little better than my dumb self; - I found a shirt I adored, so I bought a bunch of identical ones; this in addition to having identical socks and identical underwear makes it that I only have to choose&match my pants and shoes; and mine kind of all match; saves headspace; - I never read or watch news; only read headlines in newsletters I trust; saves time and headspace; - I used Github Probots to automate A LOT of replies issues/PRs; I consider this "personal" because it's tied to my hobby;
In addition, for the past 6 months I've turned a bunch of things I was doing / wanted to do into emails. I've built https://schedulethatemail.com/ for that sole purpose, help me do the stuff I wasn't doing, or that was repetitive (shameless self-promotion, I know). Here are some of the personal things I've automated through email, though some are now canceled:
- I used to forget/postpone seeing some friends I really care about, now I automatically email them to catch up (different intervals 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months); some have no idea it's automated :-) - I always wanted to write a journal, but never stuck to it; now I receive an email from myself each day with a few questions, 8/10 times I answer; works because I use my email as my todo list; push notifications don't work for me; - I have this poem, this mantra, this whatchamacallit that I like to read every day, to remind myself of who I am, my values and principles; especially when I interact with people I don't like, every day, it helps me stay myself, and not change in a bad way; works because I use my email as my todo list; - I automatically email my landlord, accountant, etc to tell them I've done something, or I'll do something within 24 hours, before they even ask; self-applied peer pressure - I'm on time most months now;
I had more, but I forget...
For index funds in my taxable account, it tells me when there is a loss/savings opportunity that is over whatever threshold I give it. This way I get email reminders if there is an opportunity to save a few hundred or thousand dollars every time the market dips.
This is a bit more versatile than just a reminder for certain prices because I am continually reinvesting at different cost basis.
Yes, and normalize it to price per kg. The product weight needs to be extracted from the item title or description in many possible formats (100G, 100 g, 100 grams), the price location and format however is uniform.
- Auto puause kodi/lights change color on incoming call.
- Entrance lights turn on when phones connects to wifi.
- Little flash when my wife's phone connects to wifi.
- Little color flash on whatapp notifications / incoming calls.
- Phone silences when sees my workplace wifi.
- Some speech recognition to change the lights.
Todo:
- Change light color in the morning if rain is expected.
- Plants dry alarm
- Preheat 3d printer with voice
I drop pdfs in a dropbox folder from any device, and at the end of the month, my home computer combines the pdfs, attaches it to an email and sends it off to accounting. I could have it autodetect which invoices from my email match work expenses, but the hard-to-automate part is needing to upload paper receipts.
When my son was born I wrote a script which checked the index every day and raised an alert when the number of people in the country with our surname increased by one.
That was the first official recognition that he was "real", so I had a before/after screenshot which was cute to see.
- tag photos with a phrase for retrieval by voice later
- manage lists by voice (e.g. shopping, to-do, bucket lists)
- manage other notes to myself by voice (e.g. reminders)
- link specific web pages to voice commands like voice bookmarks
- smarthome automation by voice via Alexa or IFTTT
I also share my voice commands with those in my family who are less technically inclined.
https://simon-schraeder.de/posts/andchill-building-alexa-ski...
Next step: Automated wine dispenser :)
It took barely any time to set up a lambda to send an email, and I was mostly doing it to entertain myself with the novelty of it. But on the few occasions when I did, pushing a button and then going back to sleep instead of getting up for work was pretty sweet.
An healthy dose of Minimalism will get you more peace of mind than automation. Automation might break at some point and you need to be ready to fix it.
Then I match keywords in the strings to categorize the expenses. These days, this would be called AI :)
Edit: I use pdftotext, which has a mode that keeps the spatial structure of tables. Works for my bank.
pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf uncompress
Here is an example. Every morning, I have a routine where I prepare my daughter for school. I don't even have to prepare the night before.
I wake up at 6:00 AM by a soft alarm. I'm kinda beginning to wake up on my own more often these days. I go to my daughter and try to wake her up but I also know she would reply, "Give me few more minutes, please." "Ok, 5 minutes." I then line-up her school uniform by the edge of the bed -- shirt and skirt at the bottom, then the underwears on top.
I flip the light switches on from the hallway all the way down to the kitchen liting them up to make it full daylight when she wakes up. I quickly check her school bag, fill-up the water bottle, and line-up all the tiffin materials at the kitchen counter. Then pour out the milk/juice with egg/bread for her and keep it ready. When all that is done, I put the socks that I picked up while preparing her uniform, in her shoes and is kept ready by the door.
I start the tea going. To the Bathroom, brush my teeth, wash-up, dried up. Then, I go wake up my wife, "Tiffin ready to be prepared." I go to my daughter, "Times up, very late." I lift her up and show her to the bathroom door. She would have slept for about 15min instead of the 5 but that is what I intended.
Wife goes to the kitchen and cooks, prepares the tiffin, packed it and keep it in the kitchen counter. She then prepares the milk formula for our younger daughter, give it to her (she holds it in her sleep and drinks). Wife goes back to bed. I go in and finish the tea which the wife had adjusted for it not to spill over.
Daughter comes out of the bathroom, get dressed, comes out of the room and drinks/eats her breakfast. During this time, I'm in my study room, logged into the computers, get the emails flowing in for me to look later. I finish my first tea of the day.
Escort daughter to her school bus.
This is one routine that has worked really well for the family with little to no adjustment or breaks. That one hour from 6 to 7 AM in the morning all goes without much thought but more from my muscle memory, following patterns of where things are kept and where to keep them.
I hope I can call this automation.
Here's a cool "launcher" project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv2LAqkmd1c&feature=youtu.be
https://github.com/plul/Public-AutoHotKey-Scripts
With Pulover's Macro creator, you can literally record actions with mouse and keyboard, get the output in AHK script and tidy it up. You can trivially recognise pixels, meaning you can tell your mouse to click x,y coordinates or a certain button (for when there is no API for something, for example)
Some genius made a virtual workspace for windows using AHK: https://github.com/octalmage/mdesktop
Some random uses I have for AHK:
* trigger today's date in dd.mm.yy (or dd-mm-yy, or any combo you like) with a macro, useful for when you drafting documents and need to quickly insert the date
* lookup the train schedule from work to home with a keypress
* shortcut to German characters on an EN keyboard
* paste and translate to/from english with dict.cc and leo.org in separate tabs
* "sig" expands to my email signature
* shortcuts to colleagues' obscure foreign names, which I always misspell in emails (saves embarrassment!)
* macro to run common applications like notepad, chrome, powershell (obvious use case)
* macro to open an excel to do list
* Quickly switch between headphone types on a work PC (USB headphones and regular headphone jack needed some fiddly settings to be changed to switch between them) (https://autohotkey.com/docs/commands/SoundSet.htm)
* Tool for popup window, can be used to display almost anything, e.g. your list of shortcuts in case you forget them! - https://autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=100953#p100953
* Huge list of ideas here: https://github.com/ahkscript/awesome-AutoHotkey
AHK has a huge amount of cool projects on the forums, and it runs like lightning since it is very resource light.
I've also setup some things for the wife, who's an artist on Patreon, where she uploads works she's finished to a given folder and my machine grabs them, resizes them to whatever she needs for different purposes, and emails them to her. It also applies watermarks depending on the appearance of it (light vs dark) and will also add it to her Jekyll website, commit the new image to the git repo, build and push it live with no interaction unless something blows up along the way (122 days since last workplace accident)
I also have a bunch of LED ropes, night lights, and our bedroom TV setup on smart plugs that are turned on and off automatically, but I don't know if that counts since I didn't build it, I just bought them.
Reporting is semi automated. I use Tiller to pull transactions into a google sheet and then use a ruby script to turn that into Ledger transactions that feed into my accounting system.
Investments aren’t automated because the amounts are different every month but I have a script that tells me how much is available for investing.
Other things we’ve “automated” are household tasks like mowing, cleaning, and snow removal. Other people do that stuff on a schedule and bill us.
- Automatic cat food dispenser
- Smarthome with HomeKit for lights, fans and stuff. Using motion sensors and time based automations a lot
- Browser extension to automatically add Japanese words I look up to my Anki deck
- scripts to automatically ocr documents in my Dropbox, run it through classification for automatic renaming and information extraction, then add it to DEVONthink for archiving. Then using a document scanner app to throw things into Dropbox
- ifttt / zapier actions to add pull request reviews to my todo list, automatically translate Japanese messages to English with slack reactions, backup posts/pictures I am tagged in on Facebook, and and and
- AppleScripts to generate random usernames, one time emails (with date and website encoded) and logging generations in DEVONthink
- mini bots to normalize pull Request titles / descriptions, link them to JIRA tickets, assign them to the PR opener, transition to “in progress”
- sieve Filters to automatically bounce expired emails, organize based on website, automatically redirect tracking emails to Deliveries, add flight emails to flight tracking apps
- cli tools to clock me in, clock me out and warn me if I’m under my agreed hours at work
- a lot of workflow workflows on my phone to do things like: navigate me home, find a Starbucks, and heaps of other smaller things
...and probably many more. In general, if I have to do something manually more than 3-4 times and I notice a pattern, I try to automate it
fswebcam --no-banner capture.jpg \
&& classify.sh tf_files classifier capture.jpg \
| head --lines 1 | grep --quiet '^slouching\b' \
&& aplay buzzer.wav
We have sometimes automated household shopping. We order food online at a grocery chain and the next day it is delivered home.
Automation most of us use washing machine. Cloth drying. Dishwasher. These three automation saves a lot of time.
Cleaning of car through car wash at times.
ANDROID POWER LOGGER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvtrlC62mI
Above is an android app that does the power logging - at work I am able to find out if power has gone at my apartment so I can inform the electricity board and hopefully get it back up again. It turns out that the EB has a will of its own... :(
I re-did the above app with an android app called tasker - hence obviating the need for an android app. (Tasker and Join - both apps are paid and from the same developer)
Further I have some trivial apps based off of tasker. For e.g. I have an app that fetches my wallet balance. Here although the wallet app is capable of showing this...the experience is limited since, I have to do more than 2 clicks to get it. Hence, I made this information available in a single button click.
Another trivial app - is to track my upcoming train journey via tasker...(because Indian Railways web portal makes its very hard to know this particular thing).
There are others too in pipeline...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16561343 [2] https://natriumapp.com/
Pretty amazing how cheap things are these days, an arduino or Pi 0w and some relays can do quite a bit. Just bought a opengarage.io and considering the opensprinkler.
When I make a blog post, my WordPress installation automatically posts about it to assorted social media sites. And when I post a new page of comics I can make it automatically calculate the next day it would come out on, based on the schedule I’ve chosen (new pages Tuesday/Thursday, unless Shit Happens) and on how many pages are already in the queue, if any.
When I put together a book of my comics, I use a small AppleScript that runs over a directory and outputs a sequentially-sorted CSV of file names, which I can dump into an InDesign template.
It ain't pretty, and the menubar app part of it stopped working a while back, but it still does the job.
1. A custom twitter client
I feel like tweeting whenever I get an insight so I post a tweet several times a day. But I whenever I used to tweet, I'd get pulled into an endless stream of notifications and timeline. So I wrote myself a client that does only one thing: posting of tweets. It has no timeline, no notification. In case you want to use it, it's hosted on https://tweetaway.herokuapp.com/
2. Site-specific search (along with Google)
I find great content on HN, so I built myself a stupidly simple website which opens up Google.com and site:ycombinator.com +keyword whenever I search. Using it, I've come across so many interesting threads that I would have never discovered. E.g. when I searched for entropy, I came across this gem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14709896
You can access it at https://dualsearch.glitch.me/ (you'll require a Chrome addon to modify Cross-origin headers because Google doesn't open in Iframe)
3. I miss my cat at work, so I built a Chrome plugin that shows an icon of her + a funny one-liner https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/orbit-the-cat/fjni...
4. Last weekend, I wrote a twitter bot that retweets my old tweets that got many retweets (to resurface them in US timezone, because at that time I'm asleep)
I also record the start and end times of any intervals during which I do not interact with my emacs. (I'd rather have a record of intervals during which I don't interact with my puter, but that would prol require me to write a kext.) This is useful for reconstructing when I left home and when I came back, among other things.
(One file records only intervals of idleness 49 minutes or longer. Another -- the one I refer to the most -- records intervals 7 minutes or longer. Another, intervals of one minute or longer.)
You have entered the questions: what have you automated into HN.
This response automatically reminds you of the times this question has been asked before:
Just kidding! I didn't actually automate this response, but someone should since this question will be asked many times and this is probably the most successful collection to date.
Credit card expenditure: since my old-school bank has no API of sort, I trigger via Tasker a daily sms to a bank number that replies with the amount left before I get to my CC limit. I then parse the sms (Tasker again, using JS) and display the amount that I have spent so far on the home of my mobile. This simple warning has dramatically helped me to keep my CC expenditure in check.
Goodreads yearly target: using a combination of Tasker, Goodreads API and some JS, I display the amount of pages I have to read each day in order to reach my yearly target of books (assuming an average length of a book of 250 pages).
* Automated a "speed check" of my new internet service provider to see what kinds of speeds I'm getting throughout the day/week.
* As an MMORPG player, wrote a log file scraper to automate different events; when my avatar's spells fail or expire, when specific items I'm looking for are put up for auction, when my avatar is sent a private message, how long it takes to "zone" from place to place to check for network issues, etc.
* Wrote a public web site that tracks population of a particular game over time. Mostly to exercise some coding skills.
* Automated some email alerting that I couldn't otherwise manage with my calendar system(s).
Reminders to do cleaning and maintenance, just cron emails to Trello.
Music alarm clock, this has been local control of Amarok (KDE) or a Python script for a Chromecast.
I intended to automate control of the central heating, which for some reason has a commercial grade control system in my apartment with an ethernet port. But I found the building is so well insulated, it hardly runs anyway. (Which I found by monitoring the state of the heating and making a graph.)
- My web server making automated backups of it's databases.
- My computer automatically downloading and cleaning up the backups of my web server's databases.
- My other computer making a copy of the important files on my computer (including, of course, website database backups).
- My offsite machine making a copy of all of that in another location.
At the end of this process: My important personal files are currently stored on five hard drives in two physical locations. All of this happens without me really paying attention to it.
Using Phillips Hue light bulbs with the Hue API, I created a PHP script that automates a number of lights in the house to perform different actions at different times of day. A light on my nightstand does a slow fade up for easy waking in the morning and then switches itself off about an hour later once my wife and I are long out of bed. There are also a lights throughout the house that flip on at sunset and then switch off at different times later in the evening, signaling, hey, it's time for bed. Yes, I could use a smartphone app (or apps) to do similar tasks, but having direct control in script form is so much easier. Changing times or adding a new bulb into the system is just a matter of editing an array in the script.
We also have a terrible time with water leaking in the basement. The sump pump we have does push out water fairly well when it runs, but it gets overwhelmed easily. Plus, the float doesn't always work correctly, so water can collect in the pit without the pump switching on like it's supposed to. So, using a combination of a TP-Link smartplug, a Wireless Tag water sensor, IFTTT and another custom PHP script linking to the TP-Link API, I now have a system that keeps water out permanently. This particular sump pump has a manual switch that allows it to run, bypassing the float. I leave the switch in the ON position and plug the pump into the TP-Link smartplug. Then I mounted the Wireless Tag water sensor in one of the basement drain pipes. If the water rises high enough to trigger the sensor, IFTTT triggers the TP-Link plug and the sump pump runs. Once the sensor no longer detects water, IFTTT again sends a signal to trigger the plug so that the pump stops. Along with this method, using PHP with the TP-Link API, I monitor weatherundergound.com every 20 minutes and if the current conditions show any form of rain, the script switches the pump on, lets it run for 10 minutes and then switches it off. Just long enough to keep the water level from rising too high. I connected all these water prevention items up a few months ago and haven't had even close to a wet basement since. (Oh and, why not just get a better, working correctly pump? The pump was apparently put in by the city years ago, long before I moved in, and is a cheap "torpedo cylinder" pump. Our plumber said it would take $thousands to tear up the basement floor to install a correct pump and the pump can't just be replaced because no one makes the type of pump any longer that would fit in the current pit. So going the automation route just set me back about $100.)
And then, auto-downloading TV shows/movies via Jackett+Radarr+Sonarr
So maybe "you'll just miss the next train if you leave right now" and "you'll catch it if you leave right now" could be augmented with a third state, "hey you'd better leave RIGHT NOW if you wanna catch the train". But a slow glide from red to green is going to have too many interim states.
TJ is "Show text, allowing individual glyph positioning" which means strings are not necessarily in the PDF as the strings themselves, but have glyph positioning info mixed into them. This is the most common issue I've come across.
Another possibility is that the fonts have been combined/compressed/butchered, so that they're not using ASCII/Unicode (this can sometimes save space by combining bits of multiple fonts. Searching for Tj/TJ/'/" should tell you if that's the case. If it is, technically there should be a translation table somewhere in the PDF file (so that clipboard operations work in PDF viewers). Look for CustomEncoding, I think.
Particularly bad PDF creation libraries can put characters in one by one.
Characters (alone or in strings) can also be in there as octal or hex.
Finally, particularly obnoxious libraries can do it without text commands at all, but convert everything to vector drawing commands, or even worse, bitmaps.
I couldn't remember CustomEncoding, and this came up when I searched. Seems helpful: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29467539/encoding-of-pdf...
Immediately preceding the Tj's are a lot of non-text characters that don't look like anything human-readable. Immediately following them are other other commands (Td, Tf, rg, k, etc.) which are preceded by numbers. There are no CustomEncodings. So I guess this means I can't really grep anything?
The PDF specification, while long, is pretty readable for this kind of thing. You can download the 1.7 version free from Adobe. Appendix A has a table of commands.
Raspberry Pi runs a program that gets sunrise sunset data for my lat long, and then turns on off lights depending on that data plus preferences about when the earliest I'd expect someone to be leaving/coming.
Used to have a little timer that plugged into the outlet, but you'd keep having to update the on-off times as the seasons changed, and the clock kept drifting.
There are photo sensitive equivalents plugs, but apparently they don't work great, and they would keep the lights on all night long, and light pollution is a pet-peeve.
My mechanical timers have all broken or drifted too.
As a software maintainer, people sends Bugzilla entry in all different forms: Full link, only numbers, BZ<number>, BZ#<Number>.
Of the last tree options, I need to open an random bugzilla link, remove the ID and replace with the sent number. It's like 10 seconds work, but I have to do it 20~40 times a day.
Nowadays, I mouse-select some numbers and press CTRL+B. A 10-lines-python-script is called from gnome. It uses xsel to see what do I have selected and, if it looks like a BZ, it opens firefox will the full link for me.
It's ridiculous simple, but it's a time/sanity saver for me.
Alerts to my phone if the fridge or freezer temperature exceeds a limit or the humidity under my dishwasher starts rising.
Granted, neither are fully automatic and require manual intervention.
I actually haven't shared my scraper script just because I think someone would then share the pictures (perhaps accidentally).
EDIT: I'll just add that there are no public photos of my kids and I ask anyone who takes photos not to share them outside family. So I do agree with your point.
I can spin up a virtual Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, and access it via virtual desktop, from any linux host running LXD 3.0+ (currently Ubuntu 18.04 server). I can go from a freshly installed server to a fully functional, deterministic dev environment in one git clone and build script run.
I also keep a virtual desktop or two around for any long running tasks that require a GUI environment, or for browser tabs I want to keep open long term.
Only question I'd have is: Could this go wrong e.g. if you were away (and she knew it) but the bot continued. Also typically aren't good morning texts followed by light follow-up conversation?
Until, one day, I'm so lazy to do it, and write the macOS app to fetch feature art and set it as a wallpaper on my personal laptop daily.
It's my rescuer.
So I loaded Windows 98 onto an old desktop, installed PCAnywhere, the UO client and a macro utility.
The result was a lightning fast, never interrupted connection to UO with a macro'ing character running 24/7 on a headless PC in a datacenter.
I didn't dare automate the application process... I had nightmares of 450 property managers calling me at once saying "Congratulations". :)
Heating comes on at 4.30am in cooler months, turns off when we leave to go to work (along with the bedroom, hallways and kitchen lights which come on at 6am)
Heating comes back on at 2pm if outside air temperature is below a certain threshold.
Bathroom floor heating and towel rail switch on and off at various times during the morning, afternoon and evening depending on the day.
Does this mean you constantly have light there even when you're not around? Any particular reason for that (maybe the switches for it are placed awkwardly or so?)
(I'm a beta tester here: https://www.getbottomless.com )
This serves two purposes for me: 1. I can be more specific about how I want to consume reddit. ie, I can fine tune parameters for each subreddit. 2. The download destination is directly to my NAS, so I can hoard it. (Bit of a datahoarder here)
It's been a fun learning experience identifying the diversity of URLs/Domains that are posted to reddit. Definitely a different perspective.
Also my cat would disagree about who trains whom, but he uses the regular 'throne' in the restroom.
Now I don't have to remember to forward mail to Expensify every time I book an airbnb for business travel, or pay my monthly O365 subscription.
It works great, except for when a company decides to change the format of their emails and I have to update my script to use a new search pattern.
2) mail forward setup you@domain.sth -> regular gmail
3) setup gmail forward address test to you@domain.sth
4) validate
5) mail forward setup you@domain.sth -> Expensify's mailbox
6) ^^
https://smalldata.tech/blog/2017/11/15/building-a-voice-assi...
I also wrote my own little VPN kill swtich - great for ensuring that my browser shuts down if the VPN dies.
https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/04/11/building-a-vpn-kill-s...
But one of the more usefull automations is a text2speach script which fires in the morning between 6 and 11, during workdays, when I'm not asleep but still at home, always 7 minutes before the next train to work leaves. This way I miss the train faar less often.
I was able to set up something I had wanted for a long time which was to turn off my TV/Stereo/Kodi after idling. I built the conditions which caused the the whole thing to shut off via Harmony hub after 10 minutes of idle after being played.
The one downside is the project moves really fast so you have to keep up with breaking changes sometimes.
Then there's a cron job that beeps on the hour (a 4-bit number from 1-12), so I can hear if my computer and watch are in sync.
https://gist.github.com/VictorPascu/1886f97927f759ec45977556...
It causes not responding prompts because I couldn't find a good way to implement a sleep call on the checker, but hey, it works, and I'm lazy enough that I'm willing to burn processor cycles to not get out of bed.
(If indoor, overkill.)
It works perfectly (watering the plants 1-2 times a day depending on the setting I set); I like its simplicity and easy of use!
I wish I could do the same for my phone. Robocalls are out of control now. At least 4 a day, sometimes 20+.
I also threw together an Alexa skill that I can tell goodnight - it closes the garage door, turns off some lights, turns off my hot water heater and arms the alarm.
Nothing large or fancy, but they get used and save me at least seconds a day!
Thermomix is more like a blender with a built-in heating element, so you can throw your veggies in and then it blends and cooks them.
edit seems it's indeed a point of discussion https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8956/is-it-safe...
Why do you ask?
And then there is privacy.
Besides that I use Home Assistant[0] with a few simple automations. For example, when the lights are on in the bathroom, and it's after dark, increase the heating/towel warmer (using Tado[1]).
Tado has its own home/away detection, plus some schedule for the heaters. It's supposed to save on energy costs.
When we're on holiday, I switch on/off various lights (with some random offset) at night... Or some times I might leave a radio on timer / connected to an IoT power switch. (I don't use any burglar alarms, cameras etc, but I try to deter them with those simple fake occupancy tools)
Philips Hue has a nice way to slowly turn the lights on. Useful to wake up during the dark winter months.
Your personal email account is probably a million times more sensitive. It contains enough personal information to get your identity stolen a thousand times over, and once your email has been compromised there is no way to ascertain the damage.
But... In Europe thanks to just another EU laws we should have every bank offering an API access for everyone starting from September 2018 IIRC. That would help a lot with automation, I hope generating few api keys with different access permissions would be possible with that.
I wish they had an API but I just use a selenium script essentially. Luckily(?) logging in to this particular account only requires user/password and no fancy codes etc. I guess when the system is built with readonly default and OTP for anything else, then the login can be kept simple.
I've wanted to do something like this for so long but it just seems so painful. How do you do this with just a little script when there's so much Javascript involved in the page, as well as random interjections like random extra security verification steps? Do you have a particularly scrape-friendly bank?
Also, there was no auto-discovery of LIFX lights and I was told I needed to re-implement the LIFX protocol from scratch because no extra dependencies were allowed in the discovery module.
1. Automated indoor gardening. I used a raspberry pi hooked up to x10 devices as a way to monitor the temperature of my garden, and run the watering and light cycles. This meant I only had to worry about my garden maybe an hour a week when changing out the nutrients and reservoirs. This saved a huge amount of time, let me go on vacation for long periods of time without having to worry about things, and saved me from forgetfulness. It allowed for me to enjoy my garden a lot more, and look for real issues, like bugs/pests/nutrient deficiencies. Getting an automated process also made each cycle more reproducible.
https://github.com/cbanek/garden-squid
2. Automated billpay. This changed my life. By not having to worry about missing bills, it really just took them completely off my radar. Downside: If there was a problem with a bill, I might not notice right away, but in general, there was so little that wasn't actually my fault that it didn't matter. Fidelity has a great automated bill pay system that is free to use, and will send out checks and do e-bills for most utility / credit card companies.
I have a vague plan to extend Espurna to have it built in.
When I leave my wifi hotspot it turns on bluetooth.
When/if it connects to my car it opens Spotify (but it doesnt start playing yet before I hit play on the steering weel).
If it's in my car's handler (there's a NFC tag there) it assumes I want navigation and it also opens Waze.
When it disconnects it turns on wifi again and keep it on for a few minutes and shut it down if it's not connected to anything.
I'm sure android auto can do all this nowadays, but my car has a 7-years-old ford-sync system, and that's bluetooth only.
I complained about the poor performance to my dealer and they replaced the stereo but that didn't really fix anything.
I wonder how difficult it would be to automate clicking on the notification to grant access to whatever it is that Android Auto thinks it needs access to?
* Remind me on my phone when I'm at home, connect to car via BT, on weekdays, during "morning hours" to not forget my building access badge.
* Go into "silent mode" if I've been in proximity to my son's high school for more than 5 minutes (I'm usually there for some event where I should be silent).
* Various volume controls when I get to (or leave) home/work/etc.
* Change the screen to not auto-dim/off when running certain apps.
My investment thesis is to buy high-growth tech company stocks with an upcoming earnings call in the next 90 days. I have a script that scrapes Yahoo finance and tells me which stocks to buy.
Surprisingly it's worked well, and I've gotten a return of 44% last year
I just sell after the earnings or when I gain the desired amount (5-10% return)
would love to see the code here
Downsides:
-I'm not actively thinking about money and hence improved investments
-I'm not monitoring credit card errors
-Comcast gradually increased increased my bill from $44/mo to $103/mo without any resistance from my side
Like you, it does mean I need to make mental notes to check into things every now and then so that there aren't charges I don't understand or investments that really seem out of whack.
Pretty much the only other thing of note I do, besides have a lawn service, is some automated plant watering because of the aforementioned traveling. For this and other reasons my schedule is variable enough that none of the usual SmartHome stuff really does anything for me even if it solved problems I felt I had, which I don't other than some remote monitoring.
`python2 ~/builds/dir2opus/dir2opus -a -b 96 --delete-input . -r && rsync -av --progress -e "ssh -p 8022" . 192.168.1.111:"/sdcard/Music/music-OPUS/" && rm ./* -rf #music`
Likewise audiobooks, but to 24kbps opus:
`python2 ~/builds/dir2opus/dir2opus -a -b 24 --delete-input . -r && rsync -av --progress -e "ssh -p 8022" . 192.168.1.111:"/sdcard/Audiobooks/" && rm ./* -rf #audiobooks`
I do use Syncthing to then sync the (opus) music from my mobile to my work desktop.
2. I wrote a cryptocurrency trading bot because I'm too lazy/uninterested to actually learn anything about the market. It seemed to do pretty well when the market was flat or going up. Hard to tell if it's doing badly now or if it's just reflecting the state of the market. I almost forgot to include it in this list because it's so thoroughly automated that I rarely bother to check it.
3. I assisted the owner of pvoutput.org with adding support for the automated data upload format from my PV inverter. Then I wrote a script that automatically polls my electricity meter using a RAVEn USB device to upload the net import/export of power.
4. Maybe other things that I've forgotten about because they're automated...
I'd love to have a service like this with wavenet-quality TTS. These are a bit jarring. Although, like low quality audio files, I guess you get used to it pretty quick?
If you have any ideas etc. drop me an email! (See profile)
(The files persist until the conversion is fully complete i.e.uploaded to S3 and sent to user)
The main lihht turns on for 1.5 minutes, then the other 2 switch take over for 'chilled' lighting. If i leave, the lights go on a timer for 10 minutes. If the PIR doesnt pick up movement, or i have not returned, the lights go off. When going to sleep, i have an acarde button as a master switch to either turn on chilled lights or off.
The lights are controlled with 5v relay switches. No intrusive adjustment were made to the main light, as i bought male / female bayonet socket to wire/ wire to bayonet socket adapters.
An Arduino is controlling the whole thing, and the wire used is cheap RGB 4 pin wire off ebay which is i belive 24gauge?
Still a bit buggy after refactoring, but ill get there eventually: https://github.com/alfanhui/automated_home_lights
Four years later it's now available in six cities and indexes hundreds of local independent stores.
If I'm in the kitchen I'm actively cooking or using the sink and pacing around, so the motion sensor keeps the lights on. After 1 minute of no motion, they turn off. Important to set timers though as the lights are no longer a reminder if something is in the oven or on the stovetop.
For the bathroom, I have a sensor placed precisely to view both inside and out of the shower with the curtain closed. This means the lights won't turn off while someone is in the shower unless they stand really still for 2 minutes. If someone wants to take a bath and won't move much, I can override the sensor to a longer shutoff time.
At 6:30pm I have a light that turns on to simulate that we're home. Looking to move this to a "sunset minus 30 minutes" model soon so it appears more organic.
At 2am, all of the lights turn off in case we forgot, or as a friendly reminder to go to bed. It hasn't worked today. :)
Makes walking around late at night less painful. (Children's toys end up everywhere!)
If anyone is interested, the API is here: openerz.herokuapp.com and the city is Zurich, Switzerland.
2. Temperature IoT Monitoring: temperature monitoring in baby room. Takes 1 minute samples of temp and humidity in the room and also records local weather in zip code. HTML Dashboard to keep track of it all. Uses very cheap NodeMCU+wifi board.
3. Webcam Timelapse: Cheapo Chinese Webcam + RaspberryPi + special no-internet access wifi networking (cause I dont trust the Chinese webcams). Grabs a frame every minute and stitches it into a video .
I've also added various other things to it like Wifi presence notification, so it sends me a notification if a guest arrives, and hooked it up to Kodi and an Amazon Echo so I can say things like "play Iron Man" and it will turn on the TV, put on the movie and turn off the lights.
Not super useful stuff, but it was fun.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/building-cheap-home-sensorcontr...
I used an ESP8266 with cheapo sensors, the whole board costs like $5 or something. The software is pretty ad-hoc but is not more than 100 lines of code.
The remote-controlled outlet is a commercial off-the-shelf product for ordinary consumers. I reverse-engineered the 433 MHz signal using a RTL-SDR receiver and some widely-available programs. Using this outlet instead of making a circuit by myself allowed me to bypass the regulatory issues, as the outlet itself is already UL-certificated - no physical modification at all, if the outlet blew up anyway, I'm not liable for the damages at school.
A simple little thing, but extremely useful. It did a good job for maintaining a prefect humidity in my dorm room and made us survived the dry winter (RH <15% otherwise, due to artificial heating). I tweaked the microcontroller with an oscilloscope to make sure it uses minimum power. The whole controller is powered by 4 AA-batteries, with > 10 days of battery life, and fit on a single breadboard. All I need to do is refill the humidifier with water every morning.
The only trap is the unreliability of the humidity sensor, because humidity measurement is inherently hard. >15 USD sensors are reliable, don't attempt the project with cheaper ones, as the only humidity-sensing element they use is a resistor and it was completely unreliable. It was pretty frustrating and lots of fruitless debugging involved because of the crap sensor initially.
Some of them are connected to the water line, so I use a german commercial solution that irrigates 1-2-3 times a day for x seconds.
I just hacked the electric signal of the valve with a cable, sugru and 3d printed parts to control it with a raspi, so it is dynamic, based on the weather and water sensors, so water is not wasted.
Other plants are not connected to the water line pipe. So I use terracota recipients and a raspi controlled deposit of water to add some water the terracota will absorb by capillarity and irrigate the plants this way.
There is no better system to irrigate plants than capillarity.
I fill the deposit manually once a month or so.
I also brought a bread-pizza mass machine as in some countries there is no good bread like in Spain or France, this way I could design my own custom cycles depending on parameters like the weight of the bread I will make. Automating it was super simple.
I created a book reader-digitalizer, all my books are digitalized, OCR.... The hardest thing to do was flipping pages. At first I used vacuum with a super complex system. A year ago or so I simplified it enormously with just a cheap Chinese electrostatic device.
Tado - a smart thermostat, sets the temperature while we're in the house. Heats up water only if we're in. Uses an app to geolocate us.
Lifx - lightbulbs which automatically dimm at 2300 (good reminder to go to bed) and auto switch off a couple of hours after sunrise.
Everything else is either always on (security cameras, smoke detector) or run as needed (Roomba, car charger, electric blanket) or autonomous (Moixa solar battery).
This has been a pet bug of mine for a while. My shifts are never the same 2 weeks in a row, and I feed it all into my calendar. But homekit etc won't consume this.
I've botched together a few scripts to set my heating based on the events in my 'work' calendar, so it sets before I get home, not after, and it does seem to work much better than any geofencing or 'learning'.
I measure each every morning. Then I press one button, enter both numbers, and get on with my day.
Not full automation, but having waist circumference along with weight has really helped me get a better sense of fat loss while doing strength training.
(Workflow app, for the Workflow)
I also have a script which scrapes my podcast player's website, to give me a list of podcast episodes that I already played. I save this list every day in an excel file, but the script makes this much easier - I run the script, then paste the results into the excel.
So, mostly domotica stuff.
I'm not sure how to autorun when an SD card is inserted (using ubuntu here).
There are a couple of reasons why I don't bother:
The first is that I consider what I'm doing to be a hobby, and therefore tax-exempt. The point was more about the challenge of writing the bot than seriously imagining that my trivial algorithm could make money. Because it's currency trading, I expect the Australian Tax Office would disagree with my definition, but there is one thing in my favour -
The second reason is that, despite hitting almost A$2000 profit around January, as we head into tax time it's sitting at less than $500. Also, I've never realised any of these profits - I withdrew the original A$500 investment, but everything else just keeps getting reinvested. I don't think the ATO is going to be too troubled that I've got a little under A$500 worth of pretend-money floating around in the aether somewhere.
Bottom line, I'm not going to worry about tax until there's enough profit that I can pay an accountant to worry about it for me, and possibly pay some backdated taxes. The up-side to automated trading, even for small-time personal investors, is that the ATO regards it as "carrying on a business of share trading" rather than investing as an individual, and their rules appear to be a bit simpler in that situation.
Generally earnings aren't a great event to bet on as they get baked in until unless they are exceptional. It feels like picking up coins in front of a steam roller.
I'd be much more worried about my email getting hacked though.
Huh? The worst case scenario of your bank login details is... someone depositing all your money to their account, surely.
I was doing some swing trading near the top and it ended up that I am paying significantly more taxes than I ever put into it.
Oh well, live and learn.
I'm fully expecting banks to throw extreme security hurdles and probably registration fees in the way if they can.
Hopefully I will be wrong.
2) Broker fees are $0 as I use Robinhood.
Like I said, I made a ~44% return. If a $7 trader fee is your argument for it not being viable then you are most likely not investing enough money, or not getting a decent return.
>quarterly by law
I don't think you answered the GP's question. What is the point of looking at the earnings call date if your script just returns a full list of companies? (Or maybe when you said 90 days you meant a shorter time period?)
Take for example Shopify. Their stock is very fast growing, however, you'll always notice a decent bump during earnings calls. I buy 30-60 days before this earnings call, because I anticipate it'll grow in the next 30-60 days (for the earnings call), given the previous growth. I sell on the day of earnings call
...and if your business is really killing it, and you're also killing it in the stock market, I am certain you won't have a problem paying a few dollars to the US Gov. It's still better than other investment avenues :-)
We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework.
To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains switches attached to the induction hob and the slow cooker. A wooden spoon attached to a 360 degree servo motor hangs above the pot on the hob and can be activated by the Pi for stirring. Initially I tried to use one of those cheap three-legged novelty vibrating pot stirrers, but that didn't work out. Thermocouples feed back to the Pi to help control cooking.
The whole thing is controlled by a messy Python script and 'recipes' are JSON based text files. They just define how long each device should stay on, a max temp to turn them off and how often they should be stirred. I get an email when cooking is done.
I plan to add some functionality over the summer to tip in ingredients as needed. The biggest issue is that it doesn't handle chunky food, it works for soups, chili sauce, pasta sauce etc. I'd love to figure out a way to fry and separate mince as you would with a spatula..
My system looks like it was put together by a drunk person. That is somewhat true.
I've found that a lot of meals done via the slow cooker tend to taste the same because of the consistently and the type of ingredients typically involved in them.
Sous-vide much more specialized, but I find super useful not for saving time, per say, but being more flexible about it. It's great when you are doing other things at the same time as cooking dinner, i.e. - leave the steaks another 30 min while I do this chore? no problem....
"I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand."
Sometimes it simply isn't about net time saved.
I don't really save much time. The real benefit is knowing that the food won't burn. Growing up my mother would make soups and stews, she'd leave them to simmer for 30 mins without checking. The food on the bottom of the pot would burn and make the whole thing taste nasty. I wanted to make a system that would prevent that, whereas my son just loves building robots and playing with motors.
It was as much a project for me and my son to mess around with as much as an actual kitchen time saver. But we have plans to develop it and just see where it goes.
It has a very "Wallace and Gromit" sounding vibe to me!
Me and my sister do live in different cities. She was quite old, but did not want any help from strangers. She did refuse to use a computer keyboard, since she hated informatization, and her sight was short.
So I did automate a system for her to scan the guests documents, detect the data required by local police for registration via OCR, fill up the form to send those data, and update the web site availability database table. The computer, when powered up, did only show instructions in big text, high contrast instructions, which where repeated by TTS (essentially "please feed the documents in the scanner", "please remove the documents from the scanner").
At the end she got used to using it, and she was quite proud being able to be so independent, since the last days of her lovely life.
For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android.
Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and corrections is an open source Android app called AndroidAPS[3].
As an insulin I use the fastest available analog Fiasp from Novo Nordisk, that works 10-15 minutes after injection.
All of these combined together has dropped my A1c results from 7.5% to 5.5%, being 90% of the time between 4.0 mmol/l and 8.5 mmol/l, and having no severe hypoglycemias. Basically I got myself some more years to live without any complications and in general I feel much better when I can sleep my nights without worrying and can eat whatever I want whenever I want.
Oh, and a warning to everybody who tries this: Accu-Chek will not cover any damage, there is nobody taking any responsibility of the results from the treatment you get out of the software. For me this works much better than any other treatment, but for others it might be even dangerous.
[0] https://www.dexcom.com/g5-mobile-cgm
[1] https://github.com/NightscoutFoundation/xDrip/
[2] https://www.accu-chek.com/insulin-pumps-integrated-systems/c...
Basically, I put down wire guide cable into the lawn and into the cement as well. It is all powered by electricity and has a little docking station. When it is scheduled to cut it simply rolls out, goes to the lawn and starts cutting on. After a pre-determined point, it will go back to the compost bin to dump the grass cuttings before going back to cut the lawn again. After it is done with all the cuts it simply returns back to the charging station.
I am trying to add better features to it like weather detection. If rain is scheduled then it will cut the lawn early and then delay cutting it again until the lawn is dry. I am also working on adding an edger component and a weed wacker competent so it can handle those tasks as well. Pretty much, my goal is to have a fully automated robot lawn mower when I am done with this project. So far it only cuts the grass and dumps the waste. I think this wire guided method is far superior to the autonomous robot mowers because most people's yards are in static arrangements that rarely change. So it is better to just add in the wire permanently so you get a perfect cut every time.
When you spend most of your day stuck in front of a monitor, it feels good to get up and turn lights on/off.
But I'm an engineer, so I've decided to automate my OKCupid experience.
Using node & puppeteer I've run a histogram, it showed that in my country, 75% of the profiles are almost completely empty (less than 10 words). I used to manually dislike these profiles (as they'll keep coming back in the search results until you dislike it), but now my script does it for me. The next thing I've done was to sort these profiles - I give higher priority to profiles that have a longer word count, that features keywords I prefer ("fascinating", "studying", "reading", are words that I catch my attention).
It used to be a very basic script, but every negative and toxic encounter has motivated me to keep it going. Right now I'm working on building a frontend to show the script's results. I'm planning on showing "suggested openers" based on the questions the potential match has said or mentioned and adding NLP features (such as sentiment analysis).
I would take a resume, custom tailor a cover letter, change out a few paragraphs in my resume to fit the specific job title --- and then.. no reply -. So. I scripted it. I would scan craigslist, monster, indeed, etc for emails or company names. The script eventually evolved to guess company homepages and scan for emails on 'career' sections.
Based on the job titles it would automatically change out cover letters. It became smart enough to understand that a word doc or txt format resume was required. It could catch "PUT THIS IN THE SUBJECT" and created a queue for hand verification -- otherwise, it would send out the emails. Once they were sent out it would scan incoming emails to determine if there were any leads - and matched the thread together with a unique email footer.
Hilariously, it flipped job searching. I would get long ranting emails why I wasn't a qualified or the position required someone more 'senior' to build CRUD webpages. OH well, HR blew their time, not mine, ---> delete. When a interested company did call, I had a nice mysql database of all the posts that company made and was ready to return a call prepared.
I got a job quickly after this php script starting running.
"I'll get you a 20% more high paying job for $1,000"
First I wrote code that automatically moved cards between the different sections, so I only ever had to look at the "Due Today" list.
Then I used Twilio to build a bot that gave me a wake up call every morning. I didn't like the TTS that Twilio used so I generated more realistic TTS via Amazon Polly and played it back. Polly has many different voices so I had seven different personas give me my task list for the day. After it read out what I had to do, it then began playing the latest BBC News update right over the phone.
The final phase of this project was a bot that called my girlfriend at the time, told her the weather, and then called me and conferenced us together so we could start our day saying hello to one another.
At some point, I got tired of the process to sync files: download the document from the browser, open the reMarkable app and drag the file into it.
I automated this workflow, and now I can just "print" directly to the device [1] the article/document I'm reading.
[0] https://remarkable.com/ [1] https://github.com/juruen/rmapi/blob/master/docs/tutorial-pr...
I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.
-- news sites via rss with heavy keyword filtering for news that's important to me like hometown news etc (Google alerts style)
-- firmware updates from various devices that wouldn't otherwise notify me like kindle
-- posts up voted over X times in a period on smaller, specialized subreddits of interest
- daily digests of message boards I follow
- flight price alerts from persistent searches on routes I follow
- account updates via polling over websites like my frequent flyer accounts etc
I also love keyboard macros built into ios and have dozens for commonly used things I type.
I've put some recipes on the wiki off Github. Most of them are quite teasy to string together once you just get the right extraction pattern, then they're simple WebsiteAgent -> Dedupe Agent -> (Email/Digest/Pushover Agent)
Proxy phone number via Twilio or Google Voice for the times when you'd rather not give your real number out.
Audio translations for digital books using espeak + pdftotext + shell scripting. If you didn't know, espeak can output wav files. It's a nice way to read since my commute is 3 hours a day.
Recipe management for putting meals into rotation and generating a shopping list. Check out Gourmet or Krecipes on linux. It could probably be hooked into a grocery delivery service like Prime Pantry or just migrated to one.
General automation with Twilio + serverless cloud functions is pretty good. There's a new Twilio tool for building IVRs (interactive voice response trees, like those phone menus you get when calling a cable company). The super cheap on-demand pricing for cloud functions makes this basically free to run.
I started a personal SMS/Voice service for some of my tasks like what's on [favorite radio station], Bus line directions, shops near me, etc. There's no real point yet but I feel like it could have uses that are actually helpful...
* : Menu composer takes into account :
- in season vegetables,
- number of reutilisation of the ingredient,
- number of reutilisation of the meal,
- expiration of the ingredients (vegetables can expire rather quickly)
- various parameters (if it is a busy week or not, number of days you want to cook...)
It's really a relief. No need to decide what to cook after work : it's already decided, and you know you have the right ingredients. Time spend for the shopping is very small.
I want to be able to plug that into an online shopping website, but as always, websites don't display there API so i'm trying to hack into it... (and people still talk about API economy...)
Nice. I'm using Google Keep for now, and there's probably a much better solution already -- but what I really want is a way to organize my shopping list the way the grocery store is organized so I can zip through it.
Ideally, this would require some collaboration with the store to get the exact layout. But a generic (vegetables first, breads 2nd, canned goods 3rd, ..., milk & dairy last. would also help tremendously.
I'd love to use the same system. Is it open source?
Ill be happy to start an open source project with a few peeps if their interested as well?
Catch me on github https://github.com/Alfanhui
I played an online game called runescape where you could trade items to other players, but it was tedious and required a lot of repetitive typing: "buying chaos runes 80gp each".
I downloaded an auto typer but i was paranoid of getting banned. I wanted a more human auto typer so i found a tutorial for making one in visual basic. It was more or less copy and paste, and as a middle schooler i really did not understand the code.
I became really interested in botting after that, downloading, modifying, and eventually creating more sophisticated scripts. Automating the game became the new game for me.
I would come home from school to a banned account, think about how they may have detected me & automate smarter.
To this day I will often spend more time writing code to automate something than i save.
Automation is a way to make the mundane work a fun game
How? The oldest form of automation. We pay someone to come and do it. We have a cleaning person come twice a week.
I have a site called http://www.correlated.org that generates funny statistics based on user-submitted data.
After several years of running it, I got a book deal. It was part of a two-part deal that also involved my other (more successful) book "Experimenting With Babies."
For the Correlated book, I wrote a bunch of code involving some seriously gnarly SQL queries and some Natural Language Generation tools, and it basically spat out the book.
There was, of course, extra manual effort needed, but the code got me about 80% there.
Here's a little more about the book:
Also, though I derive great happiness from this automation effort, I’ve noticed that the processing units are quite expensive and the maintenance cost is also large. After 5 years, I’m certain I’ve spent more time training them than if I fed the dog myself and more money that if I hired a 3rd party DwaaS (dog walker as a service).
About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that on a regular basis, and it was clear that doing it manually, on a regular basis, was not gonna happen.
I am personally -- NSFW SPOILER ALERT!! -- a long time Windows/IE user, and I knew that IE has a comprehensive automation interface. In literally a few lines of VBScript (say), you can programatically start IE, navigate to URLs, parse the DOM, create new local documents, and so on. But although those interfaces are very simple, they're not robust against failures, and have various weird and wonderful corner cases that will sometimes trip you up.
So over the next 10 years or so, I created a robust, general-purpose IE automation wrapper, and wrote some applications on top thereof. The result is that at any time, I can click a few buttons on a handsome user interface, and enter a single master password, at which point my application will automatically log into each share registry and online banking website in turn; download all new and amended data therefrom; transform all data into common formats; store it in a local cache, so it doesn't matter if it later disappears from the website; then creates a single share holdings document, showing all share holdings from all share registries, and a single online banking document, showing all transactions from all accounts at all banks since the start of time. Both documents have dynamic, user-defined sorting and filtering. They also hilite significant changes; check all share holdings against banking credits to confirm that all expected dividends were received; and so on.
In other words, I've completely automated various important financial checks that I simply couldn't do by hand on a regular basis. The downside is, I'm tied to IE - and - several hundred thousand lines of VBScript! If anyone would like to re-write all that code for Chrome or whatever - for free - you're more than welcome to contact me!!!
My NAS automatically downloads files as they are released by scene/p2p/pirate groups. Files are extracted (if compressed), renamed, metadata is added, and published on some apps like plex and trakt.
Movies, TV Shows, Music.
2. Smart Home stuff like turning on the light on sunset if I’m home, turning off the lights when I leave home and multifunctional wake up calls using light and music.
3. And which I guess I’m most proud of: I’m secretary at my local volunteer fire brigade and one of the chores is to send out a weekly email to everyone with a digest of trainings and other appointments in the next week. To get this out of my head, I wrote a serverless function that queries a special google calendar for this, collects titles, start times and notes, generates an email and sends it out to our members. This lets me just manage the appointments within my calendar and takes care of all the mechanics. Fun fact: this works that good that sometimes people come to me with “yeah, about your email...” and I’m like “which E-... OH!”
4. Vacuuming. My roomba has paid for itself several times with the time it’s saving me
http://gopi-kori.blogspot.com/2013/08/auto-login-to-hathway-...
I have also automated all bathroom lights and lights on basin to switch on based on motion sensing using these cheap switches
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Home-LED-light-PIR-Infrared-...
This saves energy by solving my problem where I used to forget switching off the lights many times.
One of the things I'd like to add is the ability to detect natural gas: She doesn't have a lot of gas appliances, but she has no sense of smell, so the usual warning sign for natural gas she'd never notice.
What data do the local police require?
Specifically in the case of Italy it seems like it is to be compliant with long standing legislation called TULPS.[1]
1.https://www.quora.com/Are-hotels-in-Italy-required-to-take-a...
That's a great way of using accessibility tools & automation.
To solve this pain point - one of our friend has created PlusGuests.
P.S. Today I built a new widget to my i3 setup, displaying the current glucose and the trend. https://i.imgur.com/VnZ23vO.png
Forgetting to bolus and accounting for the dawn phenoemenon are pretty challenging in a backpackers routine. :-)
Of course using it in pump is a different story, especially if you have a CGM with the pump. Right now I'm using the SMB algorithm in AAPS, that can help with unannounced meals by giving small boluses if it thinks you ate something. The same mechanism pretty much evens out my dawn phenomenon.
One thing you should know before trying Fiasp is the molecule size is much larger and might cause stinging feeling when the pump gives you dosage. Try to get a pump that goes slow with the dosing, otherwise the first couple of months might be a bit unpleasant. You'll get used to it though and I don't really notice it anymore.
Always calibrate when you are not sure.
G6 promises a no-calibration mode, but has a hard stop for sensors after 10 days. With G5 and calibrations you can double or triple the sensor lifetime (with xDrip).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-018-0062-8
My little sister is type I and using the BCG vaccine in this way blows my mind.
I suppose that many stations don't have such markers though.
First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky.
The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database.
On the other hand, the described project only scratches my own itch. I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations.
I've often toyed with the same idea of the parent poster
For some reason, the data and audio are out of sync but once calibrated it works quite well.
https://bitbucket.org/timwiffen89/radio_adblocker/src/master...
https://github.com/erikkaashoek/Comskip
It seems the tuning of the algorithm is complex though. There's a dedicated forum for it: http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=effa4b...
That was only one wire that I forget the purpose of, perhaps as electronic barrier. I can't imagine the mayhem of a grid of wires being struck with the same misfortune.
Quite often the worst-case scenario is a fire, so the little benefit is IMHO not worth the risk.
I'm talking about self-made hacks and cheap Chinese hardware here.
I got my parents a Nest smoke alarm (I can see the alarms too) but a year later it was being triggered by steam.
The folks at Nest actually sent a free new model that's better at not triggering for steam. But I have to wonder if my elderly parents trust it anymore.
I don't like watering grass because grass is boring and requires a ton of water, so rather than install irrigation, I ripped out all the grass and planted more interesting plants. (Drought-tolerant xeriscaping is common in my area, so this isn't unusual.)
Anyways is it open source :D
FYI for all dating folks out there: women do not want you to approach them in the street. Like, let's say, 99.5% of the time.
The solution was, obviously, to make my scraper run slower. :)
I hope you at least disclose your methods to people you contact.
I'm also not taking it too seriously. This is my pet project (I'm not obsessed with it), and a place where I channel the negative residue that sticks to me from logging into that site.
I don't keep it disclosed, Aù contraire, I write that plain on my profile "I use a JS script to filter out empty profiles". Most of the people that send me a message in OKCupid don't even bother reading my profile (even though I've kept my it brief). And the ones who do find it amusing, and interesting.
Definitely going to look into this. I'm a blind screen reader user and, when I had a phone with physical buttons, I could have it in my pocket connected to an external braille device or pair of headphones. I could easily carry on conversations, browse the web, ask for help, all sorts of things without taking it out of my pocket, and nobody had to know I was doing anything.
With a touchscreen phone I can't really do any of that. Even if I can listen to notifications in an earphone with the phone in my pocket, I can't take care of them unless I take the phone out. Plus, wearing earphones and walking around in public when you can't see isn't wise.
It's possible for sure, but like OCR there's a lot of variability in it. Just like parsing handwriting is full of edge cases, parsing morse code is as well.
I do not write that often on it though. I usually solve math problems on it and also comment on PDF docs.
All in all, I'd buy it again :)
I get around the same issue by emailing files to the reMarkable [0] but that's a solution that relies on having your own email server and is therefore less user-friendly than what you do, though it works great for my use case.
I believe using CUPS could be a simple way to implement it in Linux.
Is the remarkable better in that regard ?
IIRC it supports PDF and presumably other ebook formats, but I wouldn't expect it to have any special tool for viewing markdown.
I also automated the display of tram-departures from the tram-stop next to my house with similar hardware.
Otherwise I setup some "wireless buttons" to trigger alerts/actions on my Linux desktop system, and record local temperature/humidity into a time-series database for tracking purposes.
I was wondering about that as well but I only found the Amazon ones, which either need tricky operations to be usable (the brand-oriented dash ones) or expensive (the Amazon IoT (eom dash button) for 25 eur).
Surprisingly I did not find one on AliExpress
https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-pow.html https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota https://www.home-assistant.io
I then import those pdfs into paperwork in bulk. It has a label system and learns to apply labels correctly, which isn't 100% accurate but rather helpful. It also has rather quick fulltext search, which is nice. All in all, paperwork isn't perfect but it does the job well enough for me.
As a scanner, I got an Epson ES-200 (DS-310 in Europe) from Amazon Warehouse Deals (the packaging was dinged, which apparently justified a 35% discount).
I keep around the originals in a big chronological pile, rotated yearly. If I ever need an original document, I can search for it in my digital archive and find out its date. Then I can binary search for it in the pile.
The annoying part is scanning all your old stuff. Even with a fast feed scanner (mine is about as fast as Tesseract can process it in simplex, and twice as fast as the OCR in duplex, making my CPU -- and not the scanner -- the limiting factor), it just takes a lot of time.
To store the files on disk I keep directories marked by topic/year/month/day. The topics are stuff like taxes, finances, bills, etc. The important documents are in a couple encrypted HDDs that I use for backups. I've been thinking of doing an offsite storage like Backblaze B2 but it's probably overkill.
After scanning stuff in, everything gets shredded. There usually aren't many things to save but once they've been scanned they're there forever.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-iX500-Duplex-Scanner...
Is there any way to get hold of what you've done?
It's a really fun game - if you're ever bored, you should check it out again! They have an 'old school runescape' which is essentially how the game was in 2007, without the later changes. Definitely 10/10 nostalgia.
This is off topic, but I love/hate the system where all new content must pass a community poll. I feel like people are slowly voting for the updates that people hated back in the day (claws, ely, magic dmg % boosting gear). Stat creep is now almost as it was right before EOC, where you can get stacked out from full hp & brewed in one game tic (which kind of kills the hybrid scene)
Not sure on cost comparison, though :)
My biggest concern with letting a stranger into the home is theft/trust issues. While I'm sure most people have a good experience and I'm sure you can find a company that background checks, it is more personal paranoia (and it isn't cleaners in particular, I don't like leaving any strangers alone around the house).
I have a separate service do my lawn for about $60 every 2 weeks or so.
If that doesn't work, and if you're ethically ok with it, you could put some cameras around the house (turned on only during the day when the cleaner comes). Dashcams are reasonably cheap nowadays.
(I do feel a little sad about it, she's sweet and I see her all the time when she cleans other units in the building…)
Would you say that e.g. warfare and agriculture has been 100% automated because it's manual labor performed by people who aren't you?
Normal people don't use cleaning companies but loads of people had a cleaner nevertheless who was paid "in black" prior to this system.
Now everyone's insured, pays taxes, gets long term benefits etc.
Though I did have a cleaning person come twice a month, when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I could never afford all this much help living in the US.
I understand it was meant to be a harmless joke but it's still not so nice to say.
For free? I thought you inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of your life. Share the wealth. :)
I have had my bank remove records from my online account, or not have the ledger balance add up, so your idea interest me. I contacted the controller of the currency about my bank messing with my records, and they did absolutely nothing.
https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot, and it's not what this site is for.
There probably are a number of political and economical reasons to disrupt shipping routes and terrorize billionaires on yachts, and plenty to stay unrecognized and uncaught meanwhile (use 'hacking' to disrupt the military that might come to check).
Maybe at some point the robots gain their own sentience and decide to mutiny, maybe to become space pirates too..
The plot is pretty far-out, but I think I would watch it.
Now I just need to figure out an efficient way to download from them from my Hungarian vps since the cellphone internets are slowwww...
Suggest looking into Flexget. It unfortunately has loads of dependencies, but on the upside it's super smart. E.g. prevent duplicate downloads, etc.
Transmission is one of the more minimal torrent clients out there, and even the old uTorrent supports RSS feeds.
Only download linux ISOs though ;)
This made want to see it even more.
We've had a tendency now to introduce a request for a simple bit of information in the job posting as a sort of captcha to filter out automated spamming of applications.
1.) My hi/low setting probably doesn't match your hi/low setting. From the get go, we're cooking the same meal at two different temperatures.
2.) A lot of recipes seem to call for low setting for 8 hours. This works well for a lot of people with a standard American work day, since a stew/soup will stay above safe warming temperature in a nearly sealed pot. However, the cook times are too long. Thawed chicken for 8 hours on low almost never turns out with the right texture. In this case, it's convenience > taste.
3.) The flavor is cooked out of the ingredients, and/or there isn't enough seasoning or too many ingredients. When you get the seasoning right, too long of a cook time can dull the flavor. When there isn't enough seasoning, then your meal is bland from the start. When there are too many herbs and spices, you get a mish-mash of flavors that are all competing for attention. There was an article on here a long while ago that categorized foods into low and high amplitude flavors. Something sharply distinctive was high amplitude (think nacho cheese Doritos), while a low amplitude food had weak, hard to discern flavors (plain grits). Too many different ingredients can lead to low amplitude foods, and when I see an ingredient list with 15 different herbs and spices, I almost always steer clear.
Brown a flank steak in a pan. We're not sealing in juices - we're making a crust. Throw it in the slow cooker for a few hours. Check to make sure it's tender. Prep some veggies by cutting and portioning them in containers. Find a stew sauce that's simple. When you're ready to eat, saute your veggies in a little oil, and add a generous portion of sauce when your stir fry is near complete. Throw in the meat towards to end to heat. Serve over potatoes or rice or something simple.
While it does double as a slow cooker, I have never actually used that functionality.
Much closer to genius is the thermomix: https://thermomix.com/
A malfunctioning lid caused hot liquid to escape from the bowl, giving several consumers severe burns. The Court found that Thermomix knew of this risk but still continued to promote and supply the faulty product.
Beware of genius inventions, you may get burned.
I automated handling DNS updates via simple "git pushes" - Lets you revert from bad changes, and gives you a good history of changes over time - https://dns-api.com/
Not promising anything, because each station requires time to tune and money for computational resources.
As a kid, I gave our family cat a close scalping. It was late fall and we were picking up leaves with the mower. After a lunch break, I fired up the mower and the cat shot out from underneath making an awful noise and headed for the woods.
We assumed she was fatally injured until two/three days later when she came walking back up the sidewalk, sporting a close shave on one part of her head, but otherwise seeming uninjured. She got plenty of her favorite food that day!
This becomes especially egregious over month to year long experiments where I run the same experiment every day on end.
There was really no reason not to auto generate every possible plot, every possible analysis every time (and I cannot use ipython notebooks or things like that because it's many distributed things chained together with lots of scheduling).
The productivity gains have been enormous and are hard to overstate. I don't dread any experiment any more because even in a large complicated distributed setup, everything from initialising kerberos tickets to tons of config files, restarting services, running multiple experiments dependent on each other, and generating plots and summaries and committing them to a repo is one command. Anything that's analysed once is evaluated always.
I now almost look forward to setting up new experiments because of the pleasure I get from just chaining together calls from my control utilities.
All I have to do is pull on my laptop and I download a filter with all results pre-generated paper ready. I think a lot of people do this in experiments where everything is on a single machine, but I haven't seen it as excessive from other phd students doing complicated distributed stuff. There is always a lot of manual command line args passing, manually changing some config while instead of just creating dedicated scripts, etc.
Recipes table : it tooks some months to fill it with our choices (prefered recipes) and add attributes to that : cold/warm meal, difficulty, time taken, kind of meal (junk, bistrot, classical, exotic...), does it scale (x0.5, x2, x4...).
ingredient_table : each receipe got ingredients. Every kind of ingredrients are on a separate table.
product_table : it is there i display what you can buy from stores : 6/12/24 eggs bundle, 250/500g butter
Then it starts to be ugly, cause there is constraints : loose and hard. Timetable is a hard constraint (i don't want to cook monday evening), so it will be double ration one of the day before, Season is a hard constraint (you buy vegetables when they are in season) Tastes are a hard constraint : you decides what kind of meal you want to eat during the weak
With that you get available recipes and a timetable for cooking and quantity to cook.
Price is a lose constraint, leftovers are a lose constraint, time spent cooking is a lose constraint (could be a hard, if you have enough recipes, but as i like cooking, it's no matter for me)
After, i enumerate all possibilities and each one get a score based on lose constraints : you can use a simple weighted average, exponentially weighted average... You tweak coefs to prefer a nice price or a little time spent and then it's done. Usually a chose randomly between the ten best solutions.
I got enough recipes to cover all hard constraints. I avoid lot of problems doing a big enumeration for all possibilities (it takes a couple of minutes at my scale for 200 recipes), also, hard constraints are pretty easy to deal with, it could be a lot more complicated if user become picky on meals. I'm no coder so i don't know any design pattern or anything that could help me to design a better algo. But, as far as i know, when you can't evaluate all possibilities you have to go the optimization road.
Answers to questions : - Yeah, there is this website : https://fr-en.openfoodfacts.org/ (broken TLS it seems) that could be used to pull data on ingredients, - I don't have plan to open-source it : it's pretty hacky, ugly and probably defy any coding rule (except 4 space ident PEP8). it's not even packeged (i've never done that before...)
I kind of like transmission, had it doing its thing on my low-power NAS for a couple years with zero problems. The thing with duplicates was the rss feed sending ~7 days of shows and needing a way for my python script to tell if it had already seen an item or not so I was just dumping them into a log file and searching through it on the next run -- crazy inefficient but it did the job.
I'd love to do this as well but I'm sure at some point in the future I'll hear "sorry this won't do, we need the original".
I honestly don't necessarily regret the time I've spent playing Factorio because it is legitimately fun, but it will claim a very high priority in your brain for quite a while once you pick it up, and will push other things out of the way.
The only time so far I used both the switch and the power monitor was on the Christmas tree, because I was curious how much it cost to run ($3 or so overall iirc).
But I do agree that the feeding mechanism should definitely be designed as a lifo
AndroidAPS and OpenAPS do not work with all the same hardware, So you choose your rig based on your CGM and Pump model.
If I'd be him, I'd start by trying to get my hands into Dexcom G5 system or if he doesn't have a good insurance, the Freestyle Libre has some unofficial bluetooth readers available that work with Xdrip. First you get your continuous glucose monitoring working and then start thinking about automating the insulin delivery.
These projects started because we're not waiting. The organization behind is called Nightscout and their website has information how to build the needed hardware:
Now the pump manufacturers are seriously planning to bring closed loop systems like I have here to the market. The only model right now that has some of the features is Medtronic 670g, but in comparison, if you know what you're doing, building an open source rig will give you much more control and features than the commercial offerings. This might change in a couple of years though.
Some CS students even made a game based on the hilarious video, where you play as the moose and must eat apples while defending against incoming lawnmowers: https://joelspeanuts.itch.io/elgspillet
"If you’re a guy, imagine you could only date a half-bear-half-lion. ‘Oh, I hope this one’s nice! I hope he doesn’t do what he’s going to do.’"
Every woman I know has had one of those common experiences -- many times -- but honestly when I was younger man I really had no idea what women go through or the frequency of it. My wife has had more than few things happen to her over the years.
I would personally be terrified of anyone who thought this was an ethical or acceptable thing to do.
There are some bizarre and horrible things people do on dating sites. If you have had bad experiences, that's not ok. But don't prejudge this person without really understanding the effect his code is having.
But when it came to time to setup a lot more of them I realized that would get expensive quickly. SO I cheated. I bought a bunch of 433Mhz-based radio-buttons:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/OWSOO-433MHz-Wireless-SOS-Bu...
Then I hooked up an SDR receiver to my PC, and handle it that way. I have a 433Mhz receiver for the arduino, which could also decode those transmissions, but I never used it for anything except to prove I could.
There's a pointer to the software and some overview here:
https://blog.steve.fi/decoding_433mhz_transmissions_with_sof...
I will spend more time on that during summer when the kids are away
https://steve.fi/Hardware/helsinki-tram-times/
I do have a couple of epaper devices, and they would be ideal but for their terribly slow update-time. I like the clock showing Time & Date (or Time & Temperature), and having epaper update every second just isn't possible. Even if it were then I suspect updating so frequently would negate the potential power-saving of using epaper in the first place.
I do have a nice epaper device for showing weather & weather-forecasts, that works on batteries and updates every 20 minutes. But for trams I update departures every 2 minutes.
My idea was based on the top part of this display https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXGxPtlXkAA0inj.jpg
What you are probably getting when you start your washer is an estimate considering the steps of the cycle and loaded to capacity. Some machines have turbidity sensors - mine doesn't - this could deliver information that might shorten the cycle. Also the time may go up if it has to deal with suds or stops spinning to rearrange the load if it shakes.
If I could turn all the load sensing stuff off, I would. All I really want is two sliders that give me 0-100% for load size and temperature and a switch for delicate.
In any case, the washers at my apartment complex are always off, but it's at least consistent so that I can add about 6 minutes to whatever it shows at the beginning and plan around that.
Emailing the recipe formats the content into an email body text and doesn't require the recipient to go to the website. It also includes a .paprikarecipe attachment for direct import into the recipients Paprika app.
TCO(human labor) << TCO(automated labor)
Just like if I were to say "when in city X, it was cheaper to travel by taxi than to buy a car", I wouldn't mean a single taxi ride.
> I'm not OP, but I suspect they meant that Python and some libraries would have solved your problem in a few days of work.
I wrote software professionally for 30 years. I have a good understanding of the work required to implement a business requirement! I cant really see myself spending 10 years on a one-week task :-)
PS. I didn't downvote you.
Why? You fetch data, calculate stuff and give out reports. Unless there is heavy javascript involved, you don't need a browser for any of this. But now you are dependent on the fragile setup you have created, hopping that VBScript, IE and your datasources will continue to work as long as you live.
Becoming independant and gaining a future ground would be a valid reason to change to a better environment. It doesn't need to be Python, but considering the requirements, Python is a very good choice for this it seems.
BTW There are libs to use chrome programatically for those things. It's called headless-mode or chromeDriver. Similar things exist for other Browsers. So you could probably rewrite your app to become more indipendant without lossing the existing functionality.
This is particularly true in the UK where there's a big push for "Open Banking" where banks must provide APIs for developers.
This would remove your dependency on IE if it was all done from the command line :)
Hard to overstate how good this is for one's mental health.
I love the 30min when I come home after work where I scoop leaves and various kinds of debris out of the water. Very relaxing.
I also don't really like plants, or the outdoors. I'd much rather be inside in the A/C. Working on my own coding projects doesn't bother me, even after coding all day long.
Perhaps it's because I've been spending less time coding at work and more time managing...
Nice. A lot of local plants too?
No fancy ML needed, after a couple of times the filter gets one of these repeating fragments it should be able to block it. Fairness bonus: you get to hear each new ad a couple of times.
Maybe radio spots are a little different because they're cheaper and usually more low-quality than TV ads, but it doesn't really work for TV ads - they often have small variations, e.g. 10sec identical, 5sec different, 10sec identical (easy example). Also depending on your method of analyzing the audio it's sometimes broadcast with an unhearable fingerprint that distorts the waveform (let's say like MP3 versus WAV, but worse).
So yes, you can find some patterns - but the commercial breaks are highly mixed up and you wouldn't believe how many distinct commercials per channel are there, even if you think you hear the same ones all the time :)
There were previously some FM to MP3 "ripping" tools that would use the RDS information to tag the resulting recordings -- I'm not sure of the status of them. But it could provide a good way to detect commercials, since most radio stations change to a generic station identification message when they break for commercials / banter. (Whether you'd also want to turn down for banter is another question.)
Yes, or perhaps a combination of techniques. E.g. shared database to train an ML system to detect ads. Of course, the downside is that the ad industry will then tweak the ads until they pass the ML test.
> I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations.
I wouldn't think of it as taking away a source of income, but rather as forcing them to find a source that doesn't bother their customers so much. Ad blockers seem to be getting more accepted.
And perhaps using the clips for other purposes than "viewing" may in fact be fair use. Especially since you are trying to find a method for not viewing them.
(IANAL)
Nothing like a little competition to motivate the improvement of ML systems :)
My home theater receiver does this (Marantz). It works pretty well. It doesn't cancel out the TV commercials though, it just normalizes the volume so it matches the show. But, I assume you could make it work for muting too.
Do you have similar objections to things like self-driving vehicle technology that will take away the main source of income for truck drivers?
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte...
