Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead.

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 mum did run a B&B, in Italy, on the sea.

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.

I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go.

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...

[3] https://github.com/MilosKozak/AndroidAPS/

I used DSP to recognize the commercials in the radio broadcast on my stereo receiver and turn down the volume automatically ("adblock for the radio broadcast"). I described it here: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/02/24/radio-adblock/

I have a robot lawn mower that is wire guided. Instead of the traditional lawn mowers that basically cut the grass in all directions (making a sloppy cut pattern) my mower knows how to cut in straight lines so you get a traditional cut pattern. It also has the ability to dump the grass cuttings into a composting bin.

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.

Funny enough, possibly because I work on embedded software for automating random processes, and also from home, I don't feel the need to automate anything not work related.

When you spend most of your day stuck in front of a monitor, it feels good to get up and turn lights on/off.

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly in some users profiles ("I date only men with cars, I find it important to date gentlemen", "If you're of middle eastern origin - don't even bother sending a message") and been verbally abused in personal messages ("It's funny you've thought you have a chance with me", or another who've said "The only chance you've got with me is if your penis is 15 inches in length"). I was told I need to walk it off and don't let it get under my skin. But I can't. I've thought about quitting more than once, but the alternative is a status quo I've grown to hate.

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).

When I graduated college, the job situation wasn't as hot.

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 used Tasker to make my phone vibrate in Morse code. Now I don't have to take it out of my pocket to read a notification.

A few years ago I used Trello to keep track of my tasks for the day in a Kanban board separated by date. I had a large backlog of tasks and then a "Due this Month" "Due this Week" "Due Tomorrow" and "Due Today" sections.

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.

I bought an e-reader called reMarkable [0] that I use every day to read technical stuff on it.

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...

When the dog used to wake me up in the middle of the night to drink water and take him out, I had to do to it manually. Now it’s all automated, my body just does it. 90% of brain is asleep.

I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.

SO was complaining that I never text her while at work. Wrote a twilio app to pull random sentimental quotes from rumi and others, fit it into a personalised looking message spelling mistakes included )"thinking of you" etc.), and send it to her at random times of the day from my number. Weird thing is when I mentioned it was automated, she didn't believe me, so we kept it going till she broke up with me eventually.

I run a Huginn server which has hundreds of recipes. Most scrape websites and send me updates either by pushover or email for things that matter

-- 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 built an accelerometer-based washing machine sensor which sends a notification to my phone when the washing is done. This is useful because the machine itself has no indication when it's done: http://www.instructables.com/id/Washing-Machine-Notification...

Digital archiving of important physical mail is a nice way to go paperless and keep track of documents. Get a good scanner and shredder, then set up a system to track your scanned documents. No more misplacing files and having to stuff cabinets with papers.

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...

We (with the wife) automated menu for the week and the shopping list. A database store all recipes (ingredients, time taken...) and the menu composer chose semi-randomly* into the list.

* : 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...)

For the first 9 years of my life, my family either did not have a PC or I was not allowed to use it for more than a few minutes. My parents relaxed a little bit and allowed my brother and i to read for an hour to play video games on the computer for an hour.

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

Maybe not what anyone was expecting, but we've automated all the cleaning in the house. The clothes get washed, folded, and ironed. The trash gets taken out. All the plants get watered.

How? The oldest form of automation. We pay someone to come and do it. We have a cleaning person come twice a week.

I wrote a book.

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:

http://www.correlated.org/book.html

I trained a mobile neural network to feed the dog every morning, and his brother to feed it every night.

Ok, I'll bite!

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!!!

I automated all my piracy.

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.

1. some miscellaneous things using IFTTT like cross posting from Instagram to Twitter and Facebook

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!”

My internet provider Hathway (in Pune, India) used to throw up a login page every now and then throwing all my networked devices out of gear. The captive portal required doing login via browser to start internet again. I wrote automation scripts on Raspberry Pi to figure out when internet access is gone and then to do auto-login. Here is the detailed blog -

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.

The most useful thing I have is a little script that logs into my bank, downloads a CSV and sends me the latest transaction via email daily. Saves me time to login to online banking, and also serves as a useful way to search for previous transactions inside my mailbox from time to time.

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.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/

[1] https://www.tado.com/

Two things:

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.

My WiFi router is turned off automatically at 9PM. No fancy electronics is needed for this, just something like: https://www.lazada.com.ph/products/24-hours-auto-switch-off-...

I automated my phone integration with my car using Automate.

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 automated my Investment Portfolio.

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

Monthly credit card payments. So money flows from my employer to my checking account to my credit cards. Also of course to my 401K, IRA, Mortgage account, Saving account etc. Which means I don't encounter money much and I like it this way (I generally make sure I live within my means and my money does flow into my investments).

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

Pushing music onto my phone. I have Termux installed, and can thus run `sshd` on Termux (I have ssh keys copied over), and then copy any music I want into a temporary directory on my desktop and use https://github.com/ehmry/dir2opus to convert everything to 96kbps opus and push it over using rsync and then cleanup the temporary directory:

`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`

1. When I plug my camera's SD card into the front of my Linux server it automatically copies off any new photos and sorts them into a YYYY/DD/MM folder structure.

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...

My son used to ask me every morning whether to wear warm-weather clothes or cool-weather clothes, so I wrote a app that scraped some weather data and served it up in a web page as a temperature graph, along with a recommendation for what kind of clothes to wear.

Reading ebooks.

https://Auditus.cc

I automated my bedroom lights in a house share. I have 3 lights: the main cieling and 2 more which are a floor standing and a desk light. For sensors, I have a magnet door switch and a PIR sensor to detect direction of travel (enterring or leaving the room) and a photocel sensor to detect day/night).

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

I first built ATTIC, which aggregated and indexed newly available products from local furniture stores in DC, to serve the personal needs of me and my wife. We were trying to furnish a new home using only locally bought goods, ideally vintage ones. I started with 15 or so stores to save us the time of having to go to each website one by one. It was pretty crude at first, but did the job. It saved us time and in some cases actually gave us an edge in seeing pieces that sell out quickly. Our home has come together well and almost entirely sourced from ATTIC. Mission accomplished.

Four years later it's now available in six cities and indexes hundreds of local independent stores.

https://attic.city

The lights in the most reasonably trafficked areas of my apartment are automated. The kitchen and bathroom mainly.

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. :)

I created an API for the waste collection (cardboard, organic, paper etc.) of my city based on some CSV that they publish. I always forget when to put what on the street, now thanks to my API and IFTTT and get a notification on my phone to remind me.

If anyone is interested, the API is here: openerz.herokuapp.com and the city is Zurich, Switzerland.

1. PhotoBooth: Canon Selphy photo printer + Raspberry Pi + Special Gmail address, check for new emails with image attachments, send to printer.

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 made a sensor board that has light, motion, temperature and humidity sensors and IR LEDs and put one in every room. I put Sonoffs on the lights and various other devices and wrote a small managing program to coordinate the lot, so lights turn on when you walk into a dark room and turn off if there's no motion or if you turn on another light. The IR LEDs also control the TV/AC/etc.

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.

Finances. Paychecks are direct deposit, monthly bills are auto-pay, and my wife and I each get an allowance deducted weekly from our shared checking account into our separate checking accounts. We do still have a monthly non-automated task where we enter the current state of all of our accounts into a spreadsheet, and copy the totals into another spreadsheet that tracks our finances over time. It has been really helpful to help plan and see our progress.

I once made an automatic humidifier controller (aka a humidistat). It consisted a remote-controlled outlet, a RF circuit, a temperature/humidity sensor, a humidifier, a screen, and a AVR microcontroller. The AVR microcontroller is programmed to loop, sleep, and read the measurements from the sensor periodically. If the humidity is below my threshold, it fires up the RF transmitter and switch on the outlet hence the humidifier connected, vice verse.

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.

Watering my plants outside.

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.

Most automation doesn't work for me. I don't keep to a set 9-5 schedule, so anything that assumes a routine fails me. Here's what I do use.

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).

Incredibly minor, but I made a Workflow to log weight + waist circumference to Apple health.

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 made SigParser.com to automatically read email signatures in emails and keep SalesForce contacts up to date without having to do it all manually.

I have several scripts that make my keyboard behave better, which is "automating" in a sense. I basically have vim-style keys anywhere on the computer, as long as I'm holding caps lock. (So e.g. caps+j is the same as down arrow). This includes some more complex motions like "select current word", and even things like "open two quotes and but the cursor between them."

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.

I relocated to Germany but never studied German before and at work we all speak only English, so my German knowledge lacks a lot of words, though the grammar is OK. However here one has to deal with a huge number of letters, and there are always unknown words and phrases. So I have created a tool based on tesseract OCR, Qt and offline dictionaries of dict.cc to read letters and all kind of contracts. I also used www.lingvolive.com at the beginning but then the API changed and now I don't have time to update it. Nevertheless it saved me tons of hours, now I can read a tricky letter within 5 minutes instead of an hour.

Lights in the garden/living room come on automatically based on sunset time and weather. Fans ventilate the house/shed based on moisture and CO2. I'm in the process of automating the sunscreens on our windows.

So, mostly domotica stuff.

Turning on/off outdoor lighting as sunrise / sunset changes over the year.

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.

I automated my bugzilla integration.

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.

I've helped few Indian farmers by doing this.

http://neelkadia.com/fillatank

Screen scraping photos of my kids from a kindergarten website. Recognizing good photos that feature my kids and deleting everything else is manual, though.

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.

Virtual development environments in LXC and KVM https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders

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.

I once had a long distance girlfriend who lived on the east coast. She would like to see "good morning" texts from me, the problem is that they are 3 hours ahead, so I wrote an On.X bot to do it every morning and pick randomly from a handful of messages

We use a slow cooker which pretty much automates a lot of the process of making dinner. Just chop ingredients and throw them in. Now I just need to build a robot to chop veg

I fall in love with the 18th art. Everyday, I spent around 15 mints to open and see what news from Google Art and Culture and WikiArt.

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.

https://github.com/NghiaTranUIT/artify-macos

In 1998 I was a big fan of Ultima Online and I had just gotten my first rack in a real datacenter (as opposed to an office server room, etc.) with a real backbone connection.

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 wrote a system that automates disappointment. I wrote it once and now the disappointment keeps on coming.

I automated searching for a rental property across all the major property websites in my country. In particular I was looking for properties with certain attributes (bathtub, lock up garage etc.), in a specific set of areas (GPS-based areas predefined on a Google Map based on proximity to train station, dog park, nearest shops etc. in suburbs my wife and I liked). None of the existing property websites offered anywhere near that level of search and notification customisation, so I cobbled together a Python script that scraped the websites on a daily basis and ran all the results through a filter. Anything interesting was emailed to us both so we could reply by email and have a conversation about it. My wife and I decided to be super fussy since we didn't need to bother manually searching. After about 6 months my script found a winner and we're now in an awesome place that ticks all of our boxes.

I didn't dare automate the application process... I had nightmares of 450 property managers calling me at once saying "Congratulations". :)

Hallway lights come on automatically at sunset.

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.

I've fully automated my supply of fresh local coffee beans using a connected scale. I leave my beans on the scale and the data is sent to a ML system that learns from my consumption and reorders for me so new beans arrive at the right time.

(I'm a beta tester here: https://www.getbottomless.com )

I bought a kit and made my truck a push to start. Instead of using a wireless key device their is a hidden switch that makes it seem kooler. I also replace the radio with a zero pi that does some neat things. It is controlled over bluetooth from my phone. I also war drive with it and map wifi for fun and some other things.

I'm writing a service that downloads content from Reddit. Usually I just want to see the top video of the week, or maybe the top 5 pics from /r/pics every day or something like that. The service has handlers for various kinds of URLs. For example, if it detects a youtube URL, it utilizes "youtube-dl", or if it's an image link it will use curl, if it is a text post, I might download it as a json object from the reddit API.

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.

I made a script that scrape many job offer websites and send a notification email when some custom rules match.

Getting a laser guided vacuum robot. Automating vacuuming is awesome.

Also my cat would disagree about who trains whom, but he uses the regular 'throne' in the restroom.

With gmail you can only auto-forward mail to mailboxes which you can prove you own / have access to (by responding to an email challenge generated by google, sent to that mailbox). This meant that I couldn't automatically forward receipts / invoices from e.g. Airbnb, Digital Ocean, Microsoft etc., to Expensify. So I have a cron job that logs into my gmail account every night at 2am, scans for new mail matching certain criteria, and manually forwards it to Expensify's mailbox.

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.

I used the VoiceRecognition API to control my music player using voice commands - works great for cooking!

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...

I use https://www.home-assistant.io/ to do a coupple of automations like switching everything which uses power off when I leave home to preserve energy and switching a CCTV cam on at the same time for safety reasons.

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 made a chapter skipper for VLC because I couldn't find one that worked for shows that don't have the actual intro right at the start of the episode.

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.

Watering my plants. Nothing fancy, just using an automatic watering system.

Lots of crazy complicated Outlook and gmail filters that block sales people, spam, and so on.

I wish I could do the same for my phone. Robocalls are out of control now. At least 4 a day, sometimes 20+.

I've found that human help is a surprisingly cost-effective means of personal life automation. A cleaner comes by every week to clean our apartment; a company sends over a box of groceries so we don't have to shop; a nurse takes the twins out for their stroll every other day. All that put together doesn't cost more than $500 per month, and saves us literally dozens of hours. Next I'm looking for someone who'll take care of home maintenance chores. Wish me luck. :-)

Not too impressive, but I'm glad I have it - a cronjob runs each night and makes sure I shut my garage door. It is an open source python project to talk to the alarm system and a relay between the pins of a raspberry pi and and a wire I soldered to my garage door opener.

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!

I'm considering a filter that looks for emails from my parents with the words "computer" and "problem" and auto-replies "Did you try rebooting?"

I love automating things!

- 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

My laptop buzzes loudly if I slouch or put my hands on my face. Minimal effort implementation; damianmoore/tensorflow-image-classifier, fswebcam, cron, aplay.

I have automated payment of recurring bills. This was after paying a lot in interest reminder fees and at a period working to much. The billing automation makes me not worry if I paid bills or not.

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.

Robots wash my dishes and my clothes for me, keep my household boiler stoked, and manage the ambient temperature. I also don't ever have to refill lamps, or go around with a match each evening to light them.

Not sure if this is much of an automation. But here is one app I recently did:

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...

I automated my weekly task, goal, and reflection tracking. I mentioned it a few months ago[1]. Now I have the barebones version running here[2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16561343 [2] https://natriumapp.com/

Automatic driveway lights via motion sensor. Automatic house fan (when in saves me money on heating or cooling). Light assisted alarm, makes the bedroom lights 10% brighter a minute before the alarm goes off.

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.

Colored lights (LIFX) change color automatically during the day. mostly thanks to their scheduling, though the one in the foyer changes color based on both the time of day and on the temperature and rain forecast - during the day I can glance at the light and know how to dress. That happens with a Python script on my computer, which I should really move to the Raspberry Pi in the living room that I could leave on 24-7.

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.

Used a motor and a TP-Link smart plug to open bedroom curtain every morning, and close it in the evening. All bought on amazon.

Oh boy, great question. Over the last couple of months, I've been writing apps for a single user: me. Here's what all I've built so far:

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)

Whenever my emacs starts up and the horizontal resolution of the display connected to the computer has changed, that fact is recorded to a file. That file is consequently a record of when my computer and consequently I arrived at and left my girlfriend's place (because the resolution of the monitor I use there is different from that of the monitor I use at home).

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.)

Congratulations!

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.

I usually rewrite React.js components between function and class. This is tedious and at the same time a common task. Therefore I wrote a program that takes a javascript code as an input, and returns a converted code. It does so by parsing the input and walking the AST.

Generating and sending recurring invoices for my side projects. Lambda + SES, set on a monthly CloudWatch schedule, done.

https://github.com/forrestbrazeal/invoiceless

I have automated a couple of metrics that I like to keep an eye on.

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).

After starting to do groceries via an online supermarket that delivers to our home, I found it a hassle to add all ingredients one by one every time. So I "reverse engineered" the supermarket app API via a proxy, and made a tool to order recipes. When ordering a recipe, all ingredients are added to the cart. We use the tool for almost one year and it saved us a lot of time. More info + source code (Elixir, ReactJS): https://adrian-philipp.com/post/learning-elixir-second-side-...

Some minor things.

* 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).

I have a website which aggregates different videos and articles. I used python and scrapy to achieve this goal. I run it on a $5 linode server and it generates 150€-200€ daily. My website is hosted on webfaction.

Daily backups (ARM board in my parents' garage plus rsync and cron, and vice-versa). I think the original script is over 10 years old now.

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.)

Not directly on topic, but I am disappointed that window cleaning has not been automated yet. Window cleaning robots do exist, but they have a long way to go to become as good as automatic vacuum cleaners.

Savings and index fund investing. I have an automatic bank transfer to my broker account every month and then I'm using Interactive Brokers API in a script that buys global equities index ETF.

Probably the one I'm most proud of is my backup system. It includes:

- 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.

I haven't done much compared to some of the others in this thread, but I've done a few home automation things.

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.)

Turning on my AC when I leave work. I recorded the "ON' IR signals for my remote, and hooked up an IR emmitter on the wall opposite the AC. A Tasker profile (useful for automating stuff on android) pings my ras-pi home server whenever I leave work in the evening, which turns on my AC, so I arrive to an already cooled room. I also have a clunky webpage to manually turn it on/off which I use if I'm not going home directly from work.

And then, auto-downloading TV shows/movies via Jackett+Radarr+Sonarr

I still use facebook (minimally), but wrote a Grease Monkey script to auto-delete anything older than 90 days. This way I can still keep the Aunties/Parents etc happy with photos of the kids, but that it only lives on there a short while.

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.

Cooking, I built a sous-vide machine that cooks for me:

https://github.com/aguaviva/SousVide

I'm currently working on a website to use machine learning and game theory to allocate chores in a way that minimizes overall pain. Should have a public demo in a few days.

I frequently keep transferring money back home (overseas). Keeping a tab on the exchange rate became quickly annoying.

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.

I've build a web scraper + web UI in order to create direct links to spotify albums/EPS based on specialized (and well curated) music shops which i use to keep up with new releases, one of them being boomkat.com. I got the idea because i was spending a lot of time on public transport trying to tab + search between the music shops various websites and the spotify app while being on my phone, which I found quite frustrating.

Love personal automation.

- 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...

I am working on a tax loss harvesting tracking and reminder app.

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.

I run a little web server on my computer to be able to send a space via Google Home so I didn't have to get up to start and stop movies.

I wrote a Chrome plugin to double check the price per kg for online groceries as the values provided by my supermarket are basically fiction.

A daily email digest of changes to a google calendar, so my partner and I can use a shared calendar and keep track of what each other is adding without being emailed for every tiny change. It runs as a serverless Azure function, and has required no maintenance in a year, which is more than I can say about Outlook's ical integration which breaks every few months.

Deleting the empty "Email attachments" directory that OneDrive keeps making inside my drive. Systemd timer unit does the trick.

With tasker - mqtt - openhab -LIFX bulbs I automated some things.

- 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 automated work reimbursements.

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.

Checking the status of my visa application.

I use Custom Voice Commands to:

- 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.

Turning on my lights slighly dimmed and playing a Spotify playlist for these special situations :)

https://simon-schraeder.de/posts/andchill-building-alexa-ski...

Next step: Automated wine dispenser :)

We bought a house a couple years ago where all the closets were totally empty, not even a single basic rod. I wrote an app that allowed me to design my closets and it would spit out exactly what to buy from Elfa. This enabled us to save a lot of money over choosing a preconfigured Elfa package.

I use https://torrent.express/ to integrate BitTorrent resources over HTTP. This helps with streaming, downloading and various programmatic use cases which are all better supported with HTTP.

My AWS rep gave me one of their IoT buttons when those were first a thing. I wrote a couple of lambdas for it. One click would send an email to my boss telling him I was taking a sick day, double click would send him an email telling him I was running late.

Retaining what I learn through Spaced Repetition Software https://trevordmiller.com/blog/spaced-repetition-software

I used this python script to automate filling out a google form for 1000 times xD https://github.com/vedipen/AutomateGoogleForm

I just automated my computer backups so they would email me the results: https://github.com/Darkle/borg-backup-and-email

I cannot believe there isn't a single mention of coffee or HTCPCP here...

I'm a qa tester. Just wrote a reactjs application that takes test case steps and parameters as the input and spits out fully written test cases in .csv format as the output. Has saved me weeks of work.

I try to simplify / reduce deeds as much as reasonable.

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.

All the life staples like toilet paper and pet food are on a subscription service. I can’t remember the last time I had to think about it. Amazon subscribe and save and Chewy are great for this.

8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451442

Window shades that go down at sunset automatically. Sounds like an easy manual task, but makes a big difference when automated, especially if you have many windows.

Bills. Everyone takes funds out when they want :)

Parsing my monthly credit card bill (PDF), categorizing, and displaying statistics.

Basic toiletries and other consumables using Amazon Subscribe and Save.

I sometimes am on autopilot mode throughout the day

Dish washing. I bought a dish washer and that machine gives back at least half hour of my life every day. I don't know how I lived without it. (disclaimer: I cook at home)

thermomix + cook key = automated both our cooking schedule and shopping list. Easily worth the money.

accounting, expense tracking, tax loss harvesting, liquid investment rebalancing, taxes

I try to wire my brain to do routine tasks without having to give many thoughts. Besides the usuals where electronics, gadgets, and computers are involved, I'm more interested in the ones that I cannot use machines but my own body and brain. My wife believes that I know almost everything where they are and will likely be -- I just define a pattern based system of keeping things -- think massive CSS with Classes/IDs all over and how I could quickly navigate without much effort (before Google Chrome Dev Tools and all the niceties we have these days).

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.

Cooking - grandma does it pretty well. I just set timers

Happy birthday to my friends using text.

Nothing.

Autohotkey is capable of doing some remarkable things (windows only sadly).

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)

http://www.macrocreator.com/

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.

Entropy.

For myself, I've built a web-based task manager. Nothing fancy, apache, PHP and JavaScript. It's tied into a number of the systems I have running at home, such as a similarly built budgeting platform that handles all our money and sends me a biweekly report of all the payments I need to schedule, and any checks I need to write (usually just rent.)

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.

Bill pay?

Finances are almost entirely operationally automated. Most bills autopay from credit cards which automatically pay their statement balance every month. Those that can’t pay from a credit card(mortgage and one insurance) pull directly from our bank account.

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.