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

Lots of home automation fun with Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io)

* Self-hosted security system that e-mails me when triggered. It arms when everyone disconnects from the wifi and disarms when anyone in the home reconnects to wifi. Totally passive. Also arms at night when the kitchen lights have been out for 5 minutes after a certain time and disarms when motion patterns that can only be someone waking up are sensed.

* E-mails work and personal when smoke alarm goes off or when water is detected in basement

* E-mails pic from front door camera when doorbell pressed (yeah, like Ring, but with a ESP8266 monitoring my normal doorbell)

* Voice reminder on garbage day

* Northern loon call exactly at each sunset

* Ambient jungle noises and lights on when I wake up and it sees me

* Laundry timer + reminders

* Vacation mode random lights on/off

* Plays a Ship's bell chime on the hour, but only during daytime (ambiance)

* Tones when any outside door in the house opens. Optionally: random Seinfeld bass transitions

* Alert for power outage

* Alert if my mom's house temperature goes too low in winter when she's away (I've called the plumber to fix the furnace thanks to this)

* Turn on A/C if temperature above threshold at 4:00pm in anticipation of my return from work

Stuff like that. Loads of fun. Lots of fiddling.

Example 1 (custom hardware).

My wife and I run https://littlebird.com.au and ship 25K orders per year. We found that it was taking too long to fulfil each order using Australia Post.

So I built our own custom WebUSB postage scales and label printer. Creating a consignment is now 1-click.

This enabled us to take the fulfillment process down from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Across 25K parcels this equals 11-months of work time.

Being a WebUSB based solution, they "just work" with anything running the Blink rendering engine, even Android phones.

You can see the WebUSB Scales and Label Printer in action here:

(30 sec video) https://vimeo.com/334547755/c387957a25

Longer demo:

https://vimeo.com/334563934/915a25eedc

Shopify liked the demo and I got to demo it to their CEO and various teams in Ottawa.

The minimum order quantities on the Postage Scale hardware was 100 units, so let me know if you'd like one :)

Example 2:

I've automated the lodgement of "Australia Post Inquiries" to get a refund when they miss their SLAs. The numbers add up quick over a year.

My typing. In my work I tend to type a lot of the same things over and over again. So I automate that with AutoHotKey. Ctrl+Tab becomes RightAlt. Two words become entire paragraphs. Even simple things like "You're welcome" are just 'ywyw' or 'tyvm' becomes "Thank you very much". I know it sounds silly, but while trying to avoid RSI's, the less typing the better.

I also use autohotkey to help me remember to Linux commands that I don't remember of are awkward to type. Like 'awk1' becomes "awk '{print $1 }'" and then I can modify it as needed.

This has worked extremely well for me for many years. Ymmv.

I have a folder on my mail server called “Dead”. If I move an email to that folder then all subsequent emails to the same address as the first one go into “Dead/Match”. It’s driven by procmail and a script.

When used with one-off email addresses you get a behavior that’s like unsubscribing, but without having to trust any “unsubscribe” links or processes, and also without having to edit any config files (it’s all driven from iOS Mail.)

1/ book your hotel using the email address $RANDOM@yourdomain

2/ receive booking conformation and enjoy holiday

3/ when you eventually get marketing spam, file it in Dead and never be bothered again.

This might sound a little-bit stupid, but I automate locking/unlocking internet access on my phone and computer.

That is to say, every night my computers and phone will lock me out[0] at a set time. Then in the morning I have to log 30 minutes of exercise (tracked by my heartrate on fitbit) to unlock internet access.

I also have certain time-wasting sites like Reddit and Netflix locked out until I complete a sufficiently difficult problem on leetcode, projecteuler, or wechall

---

I was just finding it hard to keep myself going to bed at a decent hour when I have no constraints like a 9-5 job and to keep an exercise routine going. So this automation has helped me.

[0] My computers are basically totally locked, my phone keeps the phone, messaging, camera, and skype accessible

Shopping for groceries. I made a website which lets my wife and I pick recipes and any "one off" items we need for the week. The code figures out which ingredients it should buy (preferring organic / sale items) and then calls the "APIs" of our local grocery store's website to make the purchase. We then just have to pick up the pre-packed groceries on our way home from work.

It costs $5 for the packing service, but it's worth it to avoid the burden of shopping. No more tedious math on which is the better deal. No getting lost trying to find avocado oil. And no lines. I wish I had done this years ago.

There are plenty of other ways to do this, but...

I have a CC specifically for reoccurring bills. It’s automatically paid off every month and just by looking at that one debit it’s easy to notice if something odd happens and then track down what changed. Plus by adding it all together I tend to trim what services I keep paying for.

I use cron to send myself birthday reminder emails:

  0 0 9 11 *      /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: Nov 9 is Marks birthday" me@mydomain.com

Or just annual reminders or warnings I want to heed:

  0 0 1 8 *       /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: MAKE christmas St. Francis reservations NOW for good pricing..." me@mydomain.com

Sometimes, instead of /usr/bin/mail, I use 'smsme' which is a small script that interfaces with twilio:

  /usr/local/bin/curl -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken"

(that's not the entire script, but you get the idea)

I automate most things I do more than a dozen times.

Marketing for my wife's uncle was a pain, so we automated CL and FB posts to fire from Quickbooks Inventory on a schedule.

I'm full-time remote, so I have a spreadsheet that tracks my expenses from a google form, does currency conversions for my location and forex analysis to tell me the best day to pull money from an ATM, tells me how much I have to spend on food each morning...

There's a script I send quotes I like to, and it randomly sends me one from the list via Telegram every day at 6am.

I'm also a swing-trader who hates staring at charts, so my watchlist generates via news and sentiment, then I run TA on that watchlist to send me alerts if a signal is generated, then all I have to do is hit buy/sell on my inline keyboard and it sends off a market order; it auto-exits after a target or stop loss is hit.

Recently formed an agency with a few other automation devs who do similar stuff if you want to check it out: https://weautomatestuff.com

Back when Tinder's API was more open, I had a Python script that would autoswipe everyone in the match queue. Then I'd go through all my matches, manually filter the ones I didn't like, and message the ones I did.

It was highly efficient, increased my conversation rate, but didn't really impact my end metrics ;)

I live in a condo complex with a dog and no lawn. We learned after getting our dog that this place doesn’t want dogs going to the bathroom on any of the common area (makes sense but annoying to dog owners). We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week but it was a hassle to swap each time. Also it was disgusting by the end of the week. Then I discovered porch potty. Got the version that is hooked up with a sprinkler system and a drain. Set up an auto timer so it gets completely flushed every night. Saves us a bunch of money and time. Highly recommend. https://www.porchpotty.com/

Have an ultrasonic sensor on top of my monitor that's used as a presence sensor to tell the computer when I’m in front of it or not.

Pauses the music player when I walk away and starts again when I return.

More details here: https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/are-you-there/

I've used Automate App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.a...) to set my android phone to silent mode in office and loud at home based on the wifi ssid.

Previous discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20564687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875106

Nothing fancy or involved at all, but in my personal finance spreadsheet, I dynamically pull in Zillow's current estimate of my home value (which I take with a grain of salt obviously).

I also use IFTTT to pause my robovac if my doorbell rings.

Right now I'm working on a Mint scraper to automate the rest of my personal finance data entry, but running into headaches getting Selenium to work properly on Catalina.

Not exactly a script, but if I really think about it the largest thing I've automated in my life is investing--- via index funds. No picking individual stocks, no rebalancing (Vanguard and others have "target date" funds that rebalance automatically).

I read a lot of articles by saving them to Pocket and reading via my ereader. I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket and hn.algolia.com APIs that helps me to follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News and track my reading habits.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

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

[Not really automation, but I'm hijacking the opportunity to tell the story.]

I'm a terrible morning person and I noticed that I need much longer to get up and dressed and everything than it reasonably should take. On the order of "taking 1 hour to do stuff that can be done in 15 minutes". I seem to have ADHD (disclaimer: not formally diagnosed, just going off of symptom lists and descriptions from other people), and that in combination with morning drowsiness seems to make me really ineffective at this point.

So I wrote down a list of all the things that I need to do in the morning, together with an upper estimate of how long this is going to take. Think something like this:

  { "tasks": [
    { "label": "Make the bed", "duration": "60s" },
    { "label": "Morning wash", "duration": "3m" },
    { "label": "Get dressed", "duration": "2m" },
    ...
  ]}

I built an application for my desktop PC that just runs down this playbook and always shows the current task, together with a timer for the current task as well as the overall playbook, in comically large fonts to fill the screen:

  PREPARE BREAKFAST

  Current: 04:45/05:00
  Total: 16:45/59:30

There is no "Pause" button, only "Skip" for when a task is shorted than the alloted time. Also, the application can beep to signal "3-2-1-Over" at the end of each task, and each task can have a configurable beeping interval. The whole point of the system is to be breathing down my neck to stop me from procrastinating, and it works perfectly in that regard.

Since starting with this tool a few weeks ago, my morning routine has gotten a bit shorter, but I also get more stuff done at the same time. I have a slot for meditation, so I'm now doing that semi-regularly in the morning. (I still skip it too often. Maybe I should make that task unskippable.) I have a slot for preparing a packed lunch, so I don't have to eat out as much and save some money in the process. With the time saved, I've switched my commute from tram to walking. I'm still tweaking the playbook here and there, but it already feels great to arrive at work in the morning knowing that I've already done several positive things for my well-being, rather than the bare minimum as it used to be.

I use a 20 line Python script to convert Outlook .ics calendars into billable hour count. It looks for a company name (the client) and calculates start and end time. All it needs now is to fill a .pdf invoice template and I can get rid of HR :D

Human context switching. I'm being cheeky; I mean closing down and bringing up all relevant applications, their state (open windows, tabs, files...) and so on for working on a given task or project.

Sort of like a workspace manager for the OS. Releasing an open beta this winter.

There's a short, low-res demo that kinda illustrates the basic concept on https://cleave.app

I have a website that tells me when the next train leaves and if I need an umbrella: http://mazu.ai/

Probably a good idea for a startup actually, a 90s style "web portal" for urban commuters that tells you the weather, transit situation, and downloads some news articles for when you're in the tunnel.

Beware of the indulging in ease, avoiding labor and exertion, becoming habitually idle, lazy, inactive, as, an indolent man!

The use of manual labor is one which never grows obsolete. Manual labor is the study of the external world. Labor is God’s education. No separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself. (Emerson)

The simplicity of life, language, and habits empowers people, but luxurious lifestyle, pretentious language and effeminate habits lead to weakness and death. (John Ruskin)

It’s not by meeting your idle desires that freedom can be achieved, but, on the contrary, by freeing yourself from the desires. (Epictetus)

People are constantly looking for new entertainments and pleasures, hoping that way to quiet their worries and reach happiness. But this way they can't get satisfaction, because a man looking for his own pleasure is never satisfied: having received what he wanted, he is not settling down, but right away feels the new desires, which are not yet satisfied. (Tolstoy)

I drop photos (from whatever device) into a folder on my NAS and they get automatically sanitized of EXIF data, and resized/bordered ready for posting to the internet.

It's simply a cron & bash script on a server that monitors one NAS folder, then drops the output into a second folder where I can pick them up and use them.

It uses ImageMagick & Exiftool.

I use Philips Hue for light automation quite extensively.

- 6:30am to 7:00am during weekdays, the bedroom and living room lights fade on slowly, emulating sunrise. They switch off automatically when I leave home for work on a morning.

- 45 minutes before sunset, the living room lights fade on to full brightness over a 30 minute period. The bedroom lights do the same, but to a dimmer setting.

- At 10:30pm, the bedroom lights fade themselves to a brighter but warmer relaxing light setting, in preparation for going to bed.

- If I'm not home when 11:00pm comes around, based on the location of my phone, the lights will all switch themselves off again.

- The hallway lights turn themselves using a motion sensor on if motion is detected and the ambient light level is low enough - they come on fairly bright during evening hours, but the dimmest possible night light setting after 11pm and through the night. After a minute or two of detecting no motion, they switch themselves off again.

Probably not as exciting as the other comments here: I automated the startup routine at my work computer. It sets up VPN, clears out the HTTP proxy settings, clears the routing table to allow local network access, then starts up Visual Studio, SSMS, Outlook, Firefox, OneNote and some other auxiliary apps.

Other than that, I got consumer-style automation with IKEA Tradfri which responds via HomeKit and Apple shortcuts to me turning off my wake up alarm. And I use shortcuts to send a SMS home with my expected arrival time so my wife knows when she can start with dinner.

Very mundane tasks but it saves me some time:

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

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

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

* Backup certain folders on schedule

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

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

I have a list of questions that I like to be thinking about and have an automated system that texts me one of those questions at random during my waking hours.

Indian here who travels abroad (but within Asia) for work, and we need to submit a lot of documents along with a visa application (invitation letter from a colleague in the host country; NOC from the employer; tax returns etc.) for a business/work visa. The applications are the same, the data is (almost) the same, apart from the dates. So my friend built a small tool to automate the entire process. All we do now is

1. select the country that we are visiting from a dropdown 2. enter the dates that we will be arriving on and departing at 3. provide an itinerary is possible and click a button that says "magic"

And automatically all the necessary documents are emailed to the respective stakeholders (read HR and travel desk) in a snap. Otherwise, it is usually a 2-3 day process. Ask the travel desk for documents, email overseas colleague, email HR, collect all, print, write, scan, email, get them reviewed, edit/correct/modify/facepalm and finally submit.

We are now making a web app of it and putting it online.

P.S.: I realize that I might be a bit of an oddball here because it is possible that a USA passport doesn't require such mundane stuff.

I automate my todos. In the best tradition of getting things done, I have a single list for all my todos. It is in Trello and it uses Butler for automation. I have Inbox, Today, This week, Done and Later lists. The Done one gets emptied every day at 2am. Wherever I move a task to Today I get assigned to it and the due date is set to the evening of today. It's not much, but keeps me kinda organized.

These are a wonderful invention.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079N9FW5B/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_Z...

I also use these.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0748RK2XQ/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_n...

I have made other serious efforts to automate my life and generally found that trying to catch time with homemade Rube Goldberg machines is a bit like trying to catch water with a properly engineered sieve.

After your basic appliances, I've found it's actually quite hard to exchange money for time. A great value I've found is meal prep companies. They are expensive but cheaper than a cook or cleaner and they remove many chores. Debating what to eat, menu planning, grocery shopping and actual prep cooking are greatly relieved.

I have setup a crawler acommpanied by a discord bot to notify me and my friends about new posts on each faculty class website. These posts usually include stuff like exam results, schedules and other notifications. Really helpful. Stopped us from manually checking each website when we anticipate schedules and results for each exam.

Home Assistant:

- Water garden if no rain

- Lower curtains as sun sets

- Rotate pin codes on door for abnb property when bookings end

- Log in correct user when TV turned on nielsentam box

I use automatic bill pay and some scripts to fix video player settings, that's about it for full automation.

A lot of things are semi-automated, as in I have a script / specialized software to handle them, but I still run them by hand. I have a paperweight suitable for holding down the enter key which comes in handy sometimes.

I use the repeating events feature in Google Calendar a lot, that seems to mystify people who think I put them all in by hand.

The automation people seem to fall into a few camps: smart home, enterprise data, and vacation. The last is referring to the sort of people who build a business, hire some low-paid folks to do all the work "automatically", and take a vacation. This seems like cheating to me but whatever.

Usually, my download folder is quite messy. I wrote a rudimentary script to re-organize a folder using a simple cli. It also has a config that can be updated to account for different file types or categories.

Wrote a program that tracks Australian movie release dates for movies I'm interested in. Sends a daily email if a release date moves, or there a new movies for me to flag my interest in.

Interfaces with themoviedb.org for plot summary, cast and crew info and such. Interfaces with Google Calendar for writing entries for each movie I'm tracking.

The code is available although a bit rough. https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule

My job is to advertise on classified ads my local business: heard of OLX? I have macros in JavaScript that does that automatically (I only have to sit and write the captcha)

1. I wrote a cron job to auto commit my code to their repos if I haven’t edited a file in 12 hours.

2. I started a while business getting news emails on more niche topics (works better than other services IMO): https://lettergram.net/

3. Automated emails sent to customers thanking them for feedback.

4. Important emails are texted to me (as determined by my classifier)

I have a motion light at the bottom of the basement steps.

I also write scripts to compare OpenStreetMap to external datasets and surface interesting differences.

I use textexpander mainly for email support, it saves me ~80 hours per month of typing something I already typed in the past

Report generation that need to be done through some poorly designed web frontend (even to a point where you abstract the automation process and the return of the data as an api). Have been worked at various companies over the past decade, I found that this kind of automation is the most valuable.

Whenever I turn on my work laptop it launches sites and applications I use on a day to day basis, like Jira (for our ticket), Hacker News (daily dose of information), Slack, Outlook etc. Very simple to create with python and just something I wanted to make.

I automate my garden. In the summer I have it configured with an automatic drop. I still get to play in my garden and there's always more annual maintenance to do, but the general watering and care is easily automated with a drip timer from home depot.

Minor stuff. Any logins that require password (git/ssh), all the command line operations that I do more than one time (I start with moving them to text file and when it gets tedious - to shell scripts, saves surprising lots of time).

I had trouble getting a DMV appointment. Wrote a script that would alert when one was available. The site wasn't busy enough to warrant building out the booking. Only used the script once.

I bought a vacuum robot that cleans up daily. I saved a lot of time daily, I do just a ground good cleanup once in a week. Best investment ever.

Pre-authorized payments for bills (phone, gas, electricity etc). There are so many upsides to this:

- Zero stress

- Avoids late charges

- Improves credit rating (see previous point)

Edit: formatting

I use Alexa to turn on ambient music and lights. It removes tedious screentime in a place I consider a sanctuary-esc.

Worth the $75 rig.

deleting emails in gmail. It's unnecesarily complex but i can add a marker such as _delete_ in emails or use filters to get them auto-labeled, and then i have to use a google script to delete those after a month. It sounds like something that should be trivial for everyone to do, but it's not.

I use tmuxinator to auto open my terminals and start my services in separate panes in tmux

Automating menial work of Fax reading/processing in US healthcare by applying the ML.

Autohotkey to save PDF copy of a webpage along with a link in the folder currently open.

Automagically chimes and closes garage door after being left open too long

Simple stuff so far.

* I have my browser automatically launch on boot-up [linux]. Saves me a click each time, xkcd's "is it worth the time" be darned in this specific instance for me.

* I have scripts that webscrape stock//etf//mutual_fund stock prices for personal financial tracking reasons. I just want the numbers, not all the hassle of getting the information for each stock//etf//mutial_fund for each financial house every single time.

* I have a mutable script to download a large swath of a podcast's episode archive so I don't have to "click and save" hundreds of individual episodes. Modify, execute, go take a shower or make lunch, come back and modify the metadata so it works on my .mp3 player.

... stuff like this. Nothing major, but "automating the pain away" type of thing.

Note: this is ignoring the "fun programming" I do for myself as per question.

Sending server error via pushover to my phone

I built a page poller, that scrapes any web page periodically to check if some particular part of it is changed and then email it to me. Use it to have new xkcd pics delivered to my mail among other stuff.

http://pagepoller.r14.railsrumble.com/

I went through a phase of trying to automate _all_ aspects of my life. If I did a task more than 3 times, and it could be automated, I went ahead and wrote some scripts for that.

Anyone will quickly learn there is a trade-off between managing the time it takes to maintain automation and the time you would spend just "doing" said task.

After this realization, I started manually performing tasks, timing them, and storing them in a glorified spreadsheet. Any time automation broke, I timed how long it took to fix, and also put it in the spreadsheet.

I deprecated all automation tasks that did not save me either 10% or more time, or tasks that I found at least some enjoyment in (such as messaging my wife when I would be home, reading my child's school reports regardless of their result).

I have over 140 automation scripts in tact. Some are software-only (interacting with APIs, emails, SMS, scraping) and some have associated hardware (sensors attached, etc).

I have become obsessed with data being generated by this automation, so I now log all events and meta information where possible. This gives me pretty good insight on where pointless items exist in my life (which allows me to just stop doing them, automated or manually) and where important parts also exist.