A special shortcut tot remove line breaks, citations, line break hyphens and other garbage from my clipboard. For easy copying from academic papers.

I’m a big fan of automating as much as I can.

• Lights automatically turn on when someone enters the room, but only if it’s dark enough to need lights in that room at that moment. Turn them off automatically when presence is no longer detected (not just IR based motion detection).
• My old washer and dryer alert me when they’re done thanks to vibration sensors.
• Media downloads when added to a watchlist.
• Regular backups locally and to the cloud.
• My phone enables/disables rotation lock based on the app I’m currently using.
• Phone also opens various playlists when connecting to my car stereo based on date/time.
• Various “scenes” to turn devices on and off, control brightness, volume levels, etc. This includes controlling devices that are IR, RF, Bluetooth, and Zigbee based.
• Game servers that update when new versions are released, but only when no players are connected. If anyone is connected, sends a message to a discord server (that is also connected to Matrix) alerting everyone to the available update and asking players to log off at their earliest convenience. Players can also check on game server status with bot commands in the game’s channel on that server.

Everything runs locally and has a manual backup so I can still control everything the old fashioned way if my phone is dead or if my non tech savvy parents are over and need to operate any of it.

Bought my house a few years back when pickings were slim. Managed to get one that wasn’t in an HOA and fit the needs of the family, but no fiber internet. I have cable with 1G/40mbps, and that upload speed bothers me. I do a lot of ofsite backups and I work from home. My upload bandwith is almost completely saturated 24/7.

The local fiber company offers service one street over. I’ve called and begged and pleaded, but they won’t expand. Talked to the city, crickets, talked to competitors, nothing.

I set up a playwright script that runs every day. It goes to their website, enters my address, gets the message that my address is a part of a future build, clicks on the register button, receives the message that they can’t build here due to reasons. And then texts me to tell me that there has been no change to their website.

It keeps me from constantly checking and obsessing over something that’ll likely not happen for a good long while. I set up a ssh command to trigger the script in home assistant. So when I’m frustrated I can spam click it half a dozen times.

I’m waiting to eacalate things. I’m an automation test engineer by trade. I’m proficient in load tests. I’m perfectly capable of breaking their website, but I have a feeling that won’t convince them to expand and finish servicing the neighborhood. I might safely crank up the # of requests, but if they aren’t noticing me now, they probably aren’t going to notice a 10-100x increase.

At my first job, they hired me to do some really boring, repetitive stuff, but they weren’t too particular about how I did it. So I taught myself how to get real good at Excel and VBA and automated most of my work. They noticed and then they made that my job.

Ten years later, after several organizational shifts, most of my work was back to being boring, repetitive stuff. My workload was split evenly between running manual reports and maintaining old, bloated projects. But this time it was worse because my manager was hostile towards me and literally could not understand what it meant for me to write code in VBA. Like, no matter how many times I showed him what I could do, he still thought I was just clicking “record” and automating things that way. Ultimately, he just didn’t like me. My performance reviews weren’t getting better, and there was no more future in the role.

So I automated the reports and didn’t tell anyone. It bought me several hours per day to work on whatever I wanted, like my resumé. When I eventually left (for like a 60% pay raise), I sent all the automation to the other person on my team who ran those reports. I don’t know what she did with it.

Spell checker in my web browser!

Automatic backups of my most precious data. Photos, project work, important documents. Some are backed up weekly and some monthly but all automatic. Archived onto a separate partition, copied to external HDD, and then uploaded to cloud storage.

• washing machine and dishwasher
• robot vacuum (it’s not perfect but it greatly increases the amount of time in between necessary manual vacuuming)

Sonarr and Radarr for downloading tv shows and films, renaming them to a standard naming format, then moving the files to their proper drive/folder,etc. I just add a TV show or movie to the queue, and it will automatically download each new film and or episode as soon as it becomes available.

Conscious habit building, I automate myself, lol. Helps keep discipline with self-study, language learning, and fitness!

My phone does a nightly backup on my local network’s NAS so if it gets lost/stolen/destroyed I don’t have to worry about losing anything.

Using rsync in a bash script to backup my files.