Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=4
One of these years (maybe this year!) we won't need to paginate anymore and scrolling will be blissful again. In the meantime, sorry for the annoyance if you knew this; I just wanted to make sure everyone realizes how large and good this thread is.
My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they'll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the house, and the guilt associated with not picking up, is unbearable.
My brother and I built a system where her calls get re-routed to a rotation of relatives to answer her calls, to spread the load. After a call with her, each person gets a 2 hour break (customizable). If no one is available to answer, or if everyone is on break, she gets a voicemail that my dad recorded that explains that we love her, that she lives there, all the usual stuff.
It's working beautifully.
I am actually a volunteer at a non-profit in Japan. The NPO provides very similar service using volunteers for elderly people. I have been looking into automating some of the call handling/routing, personalization, and increasing family participation.
Hit me right in the feels.
Thanks for sharing pigcat. Beautiful problem solving.
These are the steps we took:
1. Get a twilio number
2. All incoming phone calls to the home phone are redirected to that twilio number [1]
3. If incoming number == grandma, request from an api endpoint the next relative to dial. Redirect her call to them.
4. If no one is available, play the voice mail
5. If incoming number != grandma, redirect the call to dad's mobile number [2]
[1] A child comment by macNchz noted correctly about "Selective Call Forwarding". This would have simplified the process and we could have skipped step 5, but our telephone provider did not offer it.
[2] Note that this is a bit of a compromise in the setup. The home phone never rings anymore and all non-grandma calls go to dad's cell. But they were happy to accept this.
Thanks :)
I would have loved to have that (or even thought up of that) when my grandmother began developing signs of dementia. Fortunately, her signs weren't that bad before she passed away ultimately.
It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/.
Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.
Incidentally I also built some tech for it: https://github.com/dllu/nectar but I need to update the readme...
https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/350
https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/3224
https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/4045
Etc
It's really cool to see it used like this! The resulting images are really neat as well!
Most online webcams are easier to identify
Since you have speed, I should dig into this.
Used to yolov5 to detect vehicles and deepsort to track them, also got a rough estimate for the speed of the pass
heres the two part blog i wrote about it
https://dharisd.github.io/posts/vehicle-monitor/
https://dharisd.github.io/posts/vehicle-monitor-part-two/
Or do you litteratur love in or on an airport?
By the way I have a quick expansion for most TLDs and for the Swiss .ch “cheese” sounds rather more apt and easier than the real one in my head :)
I'm assuming you are measuring how far a certain feature of the train takes to get from one point of the frame to the other. Similar to how police catch people speeding by measuring how long road markings take to pass in a given frame.
This is not mysterious tech deriving images from sound traveling through the floor. You will be out of luck with your underground subway.
I hope they notice (also makes me want to guess the location). I am in Zurich and I hope I don't find this spot
Plus, the trains and tracks are very well maintained, so they create a lot less noise than you may be used to.
The trains look very clean from the outside. I do wonder how loud is it, to live so near the tracks.
The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an evening movie, some late-night content, then the Indian head and "We Will Resume Broadcasting Tomorrow Morning...."
It fills dead airtime by choosing randomly among (literally) thousands of YouTube short clips I have on the drive — or showing a title card indicating when the next show begins.
Partly it's a fantasy — to have my own "channel" with my own scheduled content — my fantasy station.
Partly it serves to put on content I would otherwise not be inclined to pull up, double click and watch. It adds the serendipitous element to TV watching that I miss before streaming. The movie "Charly" (1968) just came on last night and I am sure I have not seen it since I was a teenager — had to stop what I was doing and watch a few scenes I recall vividly.
Today's lineup here: https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/
(Since the schedule is in JSON format, it was easy enough to make a web front end to display today's schedule.)
I would love to do something like this for my kids. They're constantly begging to watch Youtube, which I limit pretty heavily. Something like this could allow me to stick some pre-approved videos into a queue, and maybe even make an allowance for a half-hour of some of the ... dumber stuff that they like at a certain time of the day. I could also slip in some Kurzgesagt, Mark Rober, content that they may not otherwise be that interested in to surreptitiously educate them ;)
https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv
Personally I want almost this. I want to rotate the TV shows my kids watch in the morning but I don't want to start part way through a show (the one part of the old analogue experience that I don't miss at all). Difficult to square that circle.
Unfortunately they're removing support for all Plugins over time and have already eliminated ones that play content.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/online-media-sou...
So you should be able to do something with that.
[0] https://www.provideoinstruments.com/hdmi-to-rf-modulator-con...
I wrote a script to catalog all my shows/movies then another that reads a schedule and generates a daily playlist. My schedule has daily episodes of some shows and then weekly showings of others. I even put some network block bumpers between some shows and "upcoming schedule" clips.
The output of the scheduling script is just an m3u playlist. A cron job loads the day's playlist at midnight and it plays continuously during the day. There's no controls to pause or anything, if I miss something I miss it (by design). All the video content is stored on a 5TB drive plugged into the machine.
To complete the old school analog nature of the project I picked up a low power Hlly VHF video transmitter. I've got a small CRT TV in my office that I use during the day and I can pick up the signal on the TV in the living room. The project started on an RPi with VLC but it struggled on some videos I'd ripped from Bluray so I replaced it with a little fanless AMD box with an HDMI-RCA adapter. It sits in the garage and I can pick up the signal anywhere in the house.
The best part is apart from the setup it's proven to be pretty reliable. My next step is to make a schedule output like what you linked and maybe a web based UI to let me "change channels". For right now it does what I want with no real fuss and I always have something on that I like.
I’ve wanted to do the m3u playlist thing for a long time, so I could create a HLS stream for each “channel”. Then family members could watch from any device.
Otherwise, I will enjoy the fun of figuring it out for myself some day.
Would consider sharing how you set it up? I’d love to do something similar!
I tried using VLC instead for video playback (I think the more accepted way to play video from Python now) but when VLC completes showing a video there is a visible flash that I cannot figure out how to get rid of.
I should point out though that it doesn't "stream" — you'll have to find some other solution for that. The Pi is a dedicated "player" hooked to a dedicated TV that is always on, always showing what the Pi has to offer up.
* I wrote an add-on that allows me to read HN comments in a structured way. A typical screenreader would present page in a linear manner, so you'd have to read all replies in order, which is quite tedious in popular posts. My add-on parses the page and identifies the level of each comment, and then I can navigate to previous/next comment at any level. So I can quickly check top-level comments and then read replies only if I'm interested.
* Another add-on makes Jupyter edit boxes to work with my screenreader. Jupyter was requiered at my company , so I either had to write that add-on or else. The way it works is that it sends Control+C Control+V keystrokes to the browser to retrieve contents and then presents them to me in an accessible window for editing. When I'm done it would Control+A Control+V new content back to edit box.
* BlindCompass - iOS app that I wrote for myself to navigate on the streets. One of the problems of blind people is that it is easy to lose the sense of heading, e.g. where is north vs South. So BlindCompass would read my heading and present it as a two-pitch sound, that allows me to deduce rough direction. It's also easy to figure out the right direction and just maintain it, so with BlindCompass I can cross large open spaces easily.
https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts
(This happened years ago, I do not remember more details.)
I’m not blind but I have terrible time with directions and navigation. I’m gonna try it next time I have to stick to a general heading.
It measures and corrects pH, electrical conductivity, oxidation reduction potential, temperature of the air and water, water level, and humidity. It also automates pumps, lights, and fans (I know people normally advise against this). None of it is particularly sophisticated, but I’m really proud of it.
I initially used a deep water culture and later moved on to the nutrient film technique. It produces a lot of greens and herbs — way more than I ever expected — and it’s remarkably hands off. I recently left it to do its thing for almost 3 months before I had to intervene, and the problem wasn’t the water, nutrients, or the system failing explicitly. The plants just got too big for their channels and as they became stressed, they developed some pest issues. It was such a cool and empowering experience to see real world automation Just Work.
The whole thing is powered by an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. It’s a great little controller.
I’m currently designing my first PCB to consolidate the system onto a single board so my friends can easily build their own. It’s not extremely cheap, but it’s not too expensive either and you get a tremendous amount of food from it. It’s such a fun hobby.
If you are preparing for Collapse, ensure you have multiple independent sources of electricity available. Solar, hydro, wind. If you are in a city you are better off with a storage room full of canned food since your hydroponic plants wont give you much food after power goes out.
Absolutely, I’d like to work towards contributing useful things to open source gardening technology. Once I have something useful to put into the world I definitely will.
> Does it depend on daylight?
No, this particular system is totally isolated apart from fresh air pulled in to regulate humidity and temperature. The lights are the most expensive aspect of the system by a wide margin, but they do work extremely effectively. The plants are very happy.
I have an older iteration of the system working in an outdoor greenhouse without artificial lighting. It uses fans to regulate air temperature and humidity, but it gets light from the sun. It’s doing fine so far, but the temperature is still relatively lower so growth is slower than in the tent. I’m excited to see what the results are like over summer.
> Is water/air recycled?
This is an interesting question because at the moment the answer is no, but I have the beginnings of plans to recycle the water. I use a reverse osmosis system to feed into the system gradually (this ensures my water sensors provide reliable readings), and I’m fairly sure I could add a secondary tank to drain old solution into, filter it, and use it as the source for the feed into the RO system and then back into the active tank. Though it’s not necessary now, I think that level of efficiency could be incredible.
I’d love to be recycling nutrients as well. I know there’s plenty leftover when a grow is done, but I can’t know what the ratio of each nutrient is in order to rebalance it for the crop I’m growing. I’m sure some growers are able to do this, but I have a feeling it’s a bit beyond me. It seems like a job for a mass spectrometer. That’s possible to DIY in a sane price range, but I will likely need to wait until my kids move out to take that on. I do love the idea in any case — utilizing all of the nutrients and reusing them when possible would be a major accomplishment for me.
> What is the reason behind you making this?
There are several reasons. One, I eat a lot of greens and they’re getting more expensive. I kept a sheet in Soulver (a sort of natural language math program) which outlines a cost breakdown of a head of lettuce grown hydroponically vs from a store. It eventually hit a point where I could grow it for less than I could buy it for, and it justified jumping in and making it happen. My ROI has worked out fine, so the sheet was correct and it’s not crazy to grow with a system like this (so long as you don’t mind the maintenance, harvesting, trial and error, etc). It has actually worked in favour of growing it myself quite a bit more since I first started and hasn’t shown signs of tilting the other way for a while now.
Two, I love learning. The more I learn the more reasons I find to be in awe of the world. Seeing the way the plants grow, understanding the chemistry and biology of the system, accomplishing new things with technology — I find it incredibly fulfilling. It shows my kids that the distance between here and making something interesting or useful happen is simply doing it. First we had an idea, then we had real plants growing almost magically in a system built from scratch. All of that is awesome.
Three, like you I see some instability in the world and I want to have a grasp on how I might ease tasks like finding reliable nutrition. I have bags of fertilizer because they’re not terribly expensive and they can help generate good nutrition quickly, easily, and very reliably. Something like the kratky method can actually work really well even without stable power, so long as light and temperature are reasonable. I also have a lot of seeds for sprouting, as they’re an incredible source of easy nutrition in emergencies too. I don’t really want to need these skills for that, but I do want to have practical skills for producing as much food as possible if something were to happen.
As far as open sourcing goes, I hope to get a sense for how easy or difficult it is to get up and running with this stuff once I can get it in my friends’ hands. I plan to add a crude web interface for managing environment and automation parameters, and I’d like to figure out a way to sensibly scale out the system. For example, not everyone I’ll be giving it to cares about pH or EC, so they don’t need those components. I could simply not solder things onto their boards, but I’d rather figure out something like using standoffs to join the boards in a stack and gradually add features that way. Kind of like hats on an arduino I guess.
As I iron this stuff out I definitely want to put it out in the world. At the moment there are so many superior options in ecosystems like raspberry pi, I feel like I’d be wasting people’s time. I do think a pi is overkill (though potentially complimentary) for this kind of thing though, and the power of a connected microcontroller with MQTT and simple RPC services is way beyond what most people expect.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyqykZK2Ev4
[1] https://kylegabriel.com/projects/2020/06/automated-hydroponi...
[2] https://github.com/kizniche/Mycodo
It’s funny, I used to write all the time and I loved it. I think I became a bit too critical of myself as I saw my site getting more traffic, and I got a bit too anxious to hit publish.
I should get back to it. I’ve been working on a visual editor which generates code you can flash on an arduino with the idea that eventually this could evolve into a little automated gardening platform, but I’m not fully convinced it would be received the way I hope it would. I know a lot of people are into automated gardening, but they might not be the people who would want to use this kind of platform. In any case, I might find out faster if I write about it and see what people think. My friends are certainly into it, but, they’re my friends! Haha. I need some strangers to laugh at my ideas, maybe.
pH: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2069.html
EC: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2565.html
Water temperature: https://www.adafruit.com/product/381
CO2: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5190
Air temp and humidity: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3251
There are others but I’ll have to dig into it! I think you could spend less on alternatives, too.
If that were NL at this point your whole audience would be on the floor laughing. 'Suuuure...'. What some people won't do to get decent tomatoes.
There was even a chuckling group of people in the background when they mentioned "veggies". This was in Toronto around 2011.
In small scale there is more work maintaining the automated setup and calibrating the sensors than it would take to do the measurements and dosing manually.
As for EC, I can only correct it if it’s too low. If it’s 100 points below where I want it, I dose from two containers of pre mixed nutrient concentrate. They’re in separate containers because they’ll actually precipitate some of their constituents if they’re combined at high concentrations, which is too bad (it would be nice to use only one container).
The pH sensor I use is apparently lab grade, but only cost around $70 CAD. It has been holding up just fine for close to a year now. If I were doing this on a larger scale, I think I’d go for one that’s a bit more expensive from atlas scientific. They seem to stand by their products and claim their pH probes will operate for years if taken care of.
My EC sensor was quite a bit more — something like $150. I forget where I got it, because I had the idea to build this maybe 10 years ago and that was one of the first components I picked up! Looking around it seems like you can spend quite a bit less now, and it seems like they’re durable.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6481
When you are in different timezones it can actually be nice to fall asleep with the other person "close" to you; so we kept Skype running while one of us went to bed and the other person was working on the PC.
Unfortunately the internet connection would regularly drop, ending the Skype call. Now you did not want to wake the other person by calling them.
So I wrote a small script that would allow you to send a secret word in the chat and invoke the other persons' Skype to call you instead automatically.
Kept our relationship healthy. Now we've been married for nearly 10 years and are happily living together :)
Nice reference
I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone. Everyone got their own code, and it would text me whenever someone used a code so I'd instantly know who was coming. The text conversation was my timestamped access log. I also put time constraints on some codes so e.g. Doordash couldn't open the gate in the middle of the night, or I could set up a temporary access code for a party, and I rotated codes too, with text notifications if an outdated code was used.
I thought about making a paid app out of it, but it just didn't seem worthwhile. I didn't expect that many people would want to pay for it. For a while I was excited about a YC startup called Doorport that was going to make a hardware device that you'd install inside those dumb call boxes and make them smart with all sorts of cool features, better than my Twilio hack. But I think they pivoted to a much less interesting pure software thing and then got acquihired.
I use twilio to make outbound calls to that number using my registered phonenumber. I put a Django app in front for home owners so they can add authorized phone numbers with a expiration date.
Whenever someone is a the gate they call a twilio number, my django app checks the validity, opens the gate by calling the gate’s number with my number as ID, plays back some welcome message “hello chris, welcome to…” and sends the owner a push notification that person X is en route.
Todo: add a feature to redirect an unknown number directly to the owner and open the gate after manual verification.
Also Hooked it up to Twilio so I could text a number and it would let me in.
Added passwords and such so I could share it with friends.
I had mine integrated with Home Assistant and got notifications via a telegram integration.
I also had mine setup so me or my room-mate in our apartment telegram group could register new codes, or generate single-use codes.
I also considered building it into a paid app, but came to the same conclusion :-)
You could also have a fallback that forwards the call to your cell phone after a failed attempt at entering the code. But most of the reason I built this was so it would stop calling me at random times, so I didn't really want that.
Obviously to make a real app out of it I would have redone it in a real programming language and made some frontends for web/Android/iOS.
Someone else pointed out https://freshbuzzer.com which looks like a real product that does the same thing.
With triggers like: If the cleaner is more than 15 min late 5 times in a period of 3 months and there are more than 5 resumes posted for cleaning positions do not open the door and fire them.
I hope what you’re describing never becomes a reality. People aren’t disposable tissues for your convenience.