I sometimes use cruise control in the car.

I have an app made notifications shut up for a few minutes when that friend of yours message

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Around 10 years ago I "took the vow" to never lie again. That's a kind of automation in a sense that I've decided in advance how I'm going to behave. Sure has made things more simple, though not always the most comfortable action.

Had a customer with 12 sites and didn't want to pay for FortiManager. So when they wanted a site white listed from SSL inspection we had to log into 12 devices to add the domain to SSL exemption, sdwan exemption, and a custom web filter ID.
I made a quick Ansible playbook that would take a list of domains and add them to the appropriate groups on all 12 sites in under 1 min.

I must not automate, offloading my mental tasks is the enemy (I am dying of executive dysfunction)

We like to sleep with rain noises at night, so I set up a home assistant automation to turn on the sounds at 9pm, and turn them off at 9am. I also had to set a trigger for when HA starts since performing a backup of the VM would result in it stopping at 3am lol.

I mean I have a few lights in the house on timers and my thermostat pretty well programmed. I do much more than that I wouldn’t feel in control of my life.

And the follow up: how are yall documenting your automations so that next year when it breaks you can recreate it.

I never took on a credit card. Pay with cash, over and done once at the time of purchase. No fussing about stolen card info, or worries of compromised accounts.

Simple and elegant and also lends itself to spending less and saving more.

I have a cheap shitty desk lamp. It would cost zero cents of effort to lean over and switch it on when I sit down at my desk, so I bought a dozen smart plugs, and fought through setting up HomeAssistant.

Now I have a digital Rube Goldberg machine that lights my desk for me. HomeAssistant reads the wattage of my PC through one smart plug, I wake the PC from sleep, HA switches on another smart plug for the desk light.

I think this is the most effort I've ever put into being lazy.

Mine are mostly IT stuff

• ansible playbook for updating my VMs
• nightly scheduled pipelines for CI/CD to deploy pihole and nginx-proxy-manager
• UniFi devices auto-updating to newest software and firmware
• night light / blue light filter automatically switches on and off on my PC
• all VMs automatically back themselves up to a backupserver
• backupserver syncs itself with offsite-backupserver

I have a home screen icon on my phone that turns of all of the lights in the house. Great for bed time.

I also have one that will turn on my bathroom vent fan if it gets too humid, but will turn it off if the HVAC is running (unless I'm showering and playing music over the vent fan speaker)

So, I installed zwave lights everywhere. It was a giant pain!

I replaced them all with light switches that have motion sensors. Some turn off automatically after being turned on with no motion. Some turn on somatically with motion (and off again later.)

A small handful were turned back into normal light switches because I didn't want the automation for those rooms.

To me, THAT is automation. Wherever I was thinking about using an app from my bed was not automation. I just moved the light switch to my phone.

Not sure what you mean with automations, but there is a nice balance to be had between avoiding stuff that needs maintenance and getting stuff that is doing the maintenance of other stuff for you. So don't buy that aquarium if you do not want to do the maintenance and upkeep on that.

Other things: Dishwasher. Robot vacuum. They are awesome as fuck

Ansible playbook that updates my servers, both OS and kubernetes versions, along with automatic reboot management.

I have timers for my aquarium lights. They turn on and off at specified times each day so I don't accidentally leave them on all night and get a ton of algae growing everywhere.

At this current moment, not much. Just the night time automatons on my phone to dim the screen and go silent. I just moved though so I haven't gone full smart home yet. But the robot vacuum doing the day to day cleaning is nice.

My phone automatically switches to battery saving mode when reaching 30% instead of the standard 20 % popup. But it’s almost always in battery saving mode so that’s that

(I didn't personally make it but)

The house in renting right now has a keyless (moreso key optional) entry, and I bought a car last year that is also 'keyless'. I will never go back. It's so nice.

I used to have my smart bulbs turn on and off automatically based on the time of day, but since I moved into this apartment, it doesn't really help since the only windows face another building and the orientation basically makes it dark 24/7 without using lights.