
How we use Slack in our family - fjallstrom
http://labs.earthpeople.se/2016/02/my-family-uses-slack/
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iuguy
For those who don't want to use Slack but want some sort of family automation,
Huginn[1] may be useful.

[1] - [https://github.com/cantino/huginn/](https://github.com/cantino/huginn/)

~~~
bedros
a great concept, anything like this in python?

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tannedNerd
Check out [https://home-assistant.io](https://home-assistant.io) similar but
with some extra home automation focus.

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balls187
My wife and I use slack. In the past ~6 months we: got engage, planned a
wedding, a wedding reception (2 different dates), honeymoon to Australia, a
baby, a new house, and renting out our townhome.

While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they
have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing
on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage.

So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom
build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event
reciepe.

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TheGRS
You got engaged over slack?

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balls187
Hah. No. That I did in person (though I did flub up my rehersed speech)
[https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken-
by=balls187](https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken-by=balls187)

~~~
mdellabitta
That's awesome. You're lucky she didn't just elbow you in the face from
adrenaline.

~~~
balls187
I talked about that with the other krav instructors. The girl behind me in
purple was there to make sure no one accidentally ran into me while launching
into their attack. So it was up to me to protect myself if she hit me.

As you said, luckily it all worked out.

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ritonlajoie
Nice use of slack.

Side question : anybody here using some sort of hosted family social network ?
I'm thinking about doing that. We have a huge family (around 200 alive members
who are connected in real life) and thought about installing something, with a
facebook/g+ login with oauth. I thought about maybe a wordpress + budypress
thing but.. maybe I'm missing something better ? The first requirement is that
anybody must select his parents, so that an ancestry tree can be created,
etc...

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visakanv
Why not just create a Facebook group? What features are you missing?

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givinguflac
Privacy?

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patcon
Doing group chats with my family of 5 using Signal private messenger. The
privacy guarantee is nice, but I'll admit there are lots of little issues in
Signal group chats, often between iOS and Android.

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chermanowicz
"It turns out our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per
child."

That's crazy (awesome).

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veritas20
Seems like a great use of Slack. Unfortunately, my first and only experience
with Slack has not been a fantasy. I joined a public slack on startups and
everytime I check, I'm 100+ messages behind. Seems like a giant chat room.

I'm missing the magic.

~~~
opticalfiber
Well, yeah. That's not the intended use case for Slack. People do use it for
public groups organized around a shared interest, but it is intended for teams
or companies.

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kingnight
What is this curl script that calls out to Find My iPhone...

I'm surprised that the web api is trivial enough to script but would love to
use it.

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zrail
It's not really scriptable, but if you look at the network traffic you can
"copy as curl" one of the URLs that pop up as you're playing with "Find My
Friends" on icloud.com and paste it into a terminal. It will return a JSON
blob with geo information of all of your friends.

I don't know how long the cookie that "copy as curl" grabs lasts, but if it's
long-lived I can absolutely see dropping it into a little script and feeding
the lat/long into a static Google Maps tile URL.

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kingnight
Right on. I would have figured that iCloud would have one of those iterating
cookies (I have no idea what it's really called) where each request iterates
the request-data of each subsequent http call so a copy curl wouldn't work.

Very cool automation.

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spinningarrow
> Our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per child.

That is actually really cool. Are there any privacy concerns though?

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fjallstrom
hi. article author here. the feed url is very long, and parents can disable it
entirely. so i guess it's fine.

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pc86
> _the feed url is very long_

What does this have to do with the security of the feed?

~~~
s9ix
[http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/36870/is-
includi...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/36870/is-including-a-
secret-guid-in-an-url-security-through-obscurity)

~~~
emergentcypher
Put another way: all security is security through obscurity. Whether we're
guessing URLs or brute-forcing passwords, logging HTTP traffic or keylogging
someone's machine. I hardly see the difference. It's not easy to tell where
"obscurity" ends and "security" begins.

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chrisseaton
One-time pads as long as the message aren't security through obscurity are
they? There's no way to brute force them. No future maths or quantum computer
could ever crack them.

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jameshart
'How the pad was generated' is the obscure part with OTPs.

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filipm
I think the MatHem hack is pretty neat, why would anyone be offended by it?

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joallard
Evil coder is making it easier for his family to buy stuff from our site,
better send him a cease and desist!

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callmeed
Does anyone have a favorite "Shared Family Calendar"? We need something to
keep track of everyone's school schedule, reports/projects due, sports
games/practices, etc. etc.

I've tried Google and Trello ... wondering if there's something better.

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petepete
Out of interest, why didn't shared Google calendars work for you? It works
quite well for us.

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callmeed
It didn't "not work" but neither of my kids have gmail accounts so they can't
see the calendar on their devices.

I just thought there might be something a little more vertical/family-focused.

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jeremyw
I built a Slack bot to digitize movies, so everyone in the house knows when to
swap discs, figure out tracks and post to the TV hub.

[https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot](https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot)

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simonswords82
As a B2B SaaS app founder I dream of the day when our app generates this type
of positive, organic coverage so effortlessly. It's no wonder Slack are
growing at such a rate, they've built something that provides a serious amount
of value to people.

~~~
visakanv
There are a few things to unpackage here!

1\. Whenever you catch yourself thinking that something uncommon is
effortless, you're probably not seeing what's going on behind the scenes. Or
at least– getting to the point when you've set the flywheel in motion (and
people are trying to use your product or idea as a centerpiece for discussing
something of their own) is non-trivial! But I'm sure you know this.

2\. There are B2B SaaS apps that provide a serious amount of value that grow
nicely, but still don't grow as quickly as Slack does– Slack is kind of an
outlier in this regard.

3\. There's a predictable news cycle that these things go through:
[https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-
a-n...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-
on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e) Within this model, Slack is currently
between 4 and 6 o' clock. This will change, inevitably.

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jalada
We plan our vacations in Trello! Personally I think that's less hardcore than
using Slack for family group chat.

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splatcollision
Trello is great for vacation planning - have used it for this purpose!

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realusername
I also wanted to setup something like this but I did not see an option to
switch languages in Slack and since no-one speaks any English, it's not going
to work well...

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spinningarrow
If you're writing your own Slackbot it shouldn't matter, should it?

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realusername
The interface of Slack is still in English which is a major blocker for me.

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luckydata
I use Hangouts for that sort of things and this dude pretty much gave Google
and Facebook their roadmap for the next couple years.

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oldgun
See, people. This is how Slack should be used. For family daily use, not as
the only communication tool for opensource projects.

~~~
ergo14
What's the benefit of using this for family vs hangouts?

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georgehotelling
Is it possible to get all the stuff in the article integrated with Hangouts?

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jedberg
Right now my wife and I just use Google calendar and iMessage, but I can see a
time soon when my child can speak, read and type where it might be handy to
have a group chat.

Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my
in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate
via email.

~~~
rekoros
But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many.

I've been using gmail/gtalk for ~12 years -- I can quickly dig up (and
regularly do) pretty much anything my parents and I ever talked about. I
consider this to be the killer feature (vs, say, hotmail, where I had to keep
deleting messages because of the 10MB limit, back in the day).

~~~
jedberg
> But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many.

That's a good point, although in practice I rarely have to search through our
message history.

Also, since we're using iMessage, it's really hard to search anyway.

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davidbrent
Someone at work was recently giving me the slack pitch, and mentioned the cool
bot that be configured to announce people, answer questions etc...

It made me very nostalgic for my old IRC friends, both people and eggdrop bots
alike.

~~~
digi_owl
I have long held that IM (in particular MSN Messenger) was what killed
community usage of IRC.

Before XP shipped with Messenger bundled, and aggressively pushed (i recall
you would get a big window in your face on first login "demanding" you set up
an account), basically everyone with a net connection in the local area was
found on one or more regional channels.

After IM came however, things became very "cliche-y" as people were
"approving" each other over IM and then dropping off IRC.

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guillegette
For those using Slack, I recommend you to check out this to-do app
[http://www.zlapps.com/todo](http://www.zlapps.com/todo)

Disclaimer: I built it :)

~~~
simpixelated
I use this for groceries and it's great! Really easy to add items as I think
of them, then check the list while at the store. Thanks for the app!

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rcarmo
Smiled as I read this, seeing as I'm on Slack largely due to my "extended
family" from my previous job (everyone else left but we stayed in touch over
Slack).

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stephenitis
Are there any downsides to using slack for family uses? I can only of think of
my personal need to separate work/personal chat apps

~~~
fjallstrom
the apps support several teams, you're set to go

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birbal
this is so awesome. My wife and I have been thinking and working on how can
family productivity be improved. It's not an easy task as we are figuring out.
There was a recent blog post that became reasonably popular.
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-
slackformoms...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-slackformoms-
kavalpreet-ganti)

The challenge I feel is to determine if one should take a broad-based approach
to family productivity that addresses all aspects or should one take a narrow
high-value problem and solve for improving the productivity of that task. We
have approached it from the point of view of making kids' activity planning as
a task easier. We are going into beta in a week or so. We'll know if this
works.

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charlieegan3
We also use slack in our family - haven't customised anything other than
adding an emoji for the dog. I've found slack channels to work well with
different sections of the extended family.

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jhgg
I just moved into a house w/ a few room-mates, and we were looking to make a
discord channel for the house and write some bots around home automation.

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cryptos
It is cool to have all these conversation been backed up by the NSA ;-)

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nextos
Would this be doable with IRC?

~~~
agopaul
Well, yes people have been doing similar stuff with IRC bots. But you would
miss the possibility to show widgets inside the chat client (eg. map,
calendar, etc)

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perseusprime11
Did you look into Trello?

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runn1ng
They should have used IRC.

