Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life
Recently my wife and I have recently been trying to organize our lives together a little more, and consolidate+manage the tools and services we use use.
For example, we have a family email address (for shared bills, banking etc) and have use cases for a VPN so we pay for a ProtonMail Family subscription to include both. We also pay for 1Password Family (until ProtonMail's ProtonPass is good enough). I was considering paying for Notion so we could manage our various existing Apple notes, lists etc in a shared space (although I think it's overpriced for this use case).
This got me wondering what other software or tools are out there that have found their niche amongst bringing families value. What software (or hardware) have you bought/maintained a subscription for that has had a positive impact to your family life?
178 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadI'd never heard of macrofactor until now.
https://obsproject.com/
https://www.patreon.com/obsproject/overview
Also, setting up an iCloud family. Most of the sharing stuff we can do can be done without being in a family unit, but it makes it that much easier since it makes assumptions about who I wish to share with. From there, native Notes, Calendar, all that stuff has made our life so much easier.
Agree with 1Password family. Being able to send direct links and not passwords is amazing.
Interestingly, a theme here is that these tools allow me to have work stuff and personal stuff alongside each other, but still somewhat isolated. I think that’s more than a coincidence.
YouTube Premium is probably the only thing everyone in the family uses significantly and frequently… but mostly because they don’t notice it. Netflix, Disney+ maybe go without saying. Alexa/Google/HomePods too, mostly for music playback. Spotify Premium has excellent family features also.
Background but storage from Google One, Apple and Microsoft Office are also frequently used and relied on.
For me the hardest part is actually telling family what they could have access to - I wish there was something like https://duo.com/assets/img/leadin-images/sso_leadin_img.jpg but included all the content, apps and subscriptions we share, regardless of service provider. Whatever it is, it has to have tight integration with mobile and desktop computers so I and others can push notifications like, “Amy just signed up for NYTimes, add a shortcut and saved password?” Or a banner appears or customized Kagi results that could say, “Listen on Spotify,” if that’s what we have signed up for would be nice.
I’m thinking it might work like Apple’s notifications for health and/or activity sharing, where you get to see what others do, but instead you get to see what you have access to via the family, etc.
I tried setting up enterprise style accounts and domains and even a Google Site for this purpose and it went nowhere. Everyone already has logins and identities and half the problem is no one wants to visit “yet another website” just to find out what’s new. I haven’t tried making an app with push notifications and installing it on everyone’s devices with a web browser extension, but I also have to admit, I’m tempted to develop such a thing. Might also be useful for very small startups, etc.
It's been great until this week when I hit their ridiculously low limit: 300. That's not many tasks/notes, especially as each sub task is counted individually too.
Why is it so low? I'm a paying user. I'm probably burdening their servers with all of 10kB of text! It's such a gut punch, it makes me regret paying for it a little, just because of how petty and hostile it comes across and because of how needlessly disruptive it is to my usage.
If anyone from Todoist happens to see this, please bump that up by an order of magnitude or two. For premium users, at least. It's awful. It breaks your product for me.
https://todoist.com/help/articles/todoists-limits-for-tasks,...
I haven’t got my projects fully populated yet but 300 is definitely possible for some, eventually.
When I look at the enumerated limits I suspect a code/database issue rather than bean-counter logic… surely you can pack a whole lot of text into your cloud sync for 5 USD per month less Apple tax?
I used to use todoist but now use TickTick- similar but with some extra features. The non-premium is awful though, you have to sign up for a proper workable product (it is cheaper than todoist)
> The non-premium is awful though, you have to sign up for a proper workable product
? Ignorance is bliss, I guess, I'll stay as I am thanks.
Now we're using OurGroceries for grocery lists and just plain iOS Reminders for other stuff
We had the pay-for version for a year or two but it works just fine without as well!
We also use it as a quick todo list for things that don’t go into the family asana
Other note- asana, mostly for repeating and long term scheduled tasks has been a huge family boon for us
No need to think about it; the budget's right there, so I can spend it without second guessing myself.
Later I added savings accounts to the list but the first two are the cornerstone of my budgeting.
[1] https://lunchmoney.app
[2] https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=b19iwkvc
iCloud storage, Google plus, family setup so I don’t have to clean out inboxes or photo libraries too often for a family of 5. We do the Find My, shared notes, calendars and task in iCloud, but projects like vacation planing will be a Google doc since iCloud doc sharing is a bit squirrelly.
Shared password manager is key.
I would like notion, but there’s a fair bit of lockin with that format, and after Evernote I’m wary of building on sand.
So you can create a group email address such as family@smith.com that forwards to both john@smith.com and jane@smith.com and any other family members that’s part of the group. This is how we have it setup.
IANAL
Not in my bubble at least.
But also my 12 year old daughter is working on publishing her first iOS app on her own initiative. I’m sure they’ll do fine.
My family goes back to the 1830’s on one side, and the 1600’s on the other, so I’m pretty integrated. I don’t think any of that is really in the radar for people in my family. We are relatively well off middle class, and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins went to university. But not Yale, Harvard, or MIT. We didn’t do cram schools, but did band or soccer or theatre instead. Whatever our interests were.
Cram schools and intense stress related to academic achievement is more typical of recent immigrants, and/or particularly though not exclusively East Asian and South Asian families. When I sat for the SAT I was shocked that some of the people I sat next to had been attending study schools for months to prepare. Me and my friends just sat for it and took it cold, lol. There is a much stronger drive in that culture for academic achievement and living up to your parent’s expectations. In many-generational American families, not so much (not just white, but anyone whose family has been here for a while).
I really appreciate your anecdote, I felt like a lot of the students I went to school with had worked pretty hard (i.e. college prep, extracurriculars, way more than most Canadians at my high school, although I went to a public high school). But it makes sense if I had a biased sample!
Time for another, longer anecdote. One of our friends from college, another Chinese heritage guy of Singapore & Taiwan descent, had a rather stressful upbringing with a lot of parent pressure. He's was an electrical engineer at Xilinx at the time, but he didn't have any say in it. His dad was an EE, and damn it every one of his kids was going to be an EE too. They all went through engineering school. The "Tiger Mom" book had just come out, and out friend was ranting about it with his cube mate at work, talking about how messed up it was that they (both Chinese) had to deal with this pressure, but most of the rest of the kids out there don't. How it's apparently so uncommon in America that this lady is getting speaking tours to explain what everyone in East Asian communities take for granted. How American kids won't put up with this shit.
What happened next I wouldn't believe, except I saw the later emails and pictures. My friend's cube mate, who was in his late 20's and he'd known for a couple of years, just gets up and walks out. They never see him in person again. He just ghosted the company, bought the cheapest plane ticket to anywhere, and started backpacking around the world. About six months later they got email replies from him in South East Asia, where he'd been living in a temple for a month to learn Yoga or something. Apparently he never wanted to be an engineer, hated engineering, had no idea what he really wanted to do, and outside of his job at Xilinx he just stayed at home, alone, depressed, and hating his life, but feeling obligated to keep it all up to make his parents proud.
When I heard this story (and saw his pictures from Thailand), I just felt sorry for the kid. And he was a kid, even if he was in his late 20's at the time. Because he never had a chance to figure out who he was, what he wanted, or to choose for himself. He did work it out in the end, but only after accumulating tons of student debt, setting up all sorts of expectations from his family, and wasting away most of his youth. Everything was setup for him, and he utterly lacked agency, like a child. Most of us spend our teens and early twenties trying new things and figuring out who we are. He didn't even get to start that until he was almost 30.
I do not want that for my kids. Money helps, but it not sufficient to make one happy. Far more important is how you treat and value yourself, your confidence and self-assurance, and the company you keep. I spend far more time worrying about whether my kids are fitting in at their new school, whether they're making friends or being bullied, or whether they got an invitation to that upcoming party their friends are talking about, than I do worrying over their math scores or standardized tests. And most of our peer group feel similarly.
My daughter is 3yo so a bit early ^^, but 2 years ago I bought my nephew (then 8, loves to tinker) a Pi 400 plus a couple of kid-oriented introductory programming books (about Scratch and Python, very nicely done I must say, I reviewed them beforehand). Of course he started with playing Minecraft Pi but an hour after he was moving a cat around in Scratch.
Now I heard he's tinkering with Python. Pretty sure the GPIO is going to get some heavy use down the road, bridging the digital world to the physical one (where he tinkers with mechanical and electric stuff already).
There was zero pushing nor action on my part (except showing him how to operate the mouse), I literally just handed him the device and books over, he plugged it in and went exploring his merry way. Curiosity is a powerful engine.
That's all she needed, really. She graduated from that to Swift Playgrounds on my iPad, then once she had some understanding of Swift and programming in general she was solving problems on replit. Not sure yet how she'll jump the gap to making actual apps, but that's her goal and she's trying. She doesn't have to do it alone though; I'll help out as needed.
We limited it to coloring apps until they have an opinion at which point it will be a game and followed by whatever game their friends are playing (we haven't opened up multiplayer, they are still just playing individually then bragging about it to each other at school. It's a small glimpse into my NES days, except I was a bit older.)
Either way, ours get about 10 minutes a week but that's up from 'only on airplanes and in airports' last year
The whole time I was think "this thing can predict the future" cause I could see sharp turns and straight roads before hand. Simpler times...
I’d miss each of them if I couldn’t access them and had to switch to an alternative
That said, I’ve been gradually losing trust in Google storage services so I’m searching for alternatives (and not finding anything remotely as good unfortunately).
Key features I live by * search by ocr, object, location, face * multi-platform sync * originals storage * auto-face match * duplicate detection
I'm not sure if this is related to having a YouTube family subscription but it worked seamlessly for us.
If you decide to go with it, i recommend that you get a domain and set it up as a DDNS through cloudflare.
Especially when the option is just for them to pay $10 or something to a huge company that'll have pretty much 100% uptime and zero chance of lost files.
I have the same setup as the person you're commenting to, initial setup was easy. Just test out your backup strategy thoroughly.
If it was a matter of "just" not fucking around and "just testing out the strategy", everyone would just resell B2/S3 capacity with a markup.
Having the only copy of someone's family photos is not a responsibility I'm willing to have. YMMV though and more power to you if you want to do that.
Distant Plan b: phone -> google photos -> local backup. The problem here is that the only way to get your originals out of google photos is to use google takeout which is basically a dealbreaker here.
I don't trust Google Photos to be there for us in the long run. That said I have been paying for it and using it for years without a major gripe.
Please don't read this as me judging; if that works for you, great, I'd (as far as i understand it) not want that, but it's not my life.
For us, it’s a fun way to see what each other is up to. The reason our grown and out-of-the-house kids leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device.
Same.
> I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner
I (we) don't even do that, on purpose. If we want to know, we ask by message or call.
> The reason [...] leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device.
I agree, it's all about trust. In my mind it's exactly like being a mail server sysadmin: by design you have access to all the emails but you never read them out of ethics. In that spirit: we have location-based automations set up in Home Assistant, and by default there's a geocoded location entity per tracked device, which I disabled, relying only on zone enter/leave events, carefully balancing privacy and convenience.
Now, the use case about leaving it on at all times is:
a) If you turn it off there's a chance you forget to turn it on. That's also why the new iOS check-in feature, while nice, doesn't cut it.
b) The most trivial reason: my wife frequently misplaces her phone (and other things, which recently got airtagged).
c) My wife works in a bar; let's not kid ourselves, the nightlife way back home carries additional risk: e.g bars close at about the same time, which generates a flux of drunk people in the streets, who are more prone to do dangerously idiotic or hostile things (from driving under influence to downright assault). While not frequent incidents are not unlikely either: over the course of two years there has been about a dozen, a few were life threatening; luckily she managed to either avoid, defuse, or escape such situations, but one day she might not and end up being unable to actively alert. Once while riding her bike to work she was hit-and-run by a car, dumb luck had it so that she was still conscious. Similarly I do sports like skateboarding, if by happenstance an accident happen and I'm knocked unconscious or otherwise unable to alert I can be found.
Interestingly enough when one of us sent messages like "is everything alright?" the recipient got a prompt in Messages to try out the Check In feature.
Did you set up location based events in home assistant using iOS devices? I tried to set it up, but it always says that I’m at home, which I think is because I use WireGuard to remain connected to my home network at all times. I tried setting up a separate iCloud integration for location tracking, but it bothered me every hour about entering a 2 factor code. I ended up disabling that integration. Wondering if you have faced this issue and potentially solved it.
I tried a similar setup with Tailscale but it disconnects too frequently for such a use case due to iOS VPN limitations, and that's not even considering the fact that it's userland and eats the battery 30% faster when on. Maybe an IPSEC VPN would fare better?
Similarly the iCloud integration suffers from the 2FA issue. There's another third party one that works better in that regard (able to handle refresh tokens or whatever) but these still have a month long lifetime or something and still require 2FA occasionally. Also both are pull instead of push so not too nice on the battery if you want a prompt reaction in zone change.
So I'm simply on the good old public facing dns/https/nginx/letsencrypt, with the phone triggering an internal zone change event to the app, and then the app pushing to the server, and that just works. Maybe I could have used a Tailscale funnel but by then it was just easier for me that way.
Fun fact, I have IPv6 and HASS is self-hosted at home with the AAAA record pointing to it, but my IPv4 is behind CGNAT, so I have a small Hetzner ARM VM, pointed the A record to that, and set up a nginx to hit home over IPv6. To solve the Let's Encrypt conundrum of HTTP challenge not being able to know which machine it'd be pointing to (the name would be resolved to either A or AAAA) I migrated to DNS challenge.
An alternative would be to simply use their Nabucasa cloud thing which serves exactly that purpose, costs money but it makes it super easy, plus IIUC it funds HASS development. I tried it, it just works, but I wanted to do all of the above on Nix as a learning project.
On a small handful of occasions, someone’s been someplace completely unexpected, and we’ve asked them about it. “Hey, you’re in a nearby city. You ok?” “Oh, sorry! I forgot to tell you I’m going to the water park with Joe and Jane.” “Ok. Sounds fun! Have a good time!”
My wife being able to know where I am hasn’t changed my behavior one whit. I assume the reverse is true.
I've got location shared with my siblings and parents too, both ways. And my SO has a similar thing with their siblings and parents.
It's all about trust, people don't stalk or continuously check where others are. We mostly use it to see whether to bother someone with a longer FaceTime call or if they're coming over we use it to check their ETA.
I hope the trust we've built in the past 7 or so years of FM being enabled carries over to the teen years.
I also share location with some friends. I have one who is a professional photographer, and it's neat to see the interesting places she gets to go. Her mother also finds it comforting that I can find her if she's ever unresponsive for a long period of time. Another friend of mine was passing through my town, and saw I was home, so stopped by to visit. Unexpected and pleasant.
Your last point is key - it's totally fine to not want this feature, but it's nice for those of us who do. To each their own.
https://joplinapp.org and https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-box
AnyList lets us make shopping lists easily, add items as they run low (with previous items available to us, and check them off as we shop. There are some more sophisticated features we don't use like recipe imports and meal planning.
We also have lists for eg the hardware store, which notify us when we are nearby. And I use it for eg making packing lists for overnight trips.
Audio transcription with auto summarization. Saves me tons of time and edfort.
I purchased foldersync for android to copy nightly photos off the phones to our nas to \name\yyyymm\ to backup our photos without relying on 3rd party sync. Solves the issue of losing videos/photos if a phone breaks. http://photos/ can browse them with photoview.
For me free software is more valuable: keepass, seafile, and paperlessngx with a printer that scans to it with a button and a scan@mydomain.tld has made a huge difference particularly to be paperless and has WAF.
I purchased an airgradient indoor + outdoor after multiple plugs here and it is helpful for deciding if we should open windows as sensitive to forest fire smoke so it also counts. (I will say it had damage when it arrived and it's been annoying having to reach out a couple times to see if it can be replaced.)
Finally, I recently added lunchmoney.app for finances but time will tell if it is more than a novelty.
I really like Superhuman and Obsidian as well. I used to use notion, but I find obsidian to just work a lot faster and be more free form.
I pay for the Chatgpt subscription and we love it. Grammarly is pretty good but my wife mostly uses it.
Youtube Premium for no commercials is also really awesome.
On the other hand Notion makes it super easy for me to share a set of stuff with my family, like recipes or travel plans
On the other hand Obsidian's markdown-formatting is more for me
$KID1@domain.com, $PET2@domain.com, $HOUSE1@domain.com, etc.
I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking.
Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains from results in one click - a refreshing experience. The AI quick answer is on par with Bing's (more accurate than Google's), but the best feature is the possibility of banning/re-ranking websites (such as those SEO-spam ones).
This feature is probably the one any family member will find useful: prioritising websites they like the most and blocking/down-ranking those they dislike. For example, I hate Pinterest and have banned it. My girlfriend, on the other hand, loves it and gave a better ranking. Guess that's what customisation is for...
The lenses are probably also family-worthy, since you can quickly create personalised results pages for good sources for homework research, safe online games for children, trustworthy news for your grandma, etc. But I've never used it extensively yet.
There's also some minor features (auto-login link for anonymous tabs, bangs, news, etc) that you pretty much expect from a search engine nowadays, too. IMO, the most complete and efficient search engine I've used so far.
I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as my default in the browser.
Maybe I'll give it another go in a few months, but for now it's not for me.
I will give it another try in the future and hope my experience is different. I do like the company and the vision behind it.
In either case I need to re-search, but at least I didn't contribute to adtech and have some control over the results.