Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations

lukeprog

I have often benefited from recommendations for Things I Didn't Know I Wanted.

Given that Less Wrong is a community of unusually intelligent, critical, and self-improvement-focused people, I suspect we can generate a pretty helpful thread of product recommendations — perhaps even a monthly thread of product recommendations.

Rules:

Post one product your recommend per comment, so they can be discussed and voted on independently.
Provide a link for purchasing the product.
No books, movies, TV, games, or music. (These should go in other threads, like this one or this one.)

I'll post my own recommendations to the comments section, too.

I have often benefited from recommendations for Things I Didn't Know I Wanted.

Rules:

Post one product your recommend per comment, so they can be discussed and voted on independently.
Provide a link for purchasing the product.
No books, movies, TV, games, or music. (These should go in other threads, like this one or this one.)

I'll post my own recommendations to the comments section, too.

Tasker (Android app)

Lets you automate many activities on an Android phone. You define a context based on various conditions (e.g. connected to a Wifi network, using certain cell towers, phone spatially oriented a certain way) and various actions to perform upon entering and exiting that context. You can set variables and condition upon them, there is flow control for actions, customisable home screen widgets and shortcuts, and many other neat functions.

Some examples of tasks I use / am pondering:

When my phone is on any of the cell towers around my house, it switches the wifi on (to connect to my home network)
When the phone connects to my home network, it sends a magic packet to my PC and turns it on - but only if I am getting home at a time when I'm likely to want to use the PC (varies depending on day). But it only does this if it has been disconnected for at least half an hour (in case the connection drops out momentarily overnight)
When my phone disconnects from my car's Bluetooth hands free kit, it waits two minutes and then switches the Bluetooth antenna off.
When my phone is connected to its charger and turned face-down overnight (how I leave it next to my bed), it engages silent mode until 08:30am
A toggle button on my home screens, that switches my phone to silent and turns network-level call forwarding on (for when I am at work/movies/etc)

There's a wiki with lots of downloadable setups you can experiment with for neat results.

I've got tasker, but haven't successfully set it up to do anything. I find all of the layers of menus and terminology confusing and wonder why there isn't a configuration file I can edit by hand.

1[anonymous]14y

I haven't tried Tasker, but I used Llama for this same purpose, with excellent results. Here's a comparison of the two apps. As of July, 2012 both apps have the same rating on Google Play (4.7 stars).

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