School Email Daily Digest

We have two kids in two different schools right now, and the one thing both schools have in common is that they LOVE to send emails to the parents. Some days, I legitimately get 5-6 emails from each of these schools, and it’s just too much.

It clutters up my inbox and my head, and honestly, this volume of school email has the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of reading them all and staying informed, I feel overwhelmed, so I delete them all and read none of them.

Which led me to a simple idea. I wanted to use Google Gemini to clean up this mess and provide me with the just the core information I needed in a daily digest at the end of each day.

So I made this little “School Email Digest” tool, which you can find here.

This is what it does.

1. Uses Gmail’s simple filtering and labeling system to identify all incoming emails from the kids’ schools automatically.

2. These emails are immediately archived, so they never even show up in my inbox.

3. At 5pm each evening, Gemini uses AI to find and summarize the school emails from the day, and puts a simple digest in my inbox with just the basic gist that I need to know.

4. In the digest, there is a link to the original email if I want to click over to see the full context.

So many school emails 😵‍💫📧

This may sound technically complicated (API Keys! Google Scripts! GitHub!), but I promise it’s pretty simple. If you can click buttons and follow basic directions, it’s actually quite easy to set this up.

Printed Instapaper Magazine

A while ago, I had a somewhat counterintuitive idea: I wanted to take all my saved digital articles from my ‘read later’ queue and print them out as a physical magazine.

I experimented with various Zapier-based and other simple tools to achieve this, but none were particularly effective. I finally turned to ChatGPT to help me write a script that would make this a reality.

The code works with Instapaper and is available here if you'd like to try it out.

Raspberry Pi “Fart Detector”

My 8-year-old son and I were talking about building things with code, and when I asked what he’d want to make, he (predictably) suggested that we make a “fart detector”.

So we grabbed a wireless Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB microphone and put something together.

Since this only detects sound in general and can’t really distinguish any old sound from a proper fart sound, it’s an imperfect device. But he loved it.

Swedish Idiom Injector for Gmail

I took the Swedish Idiom Generator that I created and turned it into a Google Chrome plugin that inserts these absurdist phrases into your Gmail copy.

AI Swedish Idiom Generator

At EF, I have the pleasure of working with many lovely Swedes, and I'm always taken by their quirky (and often unbelievable-sounding) idioms.

It made me think that it'd be fun to create a totally silly little experiment to generate fake (but plausible enough...) Swedish idioms using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

You can see it in action here.

“Put on your shoes” - an Alexa skill

98% of parenting is telling your kids to put their shoes on over and over. I created an Alexa skill that just repeats “put on your shoes” incessantly until the kids listen. Surprisingly effective.