making animated gifs
https://github.com/ransomw/dotfiles/blob/master/shutils/gifm...
... and some other stuff, but that's probably the most important.
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
131–140 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#132Since Google Reader died and RSS has been slowly dying I wrote a simple scraper thing which sends me emails of new stuff. Eg. I also used it to buy a refurb'd Macbook, it notified me when Apple posted a new one and allowed me to buy it quickly (they only post a couple a day and they go quickly).
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#133I recently made a bot that scapes the local apartment listings every five minutes, filters by price and area, and then sends me the new ones in the form of Telegram messages with the basic details, a GIF of the photos (scaled to mobile size), and a map widget. Getting push notifications with the new apartments is really great, and I'll definitely be making more Telegram bots in the future...
mind sharing any more detail? heard of someone doing this before, but just started searching for a new place
My top-level post covers a similar approach to this.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#134I had three fun ones. I wanted to learn powershell, and I was interested in the history of worms on the internet, so I made a script to check https://isc.sans.edu/ and send me an email if the status was not green. Turns out, powershell has an all-in-one function to send an SMTP email, which I thought was hilarious. I used windows task scheduler to run it every hour. Second, I was struggling with my Cable internet con…
> I now have a big old dataset of SpeedTests and unix timestamps which I graphed This peaked my interest, as my connection is also crappy. Did you actually manage to make improvements with this data though?
I managed to confirm that my perceived changes in connection quality were ACTUAL changes in connection quality. I never took the time to do anything better with it though, but it does show that My provider seems to have done SOMETHING, as the speed floor has moved up, and significant events (sometimes as slow as dialup) became significantly rarer. It's also fun because it allows you to get a rough idea of how over provisioned the line is, as you can see day/night cycles.
My cable modem provides a status page with info about signal to noise ratio and other stats. I planned on adding more details to the script by scrapping from that page, but it requires a login first and I've never taken the time to learn how to manage that kind of state, as I do most scripty/webby things with raw requests from python's urllib.request module, like a plebian.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#135Taking barometric readings, recording and graphing them: https://sdfjkl.org/blog/2017-08-09-nanobaro/
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#136I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscrip…
Wouldn't happen to have this on Github would you?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one thing I love about Vimperator: its macro system. If you can do the steps using the keyboard, you can just start recording and do it once. Next time a simple key combo will repeat your steps. I've automated logging in to public Wifi networks and filling in many forms with it.
but you still need to open the url in the browser right? which is way slower
I always have my browser open; loading the URL in a new tab (and closing it after) is done by the macro too. So not really :)
I guess it could be slower if the site has many large resources (CSS, images, etc) that a script would not download. But since I do it regularly, most of it is cached anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#138Laundry. Just put your dirty clothes into a plastic bag and take them to dry cleaners. Pick up washed and ironed the next day. A huge time savings well worth the cost of service. Also no need to own washing machine, dryer, ironing board etc. EDIT: Now that I think about it, this was a bad example of automation. Please don’t downvote me!
It IS a useful exercise to rope that in as automation. Just because a human is playing the part of the levers and pullies or some black box doesn't mean the underlying control system isn't interesting or worth examining in the context of automation.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#139In college everyone's class registration would open at once, and classes would fill up quickly. Some people would even register for more than they were gonna take, to hold it for friends or just to figure their schedule out. If I didn't get into a class I wanted, I had a HTTPS script set to attempt registering for it every 5 minutes. As soon as somebody dropped it - boom it was mine.
I did something super similar: In order to graduate on time I had to take an accelerated Spanish course (hard requirement despite years of Spanish in grade school and high school). Problem: The class had a pre-requisite that I hadn't taken yet. Solution: The Uni's registration system allowed for a 4 digit numeric code to be entered to bypass registration restrictions. I wrote a script to brute force that code, regist…
ballsy!
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#140I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscrip…
Which youtube channels are you referring to? The weather is getting nicer and my walks are getting longer, would appreciate having something great to listen to (versus an audio version of a textbook).