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Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

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Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#181

Post by wongarsu »

durango wrote: post #140
mintplant wrote: post #96

I 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).

Not OP, but some channels I would recommend that work as audio-only: (mostly science or thought-provoking)

CaspianReport

CrashCourse

ExtraCredits

Innuendo Studios

Kurzgesagt

SciShow (and the sub-channels: SciShow Space and SciShow Psych)

PBS Idea Channel (no new videos, but old content is good)

vlogbrothers

Wendover Productions

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#184

Post by pmiller2 »

tylerjaywood wrote: post #141

I have a house plant that is watered automatically, but not based on any pre-determined schedule. I have the plant's livestream and its moisture level available publicly on pleasetakecareofmyplant.com and the decision to water is crowd sourced on reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant by way of a daily vote.

Do you have limits to prevent over or under watering?

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#186

Post by icebraining »

agwa wrote: post #174
artpi wrote: post #102

I have set up a battery of scripts on google app engine and Im pretty happy with it. 1. I have a script to automatically buy small amount of BTC every day 2. For the more knowledge-dense books I read, I write summaries of them ( https://piszek.com/books/ ). I have a script that puts a random book review to my pocket for reviewing every week 3. I have an instagram account of lego minifig ( https://www.instagram.com/le…

Are you able to preserve the original caller ID when forwarding SMS?

Twillio has to validate the number before allowing you to use it: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223179848-Using...

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#187

Post by kakwa_ »

hellothere007 wrote: post #5

I had a cron job that sends automatically a text to my wife each morning along with a joke, she's in another country so is something I did to keep the communication open

Reminds me of the day when, while helping debugging stuff on my father's old Solaris server, I came across a email_birthday.sh script run by a cronjob every year at my mother's birthday.

They are happily married for more than 40 years and counting ^^.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#188

Post by lstamour »

strange_quark wrote: post #81
jdlyga wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bank do you use that has this feature?

Not OP, but Chase can email and send push notifications for any purchase if you set the threshold to $0.

I can't believe I never thought of this one. If real-time enough, that sounds like a very useful feature for accounting purposes. You could turn the email into a phone push notification asking you to classify the transaction as business or personal, for example.

That said, does it take negative numbers? Or how would it handle refunds/returns?

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#189

Post by jldugger »

maxyme wrote: post #175
santaclaus wrote: post #86

In college I wrote a script to register for classes. I'd input the potentially-full classes I'd like to register for, and it would just hammer the registration site repeatedly until someone removed themselves from the class at which point I'd be registered. I'm still amazed IT didn't pull the network connection to my dorm room or have any kind of rate limiting. No 8am sessions for me!

I do this currently. I'm surprised our course catalog doesn't ban IPs that hit it every 30 seconds or so.

1 req every 30 seconds is more or less invisible, and universities have comparatively small customer bases. If everyone was doing it, there might be a problem.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#190

Post by marvinpinto »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #183
marvinpinto wrote: post #45

I automated downloading and reconciling my financials from all my bank accounts. https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler

Holy cow, I've been looking for this but for the US. Anybody know of any?

If you're up for it, you can add your own bank/creditcard company/whatever as a plugin to it - I think the examples there are decent. I could also help if need be!
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