Paying parking tickets in SF. Input my license number and CC info and it would detect and pay parking tickets that came up. There is a CAPTCHA which was trivially solvable with Tessaract OCR.
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
301–310 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#302I 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…
This is cool. I wonder how effective it is though these days, I'd say 70% of my RSS feeds are either truncated forms of a full article (with a 'click here to continue reading!' link), or just summaries.
This is why I gave up on RSS. I wanted to read content quickly without having to navigate to a website.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#303Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...
Just downloaded your extension, it looks great! What does the stack look like for this product? I'd love to hear how you went about building this extension.
google extensions are basically all javascript :p and the styling is from https://semantic-ui.com/
backend is node
planning to make a simple mobile app so i can save stuff from my phone too.
i can do a more detailed writeup later on!
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#304The grocery chain I shop at has a component of their loyalty card that lets you add certain coupons to your card and they change constantly. All told there may be a few hundred of items offered up daily, most of which I don't buy anyhow. So instead of wasting my time sifting through them to save $10 a month I just wrote a script to add all of them to my card every day at the same time. So long as I go shopping after…
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Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#305I 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...
You could charge for this if you expanded it out to other areas and websites. Might have to work with the data providers to ensure you're not breaking their TOS by scraping their websites, though.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#306I track my visits to the gym with a geofence trigger with my phone--logs to a google spreadsheet through IFTTT.
This I would love to reproduce. How?
IFTT mobile app > create recipe > set trigger "You enter an area" > Then "Add row to spreadsheet"
You have to do two "applets" though, one for entering and one for leaving, but you might be able to log to the same file
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#307I 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…
I used to use Youcast (https://github.com/I3arnon/YouCast), which allows Youtube channel or playlist to be consumed as Podcast. I used it with my iPhone podcast app to watch and listen to my favorite Youtube channels when I was off the internet.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm truly amazed that this has been going for over a year now and the internet hasn't murdered it
Some have tried, but it would take some coordinated effort over several weeks at this point to over or underwater the plant. I've found that the folks who consistently vote take it relatively seriously to the point they have discussions about optimal schedules and for the most part stick to them.
I'm glad that these people exist but on the other hand It's hard to imagine what they do in everyday life that this topic is so interesting to them, that they want to feel this responsibility for the plant.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#309I used Python to automate generating a chronological email/sms/phone contact archive when a home renovation project went wrong. My builder made a bunch of mistakes, tried to fob me off with excuses, and then pretended everything was ok. This integrated log was invaluable in showing discrepancies between what he said at the time and what he subsequently claimed.
My Python script reads my Google Contacts csv extract to identify relevant people, the lxml library parses my mobile phone call and sms logs, the mailbox module reads my email inbox and Sent Items to extract relevant messages, PIL resizes attached images. Then I use docx to reassemble the results chronologically into a Word document suitable for submitting in court proceedings.
The resulting Word document is an intimidating 130 pages long. I have shown my builder enough excerpts for him to accept liability for most defects. I won a County Court judgment against him last week. Now for the financial settlement!
I thought about putting my script up on github, though haven't had time to scrub some personal information from the source code...
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#3101) I've built a WordPress site to archive and backup my tweets https://tweets.kingkool68.com it fetches new tweets every 15 minutes. Source code at https://github.com/kingkool68/wordpress-twitter-backerupper
2) Whenever I post to Instagram I have a script that automatically posts it to Twitter including the image directly in the tweet like this https://twitter.com/kingkool68/status/916853781911838721
Source code https://github.com/kingkool68/ig2twitter