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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?

#311

Post by kobeya »

riku_iki wrote: post #271
aoeuasdf1 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be able to use https://opentimestamps.org/ to provide evidence over time (i.e. proving it wasn't fabricated all at once). Still, that doesn't prove that the individual points weren't fabricated at the time.

Another question is if this will be admissible in the court.

There isn't a blanket reason why it wouldn't be. In a particular case it's up to the judge, and the judge's decision probably depends on the quality of the experts that can be found to explain it.

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

#312

Post by sleighboy »

aperrien wrote: post #282
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safeway does the whole digital coupon thing. It’s too much of a hassle to be worthwhile but this could help. Not sure it’s worth the effort of writing the script myself though. Do you mind open sourcing it?

I wrote a database and interface once that would automatically catalog and run the Safeway Monopoly game, all I had to to was scan in the pieces with an app on my phone. It worked well, but demonstrated just how bad my luck was, after 614 tickets gathered, I won exactly 0 items. :/

Planning on using OpenCV to look for the "rare" items on the next go-round and not have to actually scan over all the game pieces manually. The most I can expect is to have some fun writing the code because I'm quite unlikely to win any cash or prizes.

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

#313

Post by crazysim »

justboxing wrote: post #239
rrggrr wrote: post #230

1. My former spouse wouldn't answer the home phone when I talked with the kids during the divorce. I wrote an app that texted her and logged the attempt for reporting to the guardian ad litem. 2. She also wouldn't answer the door when during kids pick-up. The same app texted her when I was outside. 3. To disprove her allegations I wasn't involved in the kids school and activities I used Android's Locale app to trigge…

This is awesome. You should turn this into a sevice or App -- call it DivorceBot or CustodyBot or FatherTime ? Considering that close to a MILLION Americans get divorced every year, at a 50% rate i.e. half of marriages are ending up in divorce in the US. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm

I saw on a reddit discussion that this has already become a service some courts use. I can't remember the name and it might not have been even mentioned ("PM me") but it exists already.

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

#314

Post by Jemmeh »

IgorPartola wrote: post #237

Does anyone have a script for integrating with Facebook and grabbing whose birthdays are today? I'd really like to automate it, but this info isn't available via the Graph API, so I kind of gave up on this, but if someone else has done this, I'd love to take a look.

You can export your friends birthdays to a calendar from the bottom right of the Events page, if that's what you're looking for. It stays updated from there.

https://www.facebook.com/events/

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

#315

Post by anotherevan »

Wrote a program that tracks Australian movie release dates for movies I'm interested in. Sends a daily email if a release date moves, or there a new movies for me to flag my interest in.

Interfaces with themoviedb.org for plot summary, cast and crew info and such. Interfaces with Google Calendar for writing entries for each movie I'm tracking.

Source is available at https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule

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

#317

Post by anotherevan »

I have an ultrasonic sensor on top of my monitor to tell the computer when I'm in front of it or not. If music is playing when I walk away from my computer, it pauses the music player. When I return, it starts playing again. It will also wake the monitors from power saving mode when I return, too.

https://www.michevan.id.au/content/are-you-there/

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

#318

Post by triplenineteen »

mrguyorama wrote: post #134
hacker_9 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

If authentication is cookie-based, you can use a Session object in python requests: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/advanced/#ses....

If it uses http basic auth, it's even easier: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/authenticatio...

Requests is a fantastic library.

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

#319

Post by anonu »

I setup a "photobooth": A couple Canon Selphy printers, a dual-homed wireless RaspberyPi and wrote a Python script that polls a gmail account for a jpeg attachment and round robins it to the printers using CUPS. The script also has gchat support to send the server commands (like blocking your friends' email addresses if they figure out how to spam you) and receive print alerts.

Attaching a picture to an email, hitting send and getting a nice glossy a minute later is pretty cool. Somehow feels a bit more automated and seamless than the usual printing process.

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

#320

Post by lanius »

athenot wrote: post #224

About 10 years ago I was in the market for a used Toyota Camry, so I wrote a script that scraped the used car classified and extracted models within a 4 year range and within price & mileage caps. This got plotted out into 4 overlaid point series, producing graphs that roughly looked like 1/x, roughly 2-300 datapoints total. With that in hand I went to dealer offering the best match, told them which car I wanted and…

Very useful! I'd love to get a copy of this script if it still exists.
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