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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?

#511

Post by zulln »

artpi wrote: post #125
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…

I just realized that [7] probably works only because of [8] - I always give my Twilio phone number to people and pretend with my family that this is my main number.

That is why he mentioned "verified phone number" I guess. When you have verified your own phone number you can send texts from it as well.

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

#512

Post by kakarot »

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…

I'm currently in the process of doing the exact same thing with my ttrss instance. I am using lxml. I wanted to create "pages" of comics sort of like the funnies, instead of just one big feed, since ttrss can do that already. Would you mind if I looked over your scripts? I'd love to see what your solution was.

I'm also developing something similar to your news scraper but with different end goals. I'd love to talk with you about your approaches in that domain as well.

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

#513

Post by tuyguntn »

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…

For everyone who wants to get #7, I have created a mailing list to build this as a service.

http://wishsms.launchrock.com/

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

#515

Post by worldsayshi »

t1o5 wrote: post #480
mandeepj wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats. It is for sure a life changing hack. Not sure why you choose to do diff? You could have just searched the dom for the existence of 'Apply' button? Am i missing something?

Frankly, I didn't think much. Just wrote this script in an impulse of a moment when I missed a slot. During that time, I didn't think about how it was done, but the end result. Sure diff would have triggered false positives, luckily didn't get any.

Perhaps you didn't know how the button was supposed to look like? Seems like it's better to get false positives than to miss it.

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

#516

Post by jcun4128 »

richev wrote: post #381
t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

https://visualping.io/ can do this, although it sends email alerts rather than SMS messages. I used it to notify me of new Hololens events, listed on this page https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebI...

How do you deal with the legality of scraping?

I was hired to scrape some economic related pages and build an excel file and email it, I got that done but not sure if I should try to host this and turn it into a service or just set it up for the client and let them deal with it. It's just personal use on their part.

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

#518

Post by jcun4128 »

godelmachine wrote: post #424
t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

Could you please upload your code on GitHub? May I ask your github profile?

You could write this with simpledomhtlm + php + cron or a raspberry pi (cron) and then send yourself a webhook notification via slack or configure mailgun (mailing client) or firebase android notification (haven't done this).

Inspect the page,find the structure, isolate or if it is easier to just dump the entire plaintext and use strpos to find a specific word.

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

#519

Post by charlieegan3 »

kingkool68 wrote: post #310

1) 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 http…

This should be possible with IFTTT too.

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

#520

Post by jiri »

dpcan wrote: post #458

Does it count if it doesn't FEEEEL like work??? I started an escape room business for fun, and have been enjoying the heck out of writing custom software for the rooms. Both in-room and for administration. My favorite is a javascript "OS" that I use to put imaginary windowed environments in the room, but the players never actually leave a full-screen browser. It does full window management and all the regular UI stuf…

this definitely count, and it doesnt feel like work for me too :)
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