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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?

#571

Post by Debonnys »

sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

I did something similar, my gf wanted me text her that I got home safely after I left her place. So I automated it that when I disconnected to her WiFi and within a certain time reconnected to mine it would text her. She noticed it when she drove me back home once and still got the text.

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

#572

Post by mschaef »

teacpde wrote: post #491
sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

I have thought about doing this so many times, and yet dare to make the move. It will be fun at first but not so much after she finds out.

Yeah... one day her cat dies, and she gets the automated text you forgot to stop: "Hey babe... hope you're having a great day! xoxo"

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

#573

Post by joho68 »

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...

So bounce your (unique) e-mail to an SMS-forwarder :)

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

#574

Post by patrickdavey »

Lots, my two favorites are:

1. Automating my raspberry pi to create a timelapse and upload it to youtube and update a simple Ember app [1].

2. Automating (using Tasker, mentioned here already) the alerting function on a motion detector for the raspberry pi (so if I'm home it does nothing, else sends me the picture via telegram)

[1]. http://timelapses.psdavey.com

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

#575

Post by mijoharas »

learn_more wrote: post #379
kingkool68 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best life hacks I found is to buy those stackable laundry baskets and sort them as you wear them instead of dumping them all in one and sorting right before doing laundry.

I've been doing the same thing for years. I have two bins each for socks, underwear, and t-shirts. when the dirty one fills, I wash it then dump into the respective clean one. The trick is to buy a full loads worth of socks, and a full loads worth of underwear which is probably an unusually large amount for most people. Throw hardware at the problem!

I do this with the small things that I need to buy, keep one roll of toothpaste (or whatever) that is being used, another in a cupboard. As soon as you take one out of the cupboard, buy new one to put in the cupboard.

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

#576

Post by viperscape »

unixhero wrote: post #523

Turning on and off the bedroom heater in 1 hour intervals during the night. Also It begins warming up the bedroom at 9pm and shuts off at 0830am. I use TP-LINK HS110 which uses wifi. Super nifty. I can control it remotely also with and app, and by sending packets to it over my local Ethernet.

Have a link to the packet thing?

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

#577

Post by mijoharas »

wynnvonn wrote: post #212

Dodging the f *ing lightning in the desert area of FFX. I spent hours in that section as a kid, never managing to dodge more than 20 bolts in a row... When it came out for PC, it was time for revenge! I captured video input with a simple python+QT script and emitted a button-press whenever the screen flashed. The best part was that the script didn't interfere with my controller - I could run around the area opening c…

I did the same thing!

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

#578

Post by j_s »

mintplant wrote: post #329
djhworld wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what the scraper scripts are for. For each site that does this, I have a bit of code which visits the article URL and pulls out the full content.

This is re-implemented by so many. (HN user megous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170 Dec 2016.) It would be nice to find a way to share this work, but the variety of tools used often make the customizations too custom (or maybe this is just the most common reason why creators feel there is no reason to share?).

Is anyone aware of any repositories where the customization required to obtain the important content is maintained by a community?

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

#579

Post by j_s »

inetknght wrote: post #358
stevesimmons wrote: post #309

I 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…

I use Google Voice and have often wanted pretty much the same thing. If you could integrate that into an application (Google Contacts integrated message history with Email/SMS/Phone/GV message history) that I could run on my own device, I would pay money for that. I would only be interested if I could run it on my own though, eg specifically not as a third party service; privacy issues.

SMS Backup+ for Android can put all texts into your GMail archive (and calls into Google Calendar), knocking out one dependency there.

https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus/

It's actually one of the first apps I always install after I discovered the hard way that Android used to delete corrupted SQLite databases and I lost the SMS DB on my phone.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7764943/what-can-be-done...

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

#580

Post by flatfilefan »

Debonnys wrote: post #571
sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

I did something similar, my gf wanted me text her that I got home safely after I left her place. So I automated it that when I disconnected to her WiFi and within a certain time reconnected to mine it would text her. She noticed it when she drove me back home once and still got the text.

Was a fair game still. You were safe at home.
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