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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?

#591

Post by marvinpinto »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #554
marvinpinto wrote: post #45

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

I've been working on my own classifier for updating my ledger because I struggled too much trying to get other people's stuff to work. I'm getting about ~90% accuracy using a SVM from scikit-learn, but it can only ever be semi-automated. My plan is that every month I'll go through my various accounts and help to update my ledger. One thing that I don't think other software does is automatically remove the duplication…

I handle transfers between accounts manually - as in when I see duplicates show up, I remove one of them. A neat thing that ledger-reconciler does is to print the balance (as listed on the banking website) for each account. That information combined with Ledger's balance report tells me immediately whether something is off and if investigation is needed.

This in itself has saved me so much time that I can deal with manually editing the occassional duplicate entry (internal account transfers). I also keep all my ledger data in git so it's very easy to see what has changed, etc.

Have you looked at the reckon gem[0] for auto-classification? That is basically what this program uses.

[0]: https://github.com/cantino/reckon

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

#592

Post by ClayM »

~10 years ago I wanted to be able to take advantage of watching video on this newfangled iPhone thing, but most content was not yet readily available or purchasable in a format that could be played - specifically I wanted to watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report.

I had a chain of apps and scripts which would watch for a forum torrents of those, download them, use handbrake to convert them, add them to my iTunes library, then generate new .torrent files and post the mobile friendly versions back to the forum (gotta keep that ratio up).

Things are much easier and less legally sketchy nowadays :)

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

#593

Post by tfolbrecht »

gitgud wrote: post #469
tfolbrecht wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newegg Business, Davinci XYZ jr 1.0 There's DRM on the filament and it's PLA only, but you can buy the key to unlock and rewrite the DRM NFC chip. I use an app on my phone to rewrite the values

DRM on the filament, so you need to buy their filament? How does that work?

The inside of the roll has an NFC chip in it. The NFC has information on color, amount of filament left, temperature settings etc.

I call it DRM because you can't edit it without a reverse engineered NFC key.

Another side to the DRM thing is that if you use inferior input material and the printer has a quality issue, customers are going to blame the printer and not the filament.

Value added DRM I guess

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

#594

Post by ProZsolt »

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.

I had, but ~2 years ago they took out that feature from the graph api :( It sent out bday wishes to my friends automagically.

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

#595

Post by systemtest »

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.

But what if the murderer took your phone and drove past your home?

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

#596

Post by Klathmon »

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.

I did the same thing, only at the time I had a wireless charger, so it was setup on my phone to send the text when it was after 8PM and I put my phone on the charger.

One night she stayed over, set the phone down, got the text, and thought it was hilarious and said she did think it was weird that I said the exact same thing every night.

The next day I updated it to pick from one of 10 different text messages!

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

#597

Post by Tepix »

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…

Did something similar to check availability of a special deal by my ISP.

No need to write code, you only need a shell account on a box somewhere. Put a line like this in your crontab:

    20 9,12,15,18,21 * * * curl -s http://example.com/special-deal-page | grep 'something that needs to appear on the page' | mailx -E -s "it's happening!1!" $MAILTO
This will check every three hours during daytime (which is what I wanted). "mailx -E" will only send an email if the input is not empty. Don't forget to define MAILTO and to test the contraption.

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

#599

Post by protomyth »

The family isn’t much for gambling, but we do have a set of Powerball numbers we play each week. So, I wrote a Perl program to download the winner list each week and check if we have a winner. It has been my go to project in each new language I learn. It’s pretty simple but tests a bit of the language (http, I/O) and helps me get in the mindset of the language (e.g. set comparisons vary wildly).

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

#600

Post by t1o5 »

briandear wrote: post #585
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…

To be clear, H1B isn’t an immigrant visa. It’s a temporary skilled worker visa. There are other visas designed for skilled immigrants. Someone on an H1B isn’t an immigrant so of course the system would be “broken” when expecting H1B to result in a green card. It’s no different than expecting a tourist visa to be the first step to getting a residency visa. H1B was never implemented as a pathway to permanent residency.…

Thats wrong information. H1B is a “dual intent” visa.

Its broken because it was really intended for exceptionally skilled workers. But currently its a lottery. USCIS just takes the word of the company applying for it and grants the visa. This loophole is being exploited by numerous body shops. That is reason why there are low quality H1B workers. There are various other problems like employee mobility, spouses of H1B is not free to work in the land of the free. Country of birth based quotas for permanent residency, rather than skills or points based quotas.

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