Scraping state lottery website to determine if the daily lottery jackpot amount for a particular game is greater than my threshold to care enough to consider purchasing a single ticket and sending me a text message in the morning if it is.
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
61–70 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#62I automated complaining once a month to the local water utility about a persistent puddle in the street in front of my home, caused by a leak.
Ohh someone should do this for the pot holes in the Bay Area.
You could do what one guy did and start spray-painting penises around the pot holes.
(slightly NSFW) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/27/artist-penis-potho...
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#63Expense tracking. My bank sends me one email every time my card is used. - Using the Google Places API I find the related establishment (gives me name, address, phone number, etc) - Using the Gmail API I look for a receipt email (if any) by looking for another email with the same dollar amount and the same date So at any given time I can see all the purchases/payments I've done with rich information about where and e…
What bank do you use that has this feature?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#64Scraping state lottery website to determine if the daily lottery jackpot amount for a particular game is greater than my threshold to care enough to consider purchasing a single ticket and sending me a text message in the morning if it is.
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Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#65I had a cron job that sends automatically a text to my wife each morning along with a joke, she's in another country so is something I did to keep the communication open
This sounds terrible. Even more terrible a lot of people (probably you also) don't find it terrible.
No reason to be so harsh. She's married to a techie. This is a techie thing to bring a little bit of happiness is all.
You're acting like he used a markov bot to reply to all his wife's messages.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#66Automated almost all my bill payments to use my rewards card. I set up alerts on my online banking site so I get texted when each one clears. Saves me a couple hours of grumpy time each month, plus I get a substantial 1% cash back that ends up being about $200/year. Also, you can dispute charges on a credit card if they get it wrong. Can't do that with bill payment service.
I've found that some bills (mostly rent -- I still rent) charge a percent fee for paying with credit cards.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#67I wrote a couple scripts to collect my daily webcomics and push them to my homepage.
I read them every day first thing in the morning, but I still count that as non-work.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#68Expense tracking. My bank sends me one email every time my card is used. - Using the Google Places API I find the related establishment (gives me name, address, phone number, etc) - Using the Gmail API I look for a receipt email (if any) by looking for another email with the same dollar amount and the same date So at any given time I can see all the purchases/payments I've done with rich information about where and e…
What bank do you use that has this feature?
Wells Fargo. You can get an email for purchases above a certain amount with a minimum of $1
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#69I automated downloading and reconciling my financials from all my bank accounts. https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler
This is great, would love to see support for more data sources.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#70I hunted down a Black Friday deal which was active only for a couple of minutes at random times using a Python script which was checking the price for different models and was sending emails if the prices fell.
Though I've ended up returning the product and learned to bake much tastier bread, without a need for a bread maker. :P