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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?

#91
post #9

I track my visits to the gym with a geofence trigger with my phone--logs to a google spreadsheet through IFTTT.

This I would love to reproduce. How?

Here's a recipe (not mine) that logs to Calendar instead: https://ifttt.com/applets/219749p-when-i-go-to-the-gym-log-i...

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

#92
post #61

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.

Does your local lottery authority allow you to purchase tickets online? Could automate the entire workflow.

No. I actually scrape two state lottery sites (I live on the border). One state used to allow online purchases but that got nixed due to the possibility of purchasing them while not truly in the state (which would be considered gambling across state lines which has federal laws and regulations).

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

#93
Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national radar mosaic every 15 minutes.

Explicitly setting the background programmatically was very unreliable in practice. The beauty of my script is that it simply wgets the image, checks if it is valid, resamples the image using a high quality algorithm (slow but worth it), places it in a folder, and deletes the old image.

My background preference is set to shuffle between images in that folder every minute, therefore my script acts like a pipeline.

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

#94
post #83

I automated applying for jobs a few years back. I wrote a scraper and a classifier that took a look at each job posting, determined if it required skills for technologies I wasn't familiar with, and if not, and it was also a strong enough candidate for requiring skills I'm strong with, it would send one of several appropriate resumes depending on which sort of job it was.

I would imagine you've accounted for this, but I'd highly suggest not applying for multiple jobs within the same company, with tweaked resumes/cover letters. I've seen a few of those and they always turn me off. When I'm sifting through dozens of resumes, I really don't want to feel like someone is roboblasting all of our open positions.

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

#95
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did have it piping jokes to me, but they weren't very funny. Hmm... I should make the cow tell me the weather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KHc9k5s5yU

Yeah, that one amused me. It's almost worth getting an Alexa for that.

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

#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 subscription.

Similarly, I have a self-hosted instance of Tiny Tiny RSS set up with an array of custom scraping plugins to pull all the web comics I follow into one feed, which I consume with the Android client. I'd push this through my Kindle delivery system, but then I'd be stuck reading black-and-white versions of color comics.

Along the same lines, there are a few YouTube channels I subscribe to whose content can be enjoyed nearly as well in audio-only form. As a university student, I do a lot of walking most days to get from place to place, and I fill that time listening to audio content. The same server which runs my news- and comic-gathering systems also watches those YouTube channels, pulls down new videos, converts them to audio, and publishes the results as podcast feeds which I can subscribe to through Pocket Casts on my phone.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to me it’s automated as I don’t have to do it manually. I see your point, it’s still done by a human but from my point of view it has been automated.

Well now you need to automate dropoff and pickup as well as payment.

Uber wash & fold?

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

#98
I used Nightmare (https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare) to automate logging into my 401(k) provider's website and fetching my current balance (no public tickers for the funds). It uploads that number somewhere and then I fetch that somewhere in a Google Sheets spreadsheet where I keep track of my portfolio.

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

#99
post #25

I used a raspberry pi to control my TV using HDMI-CEC and exposed a subset of the controls through a web API allowing me to turn on/off my TV from my phone or voice controlled from a google home. I did this because a chromecast will turn on my TV and set it to the correct input, but it wouldn't turn off the TV. Turning the TV off was the only reason I needed to touch my remote control at all. But just recently google…

Side note: what TV do you have? I've found that most Samsungs and many other TVs don't respond to the HDMI-CEC off signal. Was quite disappointed.
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