restart all things every night.
What do you need to restart? I tend to leave things running...I used to reboot my servers once a year, but now I'm not sure I'll even bother with that.
Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
211–220 of 349 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#212I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time. For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce it…
Have you sold your "automated start a startup" app as a service to others in your situation? There must be plenty of other people in the same boat as you.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#213I'm the kind of nerd who greatly prefers writing automation code to doing anything remotely repetitive. (I'm afraid to work out the actual timings because I'm pretty sure that I often spend more time coming up with the automation than just doing the task would take). I've got a script that automatically rips, converts and stitches together audiobooks from the library so that I can play them on my phone. It just beeps…
At least in the US, the Overdrive app for android let's you rent audiobooks from the library so you can play on your phone. No need to rip or convert.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#214I am not a programmer, but I've automated a few things in my life.
I self publish graphic novels. I have a script that runs on a directory full of page files and outputs a CSV in the format InDesign expects. I wrote it after manually editing a CSV and leaving a page out, and not noticing that until I had an advance copy in my hands and 400 more waiting to be shipped from the printer. That was an expensive learning experience.
I like to rotate my monitor portrait mode sometimes, but hate trying to rotate the Wacom tablet's settings as well. So I have a script that does this all in one go. It used to try to keep track of separate desktop backgrounds for landscape and portrait mode, but this stopped working right, so I took that part out.
I have a bunch of LIFX bulbs in my apartment. The one near the foyer changes color based on the rain forecast and the current temperature, to give me an idea of how to dress when going out, thanks to a little Python script I keep running on my computer. Someday I'll move it to the Raspberry Pi sitting in a drawer.
I recently built a Twitter bot that tweets a random card from the Tarot deck I drew. I've been trying to extend it to talk to Mastodon as well but have been getting "request too large" errors from the API when trying to send the images. Someday I'll spin up a private Mastodon instance and figure out what's going on. Maybe. Until then it sits on a free Heroku account, tweeting a card and an image of its text about once a day.
And does building a custom Wordpress theme that lets me post individual pages of my comics, and show them a whole chapter at a time, count as "automation"? It sure has saved me a lot of hassle.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#215I just figured out how to use ansible and python to script out changing the passwords for all the network gear in the office. It uses a random password generator api https://passwordwolf.com to fetch a new password, changes it on everything, then sends me the new passwords. I'm changing passwords monthly now but it works so well that I might set it to weekly.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#216I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time. For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce it…
Kind of what I was referring to here .... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14779517
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#217I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time. For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce it…
:)
reminds me of startup generator
http://tiffzhang.com/startup
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#218I am not a programmer, but I've automated a few things in my life. I self publish graphic novels. I have a script that runs on a directory full of page files and outputs a CSV in the format InDesign expects. I wrote it after manually editing a CSV and leaving a page out, and not noticing that until I had an advance copy in my hands and 400 more waiting to be shipped from the printer. That was an expensive learning ex…
I have some news for you. You are a programmer.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#219I do contract work for a few clients. I always automate the boring tasks of vpn'ning, firing up remote desktop, connecting to database servers, their email system, etc.
Automating that is fiddly and tedious, but it's worth it because I can just click a button and get a menu of clients. I choose one, and in about 10 seconds my machine is ready to go on their work.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#220I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time. For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce it…
Have you sold your "automated start a startup" app as a service to others in your situation? There must be plenty of other people in the same boat as you.
That's a nice idea! Thanks for sharing.