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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#221
post #210

I 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

Interesting. Mine is more than just a landing page generator though.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#222

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on w…

For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.

And of course, there's the "buy a full set of interchangeable socks" approach. I did this a few years ago and it's great. Pairing socks seems trivial but saving 10-20 minutes a week, every week, for minimal investment (I needed socks anyway) is a huge win.

One caveat, though - if you do this, commit to it. Don't do what I did and keep one or two pairs of non-conforming socks just because I liked them. Because now they just recirculate through my sock drawer, gumming up my otherwise perfect system. :P

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#223

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on w…

For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.

just wear one outfit. I measured 3 different shirts against same jeans, and shoes for six weeks, counted which got the most complements, and wear just that now.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#224
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann! . When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide…

What about trying new things, experimenting with life?

Decide that you will always try something different from last time.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#225
post #34

- Downloading a song of youtube, adding meta data via beets and moving to my music lib - Adding tasks to my todolist client from every app I use(including my bookmarking service when I bookmark with specific tags) - Changing terminal colours based on time of the day(lower brightness in the evenings and hence dark colours, too much sunlight in the mornings and hence solarized themes) - Automatically message people who…

I'm curious as to how you did the "Phone alerts on specific emails". I'm currently setting my raspberry pi up as a motion detector (we were burgled 2 weeks ago)... and while I can do the motion & send out the email, I really want my phone to go nuts when it gets the alert email (mostly I have notifications turned off).

Any hints appreciated! I'm also experimenting with Telegram, which I think will also solve my issue.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#226
Tweeting. I suck at it. I started with a txt, which became a spreadsheet, which is becoming distrosheet.com.

Sooo slooowly that the homepage still has stock cats&dogs images. The most upsetting thing is that I've got more than one person telling me "I like the homepage". My mental reaction was "wtf!?".

Anyway, I still don't tweet much, but I'm getting there.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#227
Easy - anything boring. "Boring" usually means repetitive and not mentally challenging, which to my mind is exactly what computers are for.

Even if the task happens infrequently and the script takes longer than the task, automating it is worth the investment: - It prevents having to remember or re-discover how to handle the task next time. - It ensures the task is handled consistently. - It prevents potential manual errors.

For example, on the financial side, my company runs bank accounts in five countries, each with different GST/VAT taxes. Over time, I've developed scripts that grab the mid-month exchange rates that our Internal Revenue service requires to be used; crunches downloaded bank transaction data into categories (including tax inclusion or not); and exports it all into a huge Google spreadsheet. This provides global and country balance sheets and profit and loss, and when tax reporting time comes for each country, a tab on the spreadsheet provides all the figures so filling returns is a five minute process. Occasionally the scripts will flag an unrecognised transaction, and rather than manually correcting this in the spreadsheet, I'll add a rule to the script so it is recognised next time.

Cumulatively this probably took several tens of hours to code, but it means we don't need to employ an accounts clerk. It takes about fifteen minutes a month to download the bank data (manually - oh how I wish banks had APIs) and run the scripts. Our accountant loves this - the spreadsheet is shared with him, he can check our formulae or add other metrics, and he prepares our annual report an order of magnitude faster than any of his other clients.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#228
I get a weekly newsletter with a bunch of music recommendations in it, which I had been manually adding to a Spotify playlist.

So I recently wrote a CLI in Node that takes a URL and a CSS-style query selector (ie, '.album-title'), then scrapes the page, searches for each found instance and adds them all to a spotify playlist.

github.com/markreid/scrapify

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#229
post #17

A bot for reserving hotel rooms. I wrote a bot to reserve hotel rooms a year in advance for a national park in the US. It was so difficult to book. After couple days of failed attempts to reserve my desired dates, and after staying up late into the night one day, I went ahead and wrote a bot to automate the task of checking for availability and then completing the checkout process once available. And... it worked.

What language did you write it in? Curious. . .

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#230
post #213
post #22

I'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.

Yes, and I use it quite a lot. My local library system, however, has a huge collection of CD audiobooks, many of which aren't available (at least in Canada) on Overdrive or Hoopla. I run my script in a window when I'm working on other things so it's trivial to just feed the disk monster. The audiobook then just shows ip in my Dripbox, ready to play.
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