I wrote a script to log in to my brokerage account nightly and check for new purchases or dividend payments, log all of that to a database, and provide an interface allowing me to see all kinds of statistical information about my investments. I love getting the cron email in the morning saying I got a dividend payment from a stock :)
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
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Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#52I wrote a script to log in to my brokerage account nightly and check for new purchases or dividend payments, log all of that to a database, and provide an interface allowing me to see all kinds of statistical information about my investments. I love getting the cron email in the morning saying I got a dividend payment from a stock :)
Cool script. Do you have it on github ?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#53In college everyone's class registration would open at once, and classes would fill up quickly. Some people would even register for more than they were gonna take, to hold it for friends or just to figure their schedule out. If I didn't get into a class I wanted, I had a HTTPS script set to attempt registering for it every 5 minutes. As soon as somebody dropped it - boom it was mine.
I did something super similar: In order to graduate on time I had to take an accelerated Spanish course (hard requirement despite years of Spanish in grade school and high school). Problem: The class had a pre-requisite that I hadn't taken yet. Solution: The Uni's registration system allowed for a 4 digit numeric code to be entered to bypass registration restrictions. I wrote a script to brute force that code, registered successfully and graduated on time. Muy bueno! :)
Edit: spelling
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#54I 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.
Damn am I so old school that I prefer real voice (and believe me, Skype over Hotel networks is awful (and floss alternatives are no better), but that's better than nothing). Automating that part of my life seems so soulless...
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#55I recently made a bot that scapes the local apartment listings every five minutes, filters by price and area, and then sends me the new ones in the form of Telegram messages with the basic details, a GIF of the photos (scaled to mobile size), and a map widget. Getting push notifications with the new apartments is really great, and I'll definitely be making more Telegram bots in the future...
mind sharing any more detail? heard of someone doing this before, but just started searching for a new place
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#56Not sure if this counts because I didn't actually code anything: but using gmail filters to automate my personal email flow has had a huge effect on my day.
I'd say it counts.
My favorite filter is anything containing "unsubscribe" goes to a "Mailers" folder never to be seen.
I don't understand how people can deal with having unread emails in their inbox all the time.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#57I have a number of old bookmarks on pinboard that I realized I never visit after I bookmarked it. Some of them I would like to clean up. So I have a heroku job that emails me a random half-dozen bookmarks every morning. I can visit them, and if I don't care about it anymore, delete the bookmark.
I need that. Any chance you got it somewhere handy?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#58Don't know if that counts but I have installed automatic switches that turn off TV, blu ray, game console at night. My electricity bill stopped climbing so I guess it works at least a bit.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#59Expense 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 exactly when (including time of day).
For some reason banks don't like to tell you the time of a purchase. only the date.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#60I use SMBSync2 (android) to back up my photos daily to a network drive. Then I created a nightly job that mounts an encrypted drive, syncs the photos, then unmounts the drive. Finally, I just created a job that uploads the encrypted drive to the cloud. This way I have an offsite backup of my stuff. It's a good feeling knowing I have an encrypted backup and don't have to trust a 3rd party service.