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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?

#71

Not 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.

This is a great heuristic vs tediously defining something more precise. Nice.

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

#72
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.

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

#73
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, you probably internalized all that cowsay wisdom.

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

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

#74
post #63

Expense 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?

I know with capital one you can set up alerts to send on a purchase value of $X. If you set X sufficiently low you'll hit nearly every purchase.

I would imagine other banks have similar functions.

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

#75
I use the public bicycle system of Brussels (Villo) quite a lot to commute. I've written a script that fetches the current status of the stations (number of available bikes & free spots) from https://opendata.brussels.be

In the morning, I get an Android notification about the stations around my home, and in the evening around my workplace.

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

#76

I 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.

Thanks! Unfortunately I can only add support for things I have access to (bank accounts and such) and I do plan on adding a few more.

To work around this I tried to make it as developer-friendly as I could so we'll see!

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

#77
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.

Would you mind sharing the code?

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

#78
post #70

I 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

I suspect Jim Lahey might have helped bring about the tastier bread without the machine :)

http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/bread-jim-lahey-2011-1...

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

#79

In 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.

We had a similar system. The problem wasn't in the classes filling up (though that happened too) but that the system was built for steady-state load and not peak load: if you weren't in and out within 10 seconds of registration starting, you were in for minutes of panic as the registration pages failed to load again and again while the classes you wanted were filled by those luckier than you.

Instead I made an autohotkey script to input my chosen course IDs and submit. Just pasting in a value, , pasting in a value, , etc.

All done in less time than even the savvy registrants who would copy/paste as fast as they could. An earlier iteration used a programmable keyboard macro: AHK wasn't on the lab computers for my first year.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats outsourcing, not automating

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.
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