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?
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
91–100 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#92Scraping 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?
#93Explicitly 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?
#94I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#95Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#96Similarly, 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?
#97Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#98Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#99I 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…
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#100It was so hard to get their cheapest server back then, they would get sold out really quickly.