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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?

#101

In college I wrote a script to register for classes. I'd input the potentially-full classes I'd like to register for, and it would just hammer the registration site repeatedly until someone removed themselves from the class at which point I'd be registered. I'm still amazed IT didn't pull the network connection to my dorm room or have any kind of rate limiting. No 8am sessions for me!

Assuming the site wasn't actually crashing I expect they didn't care or know about it.

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

#102
I have set up a battery of scripts on google app engine and Im pretty happy with it.

1. I have a script to automatically buy small amount of BTC every day

2. For the more knowledge-dense books I read, I write summaries of them (https://piszek.com/books/). I have a script that puts a random book review to my pocket for reviewing every week

3. I have an instagram account of lego minifig (https://www.instagram.com/le.traveller/). I wrote a script that likes other profiles to get traffic

4. I have a script that parses my bank e-mail statements to fill up my spending spraedsheets

5. I also have a script that parses incoming email for invoices. That system basically does my taxes

6. My GTD methodology revolves around Evernote. I have cron jobs that throw me "checklists" with stuff to do around certain times (yearly taxes, etc)

7. Using Twilio and verified number, my calendar sends personalized SMS with birthday wishes to my family that appear as they are from my number

8. Also on Twilio I have DIY voicemail that is aware of where in world am I and either routes to my current SIM card or takes a message. I also have a US number that routes any SMS to my current SIM

I recently moved, so I have to rebuild all my Smart-Home hacks. I am currently trying to automate my Intercom at home to play pre-recorded message to postman and let him in automatically

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

#103

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.

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, regist…

Oracle Peoplesoft?

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

#104
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds terrible. Even more terrible a lot of people (probably you also) don't find it terrible.

No reason to be so harsh. She's married to a techie. This is a techie thing to bring a little bit of happiness is all. You're acting like he used a markov bot to reply to all his wife's messages.

No point arguing over whether this was harsh or justified--what matters is how GGP's spouse feels about it.

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

#106
post #46

I 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.

You might have a case if 'hellothere007 doesn't write the jokes. I interpreted their post as meaning they write the jokes, queue them up with the cron job, and use it to schedule them for delivery at some time more appropriate to the wife's timezone.

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

#107
I had three fun ones.

I wanted to learn powershell, and I was interested in the history of worms on the internet, so I made a script to check https://isc.sans.edu/ and send me an email if the status was not green. Turns out, powershell has an all-in-one function to send an SMTP email, which I thought was hilarious. I used windows task scheduler to run it every hour.

Second, I was struggling with my Cable internet connection, and it was incredibly difficult to nail down what was causing my slow speeds. To help with the diagnostics, I wrote a little python script to download the files that Netflix uses for speedtests (check Fast.com) and logged the average of 10 runs to a file. It similarly used task scheduler to run every 10 minutes and as a result I now have a big old dataset of SpeedTests and unix timestamps which I graphed while playing around with Pillow

I wrote a python bot to Read project Gutenburg books to twitter. This was to participate in a contest that involved seeing which "team" could get a hashtag into more tweets. A twitter bot takes about five minutes to make, as I found a brilliant little Python-Twitter library. Unfortunately, my teammates got cold feet and convinced me to de-rate the bot's posting frequency, meaning we barely lost to a group of 60 or so sorority girls doing it the "correct" way. However, as we did it sort of below-radar, the loophole of automating it is still open and valid.

Currently I'm working on automating the process of creating photoreal scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator. The FSX scene has built tools to turn open source land-use data into ground scenery like houses and forests, and Microsoft included the SDK and Documentation as part of the game[1], but since high resolution photo-real satellite photography is an incredibly expensive asset, nobody has automated that part of the process. I most likely will not be successful, as I have no source for the photo-real imagery.

Personally, I find that absurd, as my tax dollars as an American likely pay for incredibly high resolution (higher than 1 foot per pixel) satellite imagery of the entire world, and I'm not sure how the NSA providing that to citizens would hurt national security. The Stallman in me feels that I've already paid for that data, and it should be public domain. Hell, even a year old would work fine. The biggest problem would be Google and Microsoft lobbying to prevent the devaluation of their expensive assets.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff798293.aspx

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like you're dehumanizing the people actually doing the work for you.

That was not my intention. Perhaps there is a language barrier as English is my second (or third) language.

To automate something to me means getting the same result without me manually having to do it.

Like hiring a professional to translate a document for me. I’d call that automation but I know now that’s incorrect.

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

#109
The grocery chain I shop at has a component of their loyalty card that lets you add certain coupons to your card and they change constantly. All told there may be a few hundred of items offered up daily, most of which I don't buy anyhow. So instead of wasting my time sifting through them to save $10 a month I just wrote a script to add all of them to my card every day at the same time. So long as I go shopping after that time I may have discounts for items I actually purchase deducted at checkout.

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

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ohh someone should do this for the pot holes in the Bay Area.

You could do what one guy did and start spray-painting penises around the pot holes. (slightly NSFW) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/27/artist-penis-potho...

Time to program the Roomba.. just add image recognition and spray paint module..
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