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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?

#111

Post by mrguyorama »

peacelilly wrote: post #93

Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national radar mosaic every 15 minutes. Explicitly 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…

The "shuffle any image in this folder" background option in windows is incredibly cool and underutilized

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

#112

Post by icebraining »

Walkman wrote: post #41

I have a USB stick 4G modem and I automated the connection setup; it has a web app (starts a small embedded webserver when you plug it in) which I "reverse engineered" and I wrote a small script which makes HTTP requests so I don't need to go to the web interface, login, enter PIN code and click connect every single day multiple times. I just run "telekom connect" and that's it. What a time saver! :D

That's one thing I love about Vimperator: its macro system. If you can do the steps using the keyboard, you can just start recording and do it once. Next time a simple key combo will repeat your steps.

I've automated logging in to public Wifi networks and filling in many forms with it.

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

#113

Post by richardknop »

tarboreus wrote: post #28
richardknop wrote: post #17

Laundry. Just put your dirty clothes into a plastic bag and take them to dry cleaners. Pick up washed and ironed the next day. A huge time savings well worth the cost of service. Also no need to own washing machine, dryer, ironing board etc. EDIT: Now that I think about it, this was a bad example of automation. Please don’t downvote me!

In that case, I've also automated flying my own commercial airliner. I just pay someone $400 and I'm automatically flown anywhere in the continental US! Also, I automated bread baking. I just go to the supermarket and go to the bread aisle, and hey presto! Automatic bread.

To be fair I’d imagine that bread making is quite automated these days. There’s a lot of machinery involved and much less people than few decades ago.

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

#114

Post by vollmond »

_tsz4 wrote: post #87

Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...

This is really interesting. What are some of the things you have used this for? One of the examples is a quotation, which makes lots of sense. What else could it be useful for? Formulas, maybe?

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

#115

Post by mxuribe »

maxk42 wrote: post #83

I 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.

There's a fine line here...If i was a potential employer, and somehow figured out that you were blasting my company's career/job site, i would actually want to consider you speaking with you about the job. This is because I value resourcefulness, and also because - as part of the job interview - i would like to hear how you made the script; less the tech (though that's important) but more so the algorithm, your thinking on the script creation process, etc. However, if somehow you were to tell me that you did not develop the script, and merely used someone's else's script, than that would turn me off a bit. I would still applaud you for being resourceful, but you'd get way more points in my mind for creating your own. ;-)

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

#116

Post by tessierashpool »

before 1Password existed, I wrote a little password generator. switched to 1Password when it came along though.

also built a little flash cards app for studying Japanese which auto-generates Japanese sentences for me to read and translate. (simple sentences of the いぬはすしをたべました variety.)

wrote basic beat MIDI generators for drum & bass and moombahton in a few different languages.

tried to write a Ruby -> NXC compiler for the NXT generation of the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. fortunately there’s a better option now because my compiler knowledge was basically zero.

edit: planning to extract a bunch of data from the Health app on my iPhone and run some visualization scripts on it. heart rate from Apple Watch, weight from a Bluetooth scale, etc.

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

#117

Post by DKnoll »

jdlyga wrote: post #63
juancampa wrote: post #59

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?

TD Canada Trust has a similar feature, but with Android notifications if you have the 'TD MySpend' application.

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

#118

Post by dageshi »

Wrote a system to scrape a popular hotel website for all the hotels in a particular city and then expose them in a sql + map interface.

I found there was much more information being sent to the browser per room than was being displayed on the actual site, so it was possible to search by room size (square footage) and features like whether the rooms had balconies or not.

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

#120

Post by vollmond »

mrguyorama wrote: post #111
peacelilly wrote: post #93

Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national radar mosaic every 15 minutes. Explicitly 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…

The "shuffle any image in this folder" background option in windows is incredibly cool and underutilized

I have a few dozen images in my folder... never thought of using it as a data feed like this. Awesome.
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