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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?

#121

Post by richardknop »

torinmr wrote: post #47
richardknop wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point. Now that I think about it laundry was a bad example of automation. But to me it feels like automation as I used to do it all myself manually. The amount of time I saved still surprises me. Especially ironing.

I empathize with that feeling! I recently "automated" washing dishes by upgrading to an apartment with a dishwasher, and it's an amazing quality of life improvement!

You can take that one step further an order food every day. Or go eat out. Then you don’t need kitchen and dishes.

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

#122

Post by Walkman »

icebraining wrote: post #112
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.

but you still need to open the url in the browser right? which is way slower

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

#123

Post by hacker_9 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #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 con…

> I now have a big old dataset of SpeedTests and unix timestamps which I graphed

This peaked my interest, as my connection is also crappy. Did you actually manage to make improvements with this data though?

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

#124

Post by LukeLambert »

colemannugent wrote: post #56
icodemuch wrote: post #8

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.

Am I the only one who clicks the unsubscribe link? I live by Inbox Zero and I've been giving out my email address for over a decade (500+ sites and services in 1Password), but I very rarely receive marketing emails because I always unsubscribe. In the US, it's a law that businesses must comply with opt-out requests.

Do most people feel their inbox is too far gone to manage manually?

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

#125

Post by artpi »

artpi wrote: post #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…

I just realized that [7] probably works only because of [8] - I always give my Twilio phone number to people and pretend with my family that this is my main number.

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

#126

Post by mrguyorama »

coda_ wrote: post #25

I 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…

I was going to build a "smart-home" style personal solution using my chromecast, but it turns out building a chromecast app requires a $5 registration. Not a lot of money but it was just enough friction to trigger my laziness and I moved on to other things

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

#128

Post by colinbartlett »

dageshi wrote: post #118

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.

This would be so useful to me.

I always spend WAY too long picking out hotel rooms when I travel because it's so hard to compare hotels. The prices you see in search results are always for the cheapest room which I typically never want. And there's no way to see prices or sort by room size or amenities.

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

#129

Post by headcanon »

j29h wrote: post #57
headcanon wrote: post #37

I 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?

sure! its a very simple script: https://github.com/chronick/pinbots

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

#130

Post by jerkstate »

projectramo wrote: post #24
jerkstate wrote: post #12

I automated complaining once a month to the local water utility about a persistent puddle in the street in front of my home, caused by a leak.

Did it work? If so, how many months did it take? If not, how long has it been running for?

I had been running it for 4 months and last month they patched the pothole that the puddle created, so I suspended it. I think I may restart it though, water is starting to seep through the patching.
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