The only kind of automation I use is a Python script for downloading fanfiction from fanfiction.net.
Reading through this thread, it seems like I'm living in a parallel world...
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
221–230 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Imagine two Neural Nets trained by husband and wife to do the usual conversations. Now add a solarcell and a speaker- and some noise generator for starters on a gravestone- and long after the couple is gone, the beloved ones arguing goes on. This is brilliant! No, it is not, this is one of your worser ideas. Oh, Madam is constructive again today. You want me to say my true opion or not.. This is how you always swing…
I feel like this is an SMBC comic not yet illustrated.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#223I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscrip…
github please?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#224About 10 years ago I was in the market for a used Toyota Camry, so I wrote a script that scraped the used car classified and extracted models within a 4 year range and within price & mileage caps. This got plotted out into 4 overlaid point series, producing graphs that roughly looked like 1/x, roughly 2-300 datapoints total.
With that in hand I went to dealer offering the best match, told them which car I wanted and how much I was going to pay for it. Put the graph in front of the salesperson who was floored, went back to his manager, and gave me the car for that price.
That was before I even knew what the term "market price" meant.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#225I have a house plant that is watered automatically, but not based on any pre-determined schedule. I have the plant's livestream and its moisture level available publicly on pleasetakecareofmyplant.com and the decision to water is crowd sourced on reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant by way of a daily vote.
Very clever, I like the project. I'm a fan of the pin too.. can there be a fridge magnet version?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#226I 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…
Hi, I'm a co-founder of https://snips.ai, we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform
If you want to use your Raspberry Pi with voice control without relying on Google, you can use the platform for free! We will open-source the code over time
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha thanks! The problem is in the US most banks would need screen-scraping; they don't have APIs, so it's a lot more work to do such a thing.
ledger-reconciler uses headless chrome underneath to screen-scrape all its information from banking/creditcard websites. That's how all the plugins hook into it. It does not use any public or private banking APIs. Hope that helps!
Oh dang I didn't know! I'll check it out at some point then, thanks! :)
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#228I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…
Why don't you convert this into a paid service? Sounds amazing!
I did, hosted at sinpnotifier.com, Saskatchewan province is not that attractive for skilled immigrants. Had one sale though, then I shut it down.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#229Checking the weather. I have a script that checks the temperature and notifies me via email if it's going to be too hot in the next couple of days. (I haven't found a web service that allows customizing the notification thresholds.)
I have this same thing.
Maybe their is a market for simple non-intrusive weather notifications.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#2301. My former spouse wouldn't answer the home phone when I talked with the kids during the divorce. I wrote an app that texted her and logged the attempt for reporting to the guardian ad litem.
2. She also wouldn't answer the door when during kids pick-up. The same app texted her when I was outside.
3. To disprove her allegations I wasn't involved in the kids school and activities I used Android's Locale app to trigger geofenced log entries.
4. Python and Matplotlib came in quite handy automating timeline generation from PDF docs. Never got that one quite perfect though.
I'm not sure I could have prevailed in getting more time with my kids without the time savings automation gave me. I've seen other fathers stopped cold in Court who were less prepared.