Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

281–290 of 722 posts

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

#281
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…

Curios, why don't you post summaries on http://www.wikisummaries.org ?

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

#282

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…

Safeway does the whole digital coupon thing. It’s too much of a hassle to be worthwhile but this could help. Not sure it’s worth the effort of writing the script myself though. Do you mind open sourcing it?

I wrote a database and interface once that would automatically catalog and run the Safeway Monopoly game, all I had to to was scan in the pieces with an app on my phone. It worked well, but demonstrated just how bad my luck was, after 614 tickets gathered, I won exactly 0 items. :/

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

#283

One of the biggest automation arena improvements I've made in my life is creating visual cue reminders and systems for a sort of stateful orderliness. When the laundry basket gets full past the painter tape line, I do a load. I load the dishwasher after dinner, and unload it in the morning regardless of the volume. Got a roomba that runs every other day and cries when it's full of dirt. I have NFC stickers that link…

I’d love to get a 3d printer for 160! Can you point me in the right direction? (Or add me to your alert)

Newegg Business, Davinci XYZ jr 1.0

There's DRM on the filament and it's PLA only, but you can buy the key to unlock and rewrite the DRM NFC chip. I use an app on my phone to rewrite the values

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

#284
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-...

Just downloaded your extension, it looks great! What does the stack look like for this product? I'd love to hear how you went about building this extension.

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

#285

One of the biggest automation arena improvements I've made in my life is creating visual cue reminders and systems for a sort of stateful orderliness. When the laundry basket gets full past the painter tape line, I do a load. I load the dishwasher after dinner, and unload it in the morning regardless of the volume. Got a roomba that runs every other day and cries when it's full of dirt. I have NFC stickers that link…

Can I set up a nfc system like that for iPhone??

I believe iOS11 supports NFC, but it isn't as smooth as tapping and automatically opening the document.

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

#286
-- poll/scrape website for campsite availability/openings in tx (http://texas.reserveworld.com/) -- compute if solitaire game was solvable (whenever i failed to solve it) (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/king-solitaire/id680163617?m...) -- as reader for screenplay competition, scrape & download my batch of scripts and title/prepare them for reading in dropbox -- among others..

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

#287

Does anyone have a script for integrating with Facebook and grabbing whose birthdays are today? I'd really like to automate it, but this info isn't available via the Graph API, so I kind of gave up on this, but if someone else has done this, I'd love to take a look.

You can get the freely available ical(?) link for your birthday events in the events section. No api necessary beyond the URL.

I used this to integrate it into my Google calendar.

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

#289
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you didn't market it to right crowd? I know a lot of South Asian people who go to Saskatchewan just to get their PR. There are a lot of Software Engineering/Development jobs in Toronto or bigger cities so people in those fields wont leave these bigger cities.

The problem with monetizing this service is because there are many immigration watsapp groups with many members in it. So when one member buys this service, he can simply broadcast this notification to his watsapp groups. I even made the service free, but no takers. Anyways it worked for me, changed my life !

Ah fair enough. Glad it all worked out for you. I did choose Canada ( well, my dad) for undergrad because of easier immigration policy.

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

#290
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…

Is the script for #3 up on Github by chance? I'd love see how you went about doing that!
Post reply on HN