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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?

#351

Post by shostack »

vollmond wrote: post #155

1. IFTTT turns off all of my Hue lights at sunrise (task: turn off forgotten lights) 2. At one point last year, I felt that my mornings were getting slower and slower (causing me to leave later), so I set up a Dash button where I hang my keys. When I left for work, I'd press the button, and the script would log the time to a Sparkfun data feed. After a month, I reviewed it to see just how bad it was (pretty bad). (ta…

Have you tried Roll20 for D&D? We used it for our group here at work as it allowed a remote team member to play. Even if you don't use all of it, the character sheet tools and info are pretty solid (albeit missing some things like certain spells).

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

#352

Post by pfalke »

t1o5 wrote: post #143

I 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…

Did the same thing to get a wedding registration appointment with the Berlin city administration, but used Ghostery instead of AWS+Twilio. The responsible administration department currently doesn’t give out appointments and advises not to plan weddings because they are so understaffed, but I didn’t feel like waiting. Got a notification email from Gostery in the middle of the night, registered the only available slot et voilà!

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

#353

Post by anotherevan »

I have an old analogue modem which I use to pick up caller ID information for incoming phone calls using NCID[1].

When a call comes in:

* Automatically pauses the music player on my PC.

* Looks up the number in my address book, and displays the information on my screen. Also sends to the two Kodi/OSMC servers, for people watching TV.

This assumes it is not on my block-list. If it is on my block-list of known scammer and telemarketer numbers then it as automatically answered with a recording of the "This number has been disconnected..." message to try and trick them.

[1] http://ncid.sourceforge.net/

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

#354

Post by cloverich »

shostack wrote: post #274
wynnvonn wrote: post #212

Dodging the f *ing lightning in the desert area of FFX. I spent hours in that section as a kid, never managing to dodge more than 20 bolts in a row... When it came out for PC, it was time for revenge! I captured video input with a simple python+QT script and emitted a button-press whenever the screen flashed. The best part was that the script didn't interfere with my controller - I could run around the area opening c…

On the video game kick, I remember needing to do a massive number of laps in Gran Turismo 3 to unlock something. Turns out the low-tech solution of using an insanely fast car (Escudo), taping down the controller's gas button and just letting it do laps while grazing the wall worked. Some time later I looked back and had won.

I also did this! I think I set the throttle to be controlled by the joystick, then used a rubber band to keep it going. It was so very satisfying for such a low tech solution, and I think the prize was the car I really wanted. Fun memory.

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

#355

Post by accidentalrebel »

I had some Vape related items to sell. From where I'm from a lot of people buy and sell these kind of items through Facebook groups. I then made an iMacros bot that would automatically search certain Vape related keywords on Facebook, filter by Groups, and then log the different Facebook groups details along with the number of members so I can pick which groups are worth my time to post on.

I also wanted to make a script to automate the posting of my items but Facebook has gone through extreme lengths to prevent this from happening. I eventually gave up and posted manually.

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

#357

Post by imnicuhtine »

Although not a prime example of time saving automation, I wanted more from my sprinkler timer when I was seeding my lawn so I used a raspberry pi and a 4 channel relay switch to schedule my sprinkler time with cron jobs. This way I could have the sprinklers come on more times a day than my old timer would allow. Now I use it to change schedules based on seasons.

I also made it so I could turn on a single zone for 1 minute from my phone to make troubleshooting leaks in the spring easier.

https://github.com/callahanrts/sprinklers

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

#358

Post by inetknght »

stevesimmons wrote: post #309

I used Python to automate generating a chronological email/sms/phone contact archive when a home renovation project went wrong. My builder made a bunch of mistakes, tried to fob me off with excuses, and then pretended everything was ok. This integrated log was invaluable in showing discrepancies between what he said at the time and what he subsequently claimed. My Python script reads my Google Contacts csv extract to…

I use Google Voice and have often wanted pretty much the same thing.

If you could integrate that into an application (Google Contacts integrated message history with Email/SMS/Phone/GV message history) that I could run on my own device, I would pay money for that. I would only be interested if I could run it on my own though, eg specifically not as a third party service; privacy issues.

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

#359

Post by sachleen »

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…

Do you mind sharing where you get the radar image from? I'm trying to do something similar so I can see how I should dress for my bike commute every morning. The only good/free one I have found is NOAA's RIDGE (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/doppler/ridge_download.htm...) but it's low resolution and ugly.

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

#360

Post by zanedb »

cefthurston wrote: post #208

Working on a script to automatically compile the best threads from HN each day and email. Might also send to pocket so I can read on my commute. Will go by thread count and screen out keywords in header to avoid topics I'm not interested in. I find the most valuable thing in HN are the conversations in comments (sometimes also the least valuable thing, too).

When you're done with this, please open-source it on GitHub. Something like this would be very useful.
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