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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#71

Post by fbcpck »

terminaljunkid wrote: post #58
mast4461 wrote: post #54

I jut begun to do some partial automation of website interaction with the extension Tampermonkey for Google Chrome to inject my own scripts on certain websites, often creating an additional control panel UI for custom actions such as scraping or data input. I use Tampermonkey in such a way that the code managed by Tampermonkey are only loading scripts that load my actual scripts from GitHub and other sources, such th…

would be interested to see why you use tampermonkey instead of GreaseMonkey. I tried both but stuck to GreaseMonkey as it was open source.

Not OP, but I decided to switch to Tampermonkey after GM version 4 which broke almost all my scripts due to the GM_## api changes. I no longer remember the exact details but it was poorly executed/communicated, and it’s easier to switch to TM instead of updating all the scripts.

The dashboard interface in TM is a lot nicer than GM too

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#72

Post by Throwawayxx001 »

netsharc wrote: post #52
ankit_it09 wrote: post #51

I used google scripts and google forms for some of my automation like: 1 - Notify me when Movie tickets are available to book. Used google scripts that run every minute and hit a URL to check if tickets are available now. 2 - Book a class when it's available, I have joined a Gym where you have to book a class before going, and the Zumba is very famous there the time it opens it fills up in 30seconds and there are lim…

I wonder who else is refreshing the class registration page and filling it up within 30 minutes? Or do the special people get advance notice that registration is about to open? I remember reading a wild tale of how someone made a program for a used car salesman that would check a particular car auction site to make sure they get a good deal (I wish I could remember the details, or better yet, find the URL)

You're looking for "Defcon 21 - How my Botnet Purchased Millions of Dollars in Cars and Defeated the Russian Hackers"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgz5dutPF8M

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#73

Post by martin_a »

I run Home Assistant with Zigbee devices for automatic lighting at home:

- switch on when I get home and sun is set

- switch on when I'm home and the sun sets

- switch on in the morning, full brightness, coldest color to help waking up (really helps me a lot and is not as stressful as an alarm clock)

- automatically turn light off when I (my smartphone) leave home (not visible in the WLAN for 10 minutes)

Will look into more automations there. Perhaps something about turning the heat up in the bathroom in the morning when the windows are closed (there are sensors for that).

I ran NodeRed on a Raspberry Pi too for some time, but I found that helped me only little. Mainly did logfile analysis through that but did not look into other use cases for me.

For work I've got the de-facto standard for the printing industry, I'm doing everything possible with that.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#74

Post by jaclaz »

patrickk wrote: post #57
clement_b wrote: post #47

Probably off initial topic, but: - FileJuggler on Windows, to automatically clean Desktop, Download folder and archive everything into a date-based folder structure in Drive. - AutoHotKey to insert text templates into everything (e.g. current date, formatted Jira issues, annoying things to type) The problem with automation is that one will want to break even quickly [time saved > (time spent finding/setting/maintaini…

Some more items that I've setup in AHK: - Launching commonly used apps, like Notepad, Windows Explorer or Sublime Text - Launching commonly used websites in a browser, e.g. gmail - Paste from the clipboard into a language translation site (languageX to languageY via URL parameters) - Open a to do list in Excel (hard coded file path) - Text expansion for personal and work email addresses - With one keypress, open the…

Hopefully you are prolific enough in AHK to use it directly, for all other people I suggest Lintalist:

https://lintalist.github.io/

which is a AHK based tool, very easy also for the "casual" user (like I am).

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#75

Post by netsharc »

Throwawayxx001 wrote: post #72
netsharc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder who else is refreshing the class registration page and filling it up within 30 minutes? Or do the special people get advance notice that registration is about to open? I remember reading a wild tale of how someone made a program for a used car salesman that would check a particular car auction site to make sure they get a good deal (I wish I could remember the details, or better yet, find the URL)

You're looking for "Defcon 21 - How my Botnet Purchased Millions of Dollars in Cars and Defeated the Russian Hackers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgz5dutPF8M

That should be it. Thanks, Deepthroat!

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#76

Post by jaggs »

A bit more basic, but I use two free desktop PC automation tools which I now can't do without.

1. TyperTask (https://typertask.en.uptodown.com/windows) to automate common tasks like adding different email signatures for different addresses etc etc.

2. ClipX (http://bluemars.org/clipx/) for managing a huge clipboard history file. This saves me SO much time it's unbelievable.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#77

Post by jharohit »

lostintangent wrote: post #12

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

Plugging another alternative to the horrible Selenium made by two friends of mine! https://uilicious.com/

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#78

Post by slightwinder »

ksahin wrote: post #53

I have many cron jobs in AWS Lambda functions for many tasks. I wrote a blog post about how to monitor a competitor website using Python / Lambda and serverless framework for deployment: https://dzone.com/articles/monitor-your-competitors-with-aws... For lots of workflows we also use No-code/Low-code tools like Zapier / Integromat.

How much does that cost?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#79

Post by slightwinder »

arafsheikh wrote: post #34

Last week I built an automated expense tracking dashboard on Tableau using SendGrid and Google Sheets. I use a Gmail filter to forward my credit card transaction emails to an Inbound Parser setup on SendGrid, which makes a POST call to my home server with the content of the email. A regex then captures the details from the POST body and pushes them to a Google Sheet. Next I use Tableau Public to read data from Google…

How does error-handling in this case happens? Do you get a message if some part of this pipeline fails?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#80

Post by htk »

I manage a Family Office and do monthly performance presentations with PowerPoint, the slides have an unique design, and updating them every month became extremely tedious and error prone.

I was already looking for an excuse to learn Python and this was perfect.

Instead of recreating the slides I created templates (just the last set of presentations) and update them with info directly queried from the database, using python-pptx and pyodbc.

This isn’t exactly an example of a “tool”, but I think the most important part isn’t really the tool, but to be able to identify what you can automate. How you do it might range from DIY to paying someone to code for you, but the feeling after getting rid of manual processes is great!

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