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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?

#181
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you figured out a way to automate exporting of data from Personal Capital into somewhere else (spreadsheet, DB, etc)?

That’s a great question. I haven’t tried it but seems like you can access their private API. https://github.com/haochi/personalcapital

I've been building something that looks very similar to this for Mint in Ruby but am still implementing exception handling for 2FA. I'll have to check it out--thanks!

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you attach it to an existing browser window/session that is already open? Ie. I navigate and authenticate to a site, run code, and it continues from there with what's on screen?

Playwright allows you to connect to existing browser instances, but it currently requires you to get the “debug URL” of the browser instance first: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/v0.11.1/docs/ap... . I’d love to hear a bit more about the scenario you have in mind, since that might help inform some improvements we can make. Thanks!

The issue I'm having with Selenium (well, Watir with Ruby) is booting up some automated scraping logic for a page that may be in my current session once I've done the whole authentication dance manually (so I don't have to focus on automating that piece initially).

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

#183
* Home Automation, like opening shutters at sunrise and closing them at sunset or turning on LED lights at night when movement is detected and turning them off after a certain amount of time since the last movement. Z-wave relay modules control most devices, and the command-center is Raspberry Pi + Aeon Z-Stick (aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick/), which allows for a vast amount of flexibility compared to standard Z-Wave controllers.

* an extensive collection of custom made /usr/local/bin scripts which automate things such as video recording and encoding for youtube (recordmydesktop + avconv), backups, and certain time-taking and repetitive operations on websites (like downloading invoices; through selenium-webdriver - github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/wiki/Ruby-Bindings)

* zaps on zapier.com for pushing data between multiple cloud services that would otherwise have to be moved by hand (i.e., Gmail email with matching subject to a task in kanbantool.com)

* autokey on Ubuntu, which allows me to type phrases like "!thx" and have them automatically expanded to i.e., "Thank you for your email!"

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

#184

I use YNAB ( https://youneedabudget.com/ ), which requires inputting every one of your transactions by hand or importing them from your bank. The downside of the import is it takes a few days for the transaction to show up and you need to give YNAB your bank username/password, which I'm not comfortable with. I wrote this https://github.com/buzzlawless/ynab-live-import to import credit card transactions instantly with…

That sounds a lot more complicated than just downloading bank statements and uploading them to YNAB and adds a lot more points of failure

Downloading and uploading bank statements is a manual process, unless you're willing to give the service your bank ID/PW, right? Seems to me if you set up your bank accounts to send you notification emails for any balance change, you can automatically reflect the balance without needing to deal with sensitive credentials.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, but it also keeps YNAB more in sync with your bank account, since transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement.

> transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement Wait, in what century do you live that your online banking transaction overview doesn't have up to date data ? Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ?

Regarding statement freshness, derefr already answered. Regarding username/password, in Brazil at least yes (sort of) - you log in with account number and a password, but it's sort of a "read-only password" - you can see statements and stuff with it, but if you want to actually move the money, a different password is required.

Trivia: this is used by a Mint-like company in Brazil called GuiaBolso - you give them just the "read-only password".

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

#186

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.

Just tried the examples on our site and it works really well! Amazing project!

PS: I remember interacting with you from the early days of code-push I think :)

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

#187
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement Wait, in what century do you live that your online banking transaction overview doesn't have up to date data ? Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ?

A banking "statement" usually refers to a PDF you can download; the electronic version of the thing they'd previously send you by mail. The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too. > Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ? Yes, this is common in the US (a…

> The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too.

That’a why they also provide an API. They are required by law to do so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive)

> I don't think there's any bank in North America that requires 2FA to login to your online banking.

This is required by the same law.

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

#188

I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

I did this with good results, using warm white and daylight white LED strips, a couple of PWM dimmers, and an arduino, at a former apartment a few years ago. I have a similar setup now but it's a single LED strip featuring both color temps, with its own remote controllable dimmer for brightness/color temp; I haven't bothered to automate it.

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

#189

https://smmry.com/about Summarizing long text-based articles! Found this on HN. Now when my family/ friends send me stuff they haven't actually read ... at least I can reply somewhat intelligently.

Finally, a sane way to read New Yorker articles!

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

#190
post #7

We use Jenkins to run .bat files that package our video game, upload to Steam and spool up Gamelift matchmaking servers on AWS every night. Before this I did it by hand, now I wonder how I could ever have operated with that inefficiency!

Jenkins? .bat? That's some masochism.

Can you elaborate on how that's masochistic? The game likely needs to be built on Windows.
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