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Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

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Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#41

Post by mdoms »

While I was having a home built I made a script that monitors the local council building consent website and email me every time an inspection had been completed.

During a friendly weight loss challenge I wrote a script that pulled my weight from a smart scale and inserted a rolling weekly average into my column in our shared spreadsheet.

I made a website that scrapes motogp to build my own No Spoilers website with absolutely no Javascript and a far better layout than their silly horizontal scrolling cards layout.

I wrote a script to pull data from John's Hopkins and give me daily coronavirus updates in a more digestible way (since deprecated because I'm in NZ and would rather put it behind me).

Probably a bunch more I'm forgetting about.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#42

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

orthecreedence wrote: post #32

I got sick of opening the same tmux/terminal format every time I had to restart, so I wrote this: #!/bin/bash function command() { CMD="$1" xdotool type "$1" xdotool key Return } function key() { KEY="$1" xdotool key $KEY } function clear() { for n in {1..10}; do key BackSpace done } function name_panel() { NAME="$1" key ctrl+a key comma clear command $NAME } name_panel 'cmd' key ctrl+a key c name_panel 'srv' key ctr…

I feel like I should point out that tmux is quite happy to take commands directly on the command line: `tmux new-window -n srv` will make a new window named "srv", `tmux next-window` will move you forward one window, etc. Hit prefix-? to list the commands bound to each key when you're running.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#44

Post by drexlspivey »

I use email for many automations. Email is very flexible, lots of services directly integrate with email and for all the other stuff there is zappier. Some examples

* mailing something to todo@mydomain will put it in my todo list (i.e automatically forward actionable emails, jira tickets etc)

* mailing a link to videodl@mydomain will run youtube-dl on the link and then upload the video to onedrive. I also have a companion apple shortcut that does this from the share sheet without even opening the mail client.

* sending a pdf to pdf@mydomain will send it to my ereader

* article@mydomain will parse the link, remove ads and reply with the html contents of the article

For the backend i run an instance of n8n.io which can listen for emails via imap and run custom scripts based on the email address

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#45

Post by corytheboyd »

sabrehagen wrote: post #29

I automated my desktop environment configuration using Docker containers. I'm able to go from a headless tty to perfectly tailored desktop environment in ~2.5 seconds. First time start requires a ~40 min build, byut thereafter ~2.5s to start afresh. https://github.com/sabrehagen/desktop-environment I did the same think for my production application environment. One command to go from no infrastructure to production g…

I don’t mean to sound snarky, but why? Is this for your personal desktop or something else?

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#47

Post by subjectsigma »

contingencies wrote: post #31

I've found that paying people to provide you with good food saves tonnes of time: shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning, garbage. Hotel buffet breakfasts or similar are a good solution. This is by far the most time efficient daily hack. Also good are floor cleaning robots. Not owning a car is great too, if you add up all the time doing parking/registration/license/insurance/whatever. Software... well, mostly just avo…

Do you just never cook for yourself? What service/method do you use?

I would love to reduce my cooking to weekends/whenever I feel like it, but I've had a really hard time finding a cheap, healthy, and sustainable way to do this. I always feel like I'm paying a more money to eat something that's not that great for me and tearing through gas/one-time-use plastics doing so.

Re: Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

#49

Post by orthecreedence »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #42
orthecreedence wrote: post #32

I got sick of opening the same tmux/terminal format every time I had to restart, so I wrote this: #!/bin/bash function command() { CMD="$1" xdotool type "$1" xdotool key Return } function key() { KEY="$1" xdotool key $KEY } function clear() { for n in {1..10}; do key BackSpace done } function name_panel() { NAME="$1" key ctrl+a key comma clear command $NAME } name_panel 'cmd' key ctrl+a key c name_panel 'srv' key ctr…

I feel like I should point out that tmux is quite happy to take commands directly on the command line: `tmux new-window -n srv` will make a new window named "srv", `tmux next-window` will move you forward one window, etc. Hit prefix-? to list the commands bound to each key when you're running.

Thanks! I had this strange feeling someone was going to tell me something exactly like this after I posted. I'm glad I did though, it's good to learn new things.
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