I have a morning routine script that has some yoga exercises, guided meditation, some aerobics, journalling and one hobby that alternates with the day of the week. It is basically a python script with some timers and some TTS from a text file.
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
151–160 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#152I have access to several different libraries for borrowing books. I made a webpage that would let me type a search term once and search across all of them at once.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#153I just bought a roomba:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008LX6OC6/ref=oh_aui_deta...
Highly recommend it to anyone with a large amount of hardwood floors. We have a couple area rugs, one is pretty thick and it handles the transitions fine.
Floors have never been cleaner, no longer need to vacuum animal fur everyday.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#154I have a script on AWS which scrapes the UK National Rail website for my commute every few minutes between set times in the morning and afternoon, and sends me a Slack notification if there are delays or cancellations.
I could check manually but train problems are actually infrequent enough that I usually don't bother, although they are highly disruptive when they do happen.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#1551. 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). (task: life tracking I didn't have the brainpower for in the morning)
3. The worst part about D&D is keeping track of all the little variables and math, and none of the character sheets are any good (or if they are, they have 1 or 2 glaring problems, like only allowing 3 classes), so I wrote my own. Uses KnockoutJS to update all the little formulas that change every time you level up or gain skill points, etc. Here it is, though it's not exactly polished for public consumption: https://github.com/imnotpete/character-builder (task: fiddly math when I'm trying to have fun)
4. More IFTTT -- if my Roost fire alarm battery detects an alarm, I should receive an email and all my Hue lights will turn on. Unfortunately, the whole Roost process is slow enough that I just get confused when all my lights turn on 5 minutes after I burn the pizza. (task: turn on the lights so I can see to put out a midnight fire or escape my burning house)
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#156Creating Dungeons & Dragons characters. I found that for first time players it is difficult to overcome the initial onslaught of information and rules. So I created a form-based questionnaire that abstracts out most of the uninteresting parts of creating a character, their stats. Based on how a player answered the questions, they are emailed a filled-out character form along with relevant information to their charact…
I'd love to see the code for this, happen to have a public repo?
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you're dehumanizing the people actually doing the work for you.
That was not my intention. Perhaps there is a language barrier as English is my second (or third) language. To automate something to me means getting the same result without me manually having to do it. Like hiring a professional to translate a document for me. I’d call that automation but I know now that’s incorrect.
> Perhaps there is a language barrier as English is my second (or third) language.
Ah, that's understandable then.
As someone else said in another comment, passing the work off to another human is usually referred to as "outsourcing". Automation typically refers to passing the work off to a robot or computer.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#158CD ripping. Initial audio pass in an older version of EAC, which hands off to the scripts. Those validate the audio against the AccurateRip + CUETools databases and file the rip appropriately if there's a failure (e.g. "might be a different pressing" vs. "few enough bad samples to be repairable" vs. "completely aborted the rip", etc.). Then a second pass on the disc to extract subcode data and embed any TOC/subcode differences as comments in the cuesheet. Then, based on that, automatically generate a de-emphasized version for discs with the PRE flag set anywhere, then extract additional metadata (full release date, disc number, featured artists) from the title data I manually entered in EAC, compress to FLAC, embed the cuesheet, transcode .m4a copies, and file.
Automatically adding sort-artist fields to the cuesheet/.m4a files is next (I have a good source in the software that I use for cataloging the collection). I also need to write something that backports changes made to the tags in the .m4a files to the original cuesheet...
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#159Not sure if this qualifies, but I was unimpressed by my bank USAA's transaction visualization efforts. I wanted to see a line graph of my account's withdrawals and deposits. Luckily they have an 'export to CSV' button for a specific time period of transactions, and I wrote a small program to turn these CSVs into graphs using Python's `matplotlib`: https://github.com/nicolashahn/USAA-Transaction-Graph
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#160I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscrip…
This is cool.
I wonder how effective it is though these days, I'd say 70% of my RSS feeds are either truncated forms of a full article (with a 'click here to continue reading!' link), or just summaries.