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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?

#161

Post by hellothere007 »

wiz21c wrote: post #54
Walkman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds terrible. Even more terrible a lot of people (probably you also) don't find it terrible.

Damn am I so old school that I prefer real voice (and believe me, Skype over Hotel networks is awful (and floss alternatives are no better), but that's better than nothing). Automating that part of my life seems so soulless...

I like voice better of course but what I didn't mention is that the cost per minute if I call her is $0.60 and that quickly adds up and she doesn't have internet over there, so if a text costs me $0.003 I might as well be using it

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

#162

Post by davidmurdoch »

romdev wrote: post #27

Automated almost all my bill payments to use my rewards card. I set up alerts on my online banking site so I get texted when each one clears. Saves me a couple hours of grumpy time each month, plus I get a substantial 1% cash back that ends up being about $200/year. Also, you can dispute charges on a credit card if they get it wrong. Can't do that with bill payment service.

Citi Double Cash will give you 2% cash back.

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

#163

Post by hellothere007 »

jklein11 wrote: post #21
hellothere007 wrote: post #5

I had a cron job that sends automatically a text to my wife each morning along with a joke, she's in another country so is something I did to keep the communication open

Did the text message come from a separate account or were you able to use your cell phone number? how did this work?

it was an azure webjob using twilio api to send the message, I randomized the time and the selection of jokes to make it seem like I was doing it :)

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

#165

Post by davidmurdoch »

If my Internet goes down at home I just have to plug my phone into the computer, click a confirmation button, and it will switch over to using cell data automatically.

Unfortunately this no longer works well, as hurricane Irma damaged the cell tower near my house and I only get a few hundred Kbps now. :-(

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

#166

Post by markfer »

juancampa wrote: post #48
romdev wrote: post #27

Automated almost all my bill payments to use my rewards card. I set up alerts on my online banking site so I get texted when each one clears. Saves me a couple hours of grumpy time each month, plus I get a substantial 1% cash back that ends up being about $200/year. Also, you can dispute charges on a credit card if they get it wrong. Can't do that with bill payment service.

How did you automate this? Did you use some sort of API or just set it up through the bank's website?

also curious how

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

#168

Post by thol »

schappim wrote: post #84

(This first one made/saved me thousands) I use it both for home and work: I automated the online creation of late delivery “inquiries” to Australia Post (I.e when an parcel is late or has gone missing). Australia Post has a service level agreement for prepaid Express Post satchels where if they’re late they will give you a satchel for free (or credit your account). When I applied this to every order my work shipped f…

This is the script I have been looking for, any chance at sharing or selling it?

We did this manually every week to get refunds from Australia post, but with volume it takes a long time to check on them all.

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

#169

Post by c22 »

amingilani wrote: post #49
malingo wrote: post #9

I track my visits to the gym with a geofence trigger with my phone--logs to a google spreadsheet through IFTTT.

This I would love to reproduce. How?

I use Tasker to do something similar. It checks visible cell towers when I unlock and turns on wifi if it sees the tower near my house. (Another script turns off WiFi when the network drops presumably because I've gone out of range).

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

#170

Post by bobberb »

mintplant wrote: post #96

I 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…

Please share!
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