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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?

#251

Post by hacalox »

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…

I think your project is very very cool, and I was thinking maybe we can work together on this. We created a very similar thing, but instead of scraping RSS, we scrapped some well structured pages like newspapers and blogs.

If you are interested in working together please reach me out!

You can check what we did here: https://eink.news

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

#252

Post by joefarish »

hoskdoug wrote: post #154

I 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.

That sounds really useful, have you thought about putting it up on Github?

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

#253

Post by santaclaus »

netsharc wrote: post #110
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do what one guy did and start spray-painting penises around the pot holes. (slightly NSFW) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/27/artist-penis-potho...

Time to program the Roomba.. just add image recognition and spray paint module..

Too many potholes for a Roomba, need a drone with a spray paint can.

Hell, just scrape seeclickfix for reported pothole locations, have the drone fly there and draw a dong, and boom, instant fix.

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

#254

Post by snerbles »

codegeek wrote: post #203
artpi wrote: post #102

I have set up a battery of scripts on google app engine and Im pretty happy with it. 1. I have a script to automatically buy small amount of BTC every day 2. For the more knowledge-dense books I read, I write summaries of them ( https://piszek.com/books/ ). I have a script that puts a random book review to my pocket for reviewing every week 3. I have an instagram account of lego minifig ( https://www.instagram.com/le…

#7 is genius. For lazy folks like me, that is a great way of wishing people bdays :)

Make sure you receive a notification of delivery, so you have an idea of why people are randomly thanking you months after you've forgotten about setting such a thing up.

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

#255

Post by t1o5 »

justboxing wrote: post #233
t1o5 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, hosted at sinpnotifier.com, Saskatchewan province is not that attractive for skilled immigrants. Had one sale though, then I shut it down.

> Why don't you convert this into a paid service and > I did, ...Had one sale though Yeah, was about to say, it's too small of a niche. Plus the risk that sooner or later, Saskatchewan would update their site to provide the same feature.

Yes, too small of an audience to sell it to. Also I didn't care about the timezones in the script. It will make the call no matter in which timezone you are in (you will get the call in the middle of the night), because Saskatchewan's site do not care, it will close when the quota gets filled and it gets filled fast, within hours !

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

#256

Post by Spooky23 »

jpeeler wrote: post #201
santaclaus wrote: post #86

In college I wrote a script to register for classes. I'd input the potentially-full classes I'd like to register for, and it would just hammer the registration site repeatedly until someone removed themselves from the class at which point I'd be registered. I'm still amazed IT didn't pull the network connection to my dorm room or have any kind of rate limiting. No 8am sessions for me!

Similarly the college I attended required a five or six (can't remember now) digit number required for access to class registration. The idea was that you would talk to your advisor beforehand so you didn't sign up for the wrong thing I guess. My advisor seemed to be pretty uninterested in meeting with me over email (never responded to multiple attempts), so I gave up and brute forced it. Class registration was done…

That’s brilliant.

My advisor was a jerk who scheduled appointments for about 14 people at the same time, the day he left the country for a month. Wish I had this then, that following semester was brutal.

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

#258

Post by aoeuasdf1 »

threeaccents wrote: post #242
rrggrr wrote: post #230

1. My former spouse wouldn't answer the home phone when I talked with the kids during the divorce. I wrote an app that texted her and logged the attempt for reporting to the guardian ad litem. 2. She also wouldn't answer the door when during kids pick-up. The same app texted her when I was outside. 3. To disprove her allegations I wasn't involved in the kids school and activities I used Android's Locale app to trigge…

Did you have to prove your system was logging real data?

You might be able to use https://opentimestamps.org/ to provide evidence over time (i.e. proving it wasn't fabricated all at once).

Still, that doesn't prove that the individual points weren't fabricated at the time.

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

#259

Post by [deleted] »

justboxing wrote: post #239
rrggrr wrote: post #230

1. My former spouse wouldn't answer the home phone when I talked with the kids during the divorce. I wrote an app that texted her and logged the attempt for reporting to the guardian ad litem. 2. She also wouldn't answer the door when during kids pick-up. The same app texted her when I was outside. 3. To disprove her allegations I wasn't involved in the kids school and activities I used Android's Locale app to trigge…

This is awesome. You should turn this into a sevice or App -- call it DivorceBot or CustodyBot or FatherTime ? Considering that close to a MILLION Americans get divorced every year, at a 50% rate i.e. half of marriages are ending up in divorce in the US. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm

[deleted]

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

#260

Post by 0898 »

apearson wrote: post #179
LukeLambert wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who clicks the unsubscribe link? I live by Inbox Zero and I've been giving out my email address for over a decade (500+ sites and services in 1Password), but I very rarely receive marketing emails because I always unsubscribe. In the US, it's a law that businesses must comply with opt-out requests. Do most people feel their inbox is too far gone to manage manually?

I attempt the click the unsubscribe link for everything I get but some sites seem to double down on the emails after the unsubscribe

I think this is an urban legend.
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