Earlier quoted context omitted.
me too, thanks
me 3
Would you please alert me as well?
Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
441–450 of 722 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#442I automated a lot of my eBay trawling.
Created an app that does repeatable searches which scrapes eBay to download all the results - filters out stuff from a kill word list, filters out items from yesterday's list and a bunch of other things.
Turned it into an app 14 years ago - http://www.auctionsieve.com
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#443Here are a few that have been pretty useful to me and my friends: 1) Local events finder. A few friends of mine and I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles last year and didn't know many people. Even though there is a vibrant event scene down here with hundreds of events every day, we always seemed to find out about the cool ones after they had passed. I wrote a Facebook scraper that would find all of the local bus…
is 3) up somewhere? I spend my time from boarding to takeoff frantically googling movies.
Not yet, but I am happy to share it. Shoot me an email and I'll dust off the code and send it your way.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm trying to expand my Chinese vocab, so I usually do something like " translation" eg. 拓展 expand
For that I use Anki with the Chinese Support plugin, which is honestly pretty great. It does not only have characters and translation, but also pronunciation both as Pinyin (I think other romanizations can be configured) and audio (which plays on review, great for training your ear and checking your pronunciation), as well as measure words and characters in the opposite set (simplified vs traditional). And it can fil…
ive actually never tried anki before, but will check it out now. thks for the details!
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#445I used a raspberry pi to control my TV using HDMI-CEC and exposed a subset of the controls through a web API allowing me to turn on/off my TV from my phone or voice controlled from a google home. I did this because a chromecast will turn on my TV and set it to the correct input, but it wouldn't turn off the TV. Turning the TV off was the only reason I needed to touch my remote control at all. But just recently google…
> But just recently google added the turning off Thanks for posting this. I was thinking about attaching an IR blaster to a Raspberry Pi to do the same thing.
No problem. ive been thinking of doing the ir blaster recently as well. Id like to be able to change the input on my audio receiver without using the remote.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#446Wrote a simple app that emails people automatically asking them if they want to hangout. It reads my calendar and randomly decides whether or not we should hang out. The probability that it'll decide to ask gets higher and higher the longer we don't hangout, which it determines by reading my calendar.
I'm also wondering if you could post that script, that sounds very interesting
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I now have a big old dataset of SpeedTests and unix timestamps which I graphed This peaked my interest, as my connection is also crappy. Did you actually manage to make improvements with this data though?
I managed to confirm that my perceived changes in connection quality were ACTUAL changes in connection quality. I never took the time to do anything better with it though, but it does show that My provider seems to have done SOMETHING, as the speed floor has moved up, and significant events (sometimes as slow as dialup) became significantly rarer. It's also fun because it allows you to get a rough idea of how over pr…
I used to do the same with my DSL connection. I noticed that the connection would drop or degrade when it rained sometimes. I started scraping the modem's status page with curl (the status page didn't require logging in), and graphing the SNR and data rates with gnuplot. Then I added temperature and precipitation data scraped from Weather Underground with a Python script to a separate CSV file.
I did confirm that the SNR varied with temperature, with both daily and long-term cycles, assuming from thermal expansion/contraction in the lines and connections. I also observed dropouts when it rained.
The strangest thing was that there was also a hard 12-hour cycle: every morning and evening, at the same times, the SNR would suddenly drop (in the morning) and go up (in the evening) by several dB. I never figured out what it was, but I always guessed it was some equipment turning on or off that caused interference on the line.
One of the coolest parts actually was simply using GNU `date` to parse dates in natural language, so I could run something like `plotmodem 2 months ago to 1 month ago` to graph the data from the previous month, or `plotmodem 2 weeks` to see the last 2 weeks of data. I used `date` to convert natural-language dates to a standard format which I then parsed out of the CSV files with grep.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you had many issues with them changing things that break this connectivity? I use Mint and they seem to have endless issues with that despite having obviously close business relationships.
Not really, but I haven't updated the package version in a while. What is Mint (I assume you're not referring to the Linux distro)?
Mint is a financial website/app that hooks into your bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, loans, etc. and compiles them all into one place. It also has some built in budgeting tools and such. It's owned by Intuit.
Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
#449Used python and selenium webdriver to scrape free movie pirate sites for URLs and images. The script had to traverse the pirate sites using id tags, and simulate a click in the movie iframe for the site to populate the iframe's src attribute. Then it generates a static html page from that list of URLs. It automatically updates a netflix style website for me and my friends to watch movies. This negates all the pirate…
link that thing dude or pm it to me