Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by t1o5 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 4:54 AM UTC

tonyarkles wrote: post #277

t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

Did you make it to SK? There's a few of us here, but not that many...

Yes, made it to SK, but moved to Montreal for better job prospects. Probably will have to move to Toronto because my spouse's can't find a good job due to the strict French language requirements for non IT jobs in Quebec.

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

#482

Post by meerab » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 4:58 AM UTC

pinusc wrote: post #472

I. I live in China, so pollution can be a problem at times. Usually I don't bother to check the Air Quality Index, but it's useful to know when it's really bad, so I wrote a small script to connect to aqicn API and display the index in my desktop panel (along with weather and temperature :) II. This year my school's schedule is really hard to interpret, with 4-days rotations out of 6 every week, plus fridays also rot…

Hello Pinusc,

About number II - I am in California and school calendar is hard to keep up. I am writing an app for it. I will be interested in knowing how you are approaching this - especially for Chinese schools.

My e-mail is meera.bavadekar at gmail.com Please feel free to drop a line.

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

#483

Post by t1o5 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:00 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #438

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.

Well, you'd want to make it a /bit/ more generic, surely? Like, "load this url and send a text to this number if the (page text | diff) matches this regexp"? Even allow people to create presets that would then be added as a generic thing. You could use it for camping all sorts of intermittent online things (web site specials, online ticket pre-orders, etc.)

There are many sites which already does this. During that situation when I missed a slot, I didn't want to take any chances again by using sites like visualping. I trusted my script and twilio API to work.

First I thought to ring a loud alarm connected with a Pi, but then it will be limited to my apartment. So I went with twilio to give me a phone call. Because I should act immediately and time was of the essence. Emails or SMS might go unnoticed.

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

#484

Post by zeristor » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:00 AM UTC

richev wrote: post #381

t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

https://visualping.io/ can do this, although it sends email alerts rather than SMS messages. I used it to notify me of new Hololens events, listed on this page https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebI...

No Hololens events in London, is that by design?

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

#485

Post by sasaf5 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:07 AM UTC

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me again for not updating the tables more frequently :P

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

#486

Post by zeristor » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:07 AM UTC

pfalke wrote: post #352

t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

Did the same thing to get a wedding registration appointment with the Berlin city administration, but used Ghostery instead of AWS+Twilio. The responsible administration department currently doesn’t give out appointments and advises not to plan weddings because they are so understaffed, but I didn’t feel like waiting. Got a notification email from Gostery in the middle of the night, registered the only available slot…

Isn’t Ghostery an ad-blocker?

I can’t see anything else with that name. All the references in this thread are great tips, so I’d like to track this one down too.

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

#487

Post by AWebOfBrown » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:08 AM UTC

I did a simple scraping automation of my favourite online clothing stores, storing the clothes (prices per size) in Postgres which would notify me via SMS if something I wanted dropped below a price point I set. Also built a simple front-end for it using React / Apollo (with graphQl and express on the backend) and MobX. The gist was you could select a store from a dropdown, plug-in the product code and it'd go fetch the product / save its url in the DB and scan it every 4 hours or so, then scan the products table to see if the price of the product was set below my desired price and then notify (scheduled via node-cron).

Had it working well, but of course it was against T&Cs for each store and ultimately would have been quite brittle, so I didn't polish it off before moving on. Frustrating because I wanted to use it as a demo to get a first web-dev job but it really wasn't worth completing and deploying. Also, twilio SMS in Australia is IIRC 5c per message which is kinda ridiculous for any serious quantity of texts, I planned to hook it up to a Telegram bot instead.

It was actually useful though because clothing retailers don't often send you a notification if what you want drops in price, particularly when it's an individual price drop due to low stock.

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

#488

Post by zeristor » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

I’ve tweaked Gmail filter settings so some Meetup invites appeared as a phone alert, ie nearly everything else filtered into no alert.

London Meetup fill up within minutes that many data science ones allot tickets “randomly” via lottery.

Surely this is a market opportunity?

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

#489

Post by t1o5 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:21 AM UTC

zeristor wrote: post #488

t1o5 wrote: post #143

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

I’ve tweaked Gmail filter settings so some Meetup invites appeared as a phone alert, ie nearly everything else filtered into no alert. London Meetup fill up within minutes that many data science ones allot tickets “randomly” via lottery. Surely this is a market opportunity?

The problems are too fragmented for a generic alert service to solve.

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

#490

Post by viperscape » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 5:27 AM UTC

My kids constantly lose the controller to the tv, so I hooked up a smart outlet and echo dot to be able to turn on TV with my voice. The TV turns on because of “power-on from powerloss” settings most TVs have or default to. The Roku automatically pauses any show when the HDMI goes dormant and plays it when TV comes back.

I also scrape the NASA astronomical pic of the day, I think they have an API now, and save the photo in a background images folder, the desktop background is automatically rotated every 30 minutes pointing at that folder for source.