Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
I had three fun ones.<p>I wanted to learn powershell, and I was interested in the history of worms on the internet, so I made a script to check <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isc.sans.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isc.sans.edu&#x2F;</a> and send me an email if the status was not green. Turns out, powershell has an all-in-one function to send an SMTP email, which I thought was hilarious. I used windows task scheduler to run it every hour.<p>Second, I was struggling with my Cable internet connection, and it was incredibly difficult to nail down what was causing my slow speeds. To help with the diagnostics, I wrote a little python script to download the files that Netflix uses for speedtests (check Fast.com) and logged the average of 10 runs to a file. It similarly used task scheduler to run every 10 minutes and as a result I now have a big old dataset of SpeedTests and unix timestamps which I graphed while playing around with Pillow<p>I wrote a python bot to Read project Gutenburg books to twitter. This was to participate in a contest that involved seeing which &quot;team&quot; could get a hashtag into more tweets. A twitter bot takes about five minutes to make, as I found a brilliant little Python-Twitter library. Unfortunately, my teammates got cold feet and convinced me to de-rate the bot&#x27;s posting frequency, meaning we barely lost to a group of 60 or so sorority girls doing it the &quot;correct&quot; way. However, as we did it sort of below-radar, the loophole of automating it is still open and valid.<p>Currently I&#x27;m working on automating the process of creating photoreal scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator. The FSX scene has built tools to turn open source land-use data into ground scenery like houses and forests, and Microsoft included the SDK and Documentation as part of the game[1], but since high resolution photo-real satellite photography is an incredibly expensive asset, nobody has automated that part of the process. I most likely will not be successful, as I have no source for the photo-real imagery.<p>Personally, I find that absurd, as my tax dollars as an American likely pay for incredibly high resolution (higher than 1 foot per pixel) satellite imagery of the entire world, and I&#x27;m not sure how the NSA providing that to citizens would hurt national security. The Stallman in me feels that I&#x27;ve already paid for that data, and it should be public domain. Hell, even a year old would work fine. The biggest problem would be Google and Microsoft lobbying to prevent the devaluation of their expensive assets.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;ff798293.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;ff798293.aspx</a>