←back to thread

Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
Show context
actionfromafar ◴[28 Apr 23 10:04 UTC] No.35739396[source]▶
My wife has her work schedule in a mobile web app, but the app is really bad. Turns out the app is just a wrapper around a web site.

So I made a KVM instance which does one thing - login automatically, start Firefox, login with Selenium, then uses some kind of other Python desktop control contraption to press CTRL-S, tab-tab, save the web page to the Downloads folder.

Then, the python program proceeds to parse the HTML (with BeautifulSoup), extract the schedule times from how they are showed in some <div> or other (super weird ugly text format). Checks for changes over time and emails her what has changed. (So she gets a notice when her schedule changes and she doesn't have to periodically check in with the app.)

Finally converts the schedule to calendar format and publishes on a web site so the schedule can also be seen in the phone calendar.

replies(3): >>35739406 #>>35750142 #>>35756548 #
supahfly_remix ◴[28 Apr 23 10:07 UTC] No.35739406[source]▶
That's cool! What library/software did you get the instance to email?
replies(1): >>35739413 #
1. actionfromafar ◴[28 Apr 23 10:08 UTC] No.35739413[source]▶
Python has a built-in SMTP client, which I connected to my regular email account. So the emails are "coming from me".