What are some useful, fun scripts that you use regularly?

Meta
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Hi everybody,

Since this is a great scripting and design community, visual- and coding-wise, I would ask you guys, if there are any useful and/or fun scripts that you use regularly, maybe daily, and make your digital life easier?

This is meant to be a free, meta-discussion first and foremost, and I invite you to share ideas that can go even beyond Rhino and Grasshopper. You don’t have to share your scripts, but you might, if you want to!

Let’s go!

I have a small Python script that manages my Downloads folder and some other directoriesI It basically sorts files by file type, name and some other specific characteristics into a predefined folder structures. It also renames selected folders to show how many new, unrevised files have been added lately. For instance, I have a folder ‘Inbox’ in my ‘Finances’ directory that gets renamed to ‘Inbox (2)’, if two new bank statements have been added that I still need to review.

Furthermore, I have another Python script that is scheduled to run 4 times a day on a web server. I checks selected RSS feeds for new content and downloads it, if it matches certain criteria. A database keeps track of the recent downloads to the server and prevents fetching duplicate or similar files. The script also monitors server space and purges older, tagged files, if it runs out of space, or even halts all operations and messages me.

I have another Python script, that I use once or twice a year. It scrapes my entire amazon order history, parses the data, saves it to a CSV file and outputs some fun diagrams, like spending per month and so on.
Unfortunately, this script doesn’t work anymore, since amazon has somehow made it harder to remotely login to your account with a script. I haven’t managed to fix it so far.

1 Like
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OK I’ll go next!
A script to calculate and print the age in days, months and years of my kids (useful/fun when their age in months is significant). Given a photo of one of them it will check the date when the photo was taken from the Exif tags and look for a photo of the other one at the same age. And to completely blow up the Single Responsibility principle the same script looks in our city’s open data repository for the school meals for the week and prints the whole week to the console or just today and tomorrow to the notification area of my iPhone.

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Great stuff, @Dancergraham! What do you do with the school meal information? Or are you just curious what your children eat on weekdays?

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Yes. Curiosity, experimenting with web queries and also trying to avoid giving the same meal for lunch and dinner.

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Nice! Are your kids also interested in coding?

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My 3 year old likes it when I make my phone print her name N times. My 20 month old hasn’t expressed an opinion yet :smiley:
:baby: :baby_bottle:

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What tool(s) are you using for this ? Have you tried Selenium?

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Mainly requests! Thanks, I’ll look into it.

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I haven’t tried it - I’ve only used Requests + Beautiful Soup but I heard about Selenium here:

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hello… @Dancergraham and @diff-arch
Do you know if it’s possible to use directly selenium in the rhino python editor?
If yes, how can i do… how can i add the selenium lib to the rhino python editor?

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Hello,

I don’t know - I can see various online tutorials and questions about using Selenium with IronPython - have you tried to follow some of those?

good luck!

Graham