Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with automation

I need email updates on my blackberry from a private authenticated rss feed.

Chamunks — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:57:46 -0800

I need to be notified on my blackberry of RSS events on a secure authenticated RSS feed. These notifications can be sms texts or preferably plain text emails. They could and should filter for keywords as the site doesn't as far as I can tell. I was thinking of using yahoo pipes but I have no idea how to start but I've heard its a good way to start. I'm looking for ways to be notified immediately of events on member sites I go to. One in particular is https://ssl.what.cd and a keyword would be something like "freeleech". Its the only example that I can think of right now but I have many other uses for something like this any insight related to fulfilling my need here is fully appreciated.

Also if this (assuming but not limited to the use of yahoo pipes) pipe could also benefit from being able to push this feed to google reader as it would be nice to find a way to get authenticated feeds in google reader.

Please if you must troll over invites and morality issues please restrict them to direct messages to my user via mefimail I would prefer to keep this questions answers related to solving my problem and not a possible piracy flame war when that is not the focus of this question it was only an example.

Type, copy, click, paste, type, copy, click...

SNWidget — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:56:57 -0800

I've been manually sending out emails about test results and then entering them into a database - is there a way to automate so part of this process? I'm a teaching assistant for a graduate department. Students in various classes come into the resource room in which I work and take a variety of tests that are required to pass their classes. They take the tests, we grade them, enter the results into a spreadsheet, and then send them an e-mail saying if they've passed of failed.

Since it's the end of the semester, I got caught doing about 30 of these today. Copying and pasting the same form letter over and over into an Outlook window after having entered these all into an Excel spreadsheet seemed stupid. I know there's gotta be a way to automate this process at least partially - can you help me with it?

Here's the general gist of it all.

Student takes test from one of 4 classes.

Results (a pass or fail) is entered into an excel spreadsheet. Each class has it's own spreadsheet. Each student needs to take multiple tests, and they can be taken in any order at any time during the semester. If the student fails, they must retake the test. They get an e-mail for every time they take a test, up to 3 times. Students can take multiple tests at once as well.

After the student takes the test, they are graded and entered into the database. The student's name, test type, and whether they passed or not, and the date is recorded. And e-mail is then sent to them with a list of which tests they took, and whether they passed or failed the tests. There's a bit more info on the letter, but that's all standard form stuff.

Which parts of this can be automated? And how do I do it? I know about mail merge, but because of the continual nature of this, I'm having trouble seeing how to make this work. If not, is this just something I'm going to have to do manually?

I have available a PC, Excel, and Microsoft Outlook.

How can I create vCards from email sigs?

mfitz — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:05:40 -0800

How can I auto-magically create a vCard from an email signature? I'm growing tired of the repeated copy-and-paste operations required to make new entries in my Apple Address Book when I have a nicely formatted signature file right in front of me. Is there a script or other handy tool that will do this work for me, guessing which bit of info is the name, phone number, etc. and placing them into a new vCard for me?

I Wish I Could Just Throw It At the 'Net

47triple2 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:33:21 -0800

Auomating Mac Filter: I want to upload a movie to a free video sharing site from the command line. How? I currently have a system where I email an image to my Mac Mini which upload the image to TinyPic then Twitters the caption and image URL: ("This is a cool picture! - http://bt.ly/example")

I want to do the same thing with videos. The only problem is that I do not know how to automate uploading a short video to a video sharing site. I found this python script to upload a video to Revver, but using the following command, I cannot get the video to upload:

python /Users/example/RevverExamplePython/revver-upload-video.py /Users/example/revverupload/movie.3gp --login Username --passphrase-file /Users/example/revverpassphrase.txt --age-rating 1 --title test --tag test --author test --url http://www.example.com/ --credits test --description test

Which returns an unnamed error. So, in the end, I want a system to upload a video to any video sharing site and return the URL (or video id) for that video. Help?

How to make Quick Parts more intelligent in MS Word?

Ridge — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:58:19 -0800

I want to automate a Word document for some sales drones. I'd love it if I could check for when a Quick Part field ends with an "s", and if so insert just an apostrophe as opposed to apostrophe then "s". But how? Here's the sitch: Sales need a template they can use that's been automated to within an inch of its life. So I've used Quick Parts for a field called [Company] like so:

If [Company]'s requirements...

They can edit one instance of the [Company] field and it auto-updates across the whole document. Which works great, right up until said [Company] name ends with an "s", eg:

If Ridge Services's requirements...

They send out a lot of these documents, and I don't trust them to reliably check every one for instances of "Ridge Services's" and correct them all (even though Word helpfully lets you know via its spelling error red underline).

So, is there any way to check what letter [Company] ends with, and if it ends with any letter other than "s", insert an apostrophe and then "s", but if [Company] ends with an "s", just insert an apostrophe?

And if so, how?

Oh, and it has to work across MS Word 2007 PC, and MS Word 2008 Mac. Ya know, just to complicate things...

PPS: I hate Word

Best Macro Recorder/Playback

tcv — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:39:59 -0800

I am in a market for a Windows macro recorder and am trying to decided between Perfect Macro Recorder or Jitbit or whatever HIVEMIND suggests... Ideally what this macro would do is the following:

1. Start at login within a particular account.
2. Go to a particular website.
3. Click a particular link on that site.
4. Click another link on the next page.
5. Login to account when prompted and submit.

That would do it.

I am not a programmer so whatever I choose would has to be pretty darned easy to use.

Thanks!!

automefi: entering a sequence of keystrokes on a mac. Free software?

omnigut — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:54:35 -0800

I'd like to automate my mac to do keystrokes. Like, flicking between an excel spreadsheet and firefox. I'd like free software to do this. Any suggestions? The keystrokes are simple:
cmd c (copy excel cell)
down (to next cell)
cmd tab (change to nex application - firefox)
cmd t (new tab)
cmd v (paste excel cell into firefox URL field)
enter (load page)
cmd tab (change to next application - back to excel)

I'd like to be able to run the automation by hitting a key, like one of the f buttons. I've used AutoIT on Windows 2000, and just about got used to it. Is there a Mac equivalent? Does the mac itself have this kind of thing on it? (macro?) Mac OSX 10.5

Help in rendering Gmail 'Last Accounty Activity' useless.

passtehbrainz — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:19:08 -0800

Automatically login / logout of Gmail at a specified interval As you know, gmail lists the latest activity at the bottom of the page, and shows the last few ip's and the times they logged in by clicking details.

I need to 'fool' this log, by automating logging in, and logging out at a specified interval. Some ideas would be through a firefox extension, applescript, a mouse clicking recording program, etc, but I haven't found any such solution.

Without going into details, I need to render the gmail activity log useless.

Is there a sane way to batch-convert a year of expenses from one currency to another in Excel?

doctorpiorno — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:24:57 -0800

Excel n00b filter: Is there a way to automatically convert an expense sheet from one currency to another by matching the date the cost was incurred with the exchange rate applicable on that specific day? I need to include a ton of expenses incurred while abroad in my yearly tax report, but all my receipts are in Japanese Yen. Therefore, I have to find out what the JPY - EUR exchange rate was on the day each expense was incurred and convert the amount to Euro. This is terribly time-consuming, so I'm looking for ways to automate the process.

I have managed to find a website that will let me download historical data of the exchange rates in Excel format, which makes things a bit easier. However, this would be much faster still if I could get Excel to automatically look up the exchange rates on that table according to the date and grab the correct rate for each entry.

I'm pretty sure there is a way to do this under Excel, but I can't find it for the life of me. Could one of the experts in the house kindly point me in the right direction? Thanks Hive Mind!

How can I make a movie from 4000 still images?

jozzas — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:10:11 -0800

I want to assemble 4000 still images from a recent trip into a movie. I don't want to do it manually. Please tell me what software will do this for me! I have been travelling for the last eight months, and have taken 4000+ photos. Since there's no way anyone would ever want to look at all of them, I want to assemble them all into a video, where each image is displayed for a tenth of a second or so (and the whole thing set to music). I assume this can be done fairly easily as it's how all stop motion animation is done, right?

I would like to be able to script this and leave it to render. I have resized copies of the images to 720p, and even added black borders to vertical shots so that they're the correct size.

I've tried ImageMagick, but it doesn't come with either H264 or mp3 (for decoding the music) codecs, which are what I think I want. I tried compiling these in from source but got stuck in dependency hell and have now given up on ImageMagick completely. I'm only going to be uploading this to the web, so any suggestions on better codecs will also be listened to.

Please reccommend me some software, preferably free, that will allow me to assemble my little movie. XP / Linux doesn't bother me either way, as long as it works. Thanks!

Exrtracting automation data

leibniz — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:42:54 -0800

Is there any way to extract/copy the automation data (e.g. volume, panning in real audio or midi) from a music sequencer so that it can be displayed and analyzed as numerical data in another programme? Is there an indirect way to do the same thing by tracing the line in a graphics programme? I am planning a musical rating experiment where participants rate various features of an audio clip in real time. It is really convenient to use the automation data (e.g. panning) of a sequencer programme, where they have a draw tool (in particular I have Ableton live 7). It will look something like this in the end.

So is there a way to capture this data so that we can analyze it with another programme (e.g. to present as a list of numbers in excel)? Perhaps there's even an indirect way to do a screen capture and then draw a line matching it in a graphics programme, and then extract that data?? The ultimate goal is to make detailed quantitative comparisons of ratings by different people that can be lined up with features of the music at a particular moment.

Invisible automatic backup?

ConstantineXVI — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:04:02 -0800

Want to build a backup/storage/print server for a home network that the users will never have to be aware of Our desktop recently died of capacitor plague. Instead of simply replacing the desktop, we've been considering buying netbooks for the kids, likely running WinXP (we already have a laptop or two ourselves). At the core's going to be a lightweight machine, preferably running Linux that's going to handle storage (easy enough), printing (again), and the tricky part, backup.

Whenever they're connected to our home WiFi, I want their netbooks to automatically back up their data to the server, in case of disaster. More importantly, I don't want them to lift a finger or be aware of the process at all. Chronological backups like Time Machine wouldn't be a bad idea, but not necessary.

I don't want to do this anymore - help me automate it!

downing street memo — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:24:25 -0800

In Excel, is there an easy (i.e. free) way to cross-reference new spreadsheet entries with another workbook to ensure there are no duplicates? I'm totally ignorant about Excel automation, so please forgive if there's a simple way to do this. My team at work has been asked to compile a daily list of names using Excel. The only problem is that there is another, existing database of names, and there can't be any duplicates.

Is there any simple way to quickly cross-reference the two workbooks? Currently we're just opening the old database and manually searching for duplicates. The two workbooks can't be combined, for a variety of reasons.

Need to automate a weekly task using AppleScript

joshrholloway — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:20:15 -0800

I need to automate the process of printing a report to PDF with the date in the file name, saving it in an archive folder, printing it, and emailing it as an attachment. I am on a Mac and using Pages, Automator, and AppleScript. Help me find the missing pieces! I have to write a report each Friday for work and send it as an attachment to a specific email address where it gets processed by an internal server. Usually my process is as follows:

1. Write report in Pages.
2. Print report as PDF to a specific folder using OS X's built-in capabilities.
3. Name the PDF file based on the date.
4. Print the PDF file to a hard copy.
5. Attach the PDF to an email using Mail and send it.

I realize that's not a ton of work, but this Friday I felt the urge to automate the process. At first I wanted to do it to save myself some time, and then once I had spent an hour trying to figure it out it became more of a challenge, and then after spending another hour on it I didn't care about solving the problem myself and just wanted a solution by any means necessary.

Most of the individual pieces of this automated task are not difficult to accomplish, but I have found it difficult to get each step to talk to the next. I have also had trouble due to the fact that I want to make the file name of the saved PDF contain the date it was saved. I'm sure this would be easy for anyone who has used AppleScript extensively, but I'm just a beginner at it so it's baffling me.

Could someone help me figure out the proper script structure to make all this work? If it matters, I am using the latest version of OS X and Pages. The files need to be saved with the name "weekly_report_MM_DD_YYYY.pdf" (it doesn't have to be exact, just something along those lines) and the email that it is attached to doesn't need anything in it except for a recipient. If I've forgotten any necessary details, please let me know and I'll provide them.

HELP!

help me find new awesome broadcasting software for a good cause

stenseng — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:07:17 -0800

Mefi broadcasting experts: suggest broadcast automation software for the radio station of the organization I do IT support for... Through the agency I work for, I provide IT support services for a talking book and braille library for blind and visually impaired people. They've got a radio station that provides news broadcasts, book narration, etc.

Their broadcast studio (and particularly the automation part of the booth) is based around Dalet systems 5.1, which was designed for NT4, requires expensive, proprietary soundcards, and is generally old, slow, buggy, and not well supported.

What's the new hotness, broadcasting mefites? Help me suggest a modern system that can do show scheduling, switching from multiple sources (pre recorded show, live feed, sattelite feed,) will work with most decent modern ASIO or dsound compatible audio cards, etc.

Bonus points if it's accessible via screen readers, but not a deal breaker... Thoughts?

Help me replicate my beloved Photoshop 5.5 action!

amtho — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:04:23 -0800

In Photoshop 5.5 I was able to create an action to resize a layer/selection to a maximum width (say, 200 px). I could quickly select objects of varying initial sizes, run the action, and voila, everything fit neatly in a column. I've had Photoshop CS4 for over a week and can't figure out how to replicate this; my resizing seems to always be happening as a percent of the original size. When I previously created the action (in, yes, good old 5.5 -- which I must add runs extremely fast on my current computer), I just kind of recorded it and it magically worked. I remember being impressed. I did similar actions several times -- it was very handy.

So far, CS4 is great (although the grouping of layers is my favorite feature, and I'm sure that's been around a while), but I really need this functionality.

Pointers to specific action-oriented resources would be helpful. Googling "Photoshop actions" and "Photoshop help" led me to some web sites with lots of stuff there, but I didn't see how to efficiently find the answer to my specific question. I'm ... reluctant to involve Adobe support unless I absolutely must; it seems like a good way to spend a lot of time waiting for an answer, and anyway it would be nice to know how to figure this kind of stuff out.

I have the O'Reilly "Missing Manual" book, but could only find directions on record/playback for actions, and nothing special about resizing.

How to create my own books for Classics.app?

tksh — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:45:41 -0800

How would I automate converting Project Gutenberg books into ebooks for Classics.app on the iPhone? Or more specifically, I have recently finished reading some classics on the wonderful Classics program for the iPhone/iTouch and I want to start adding my own favourites for on-the-go reading.

I've figured out that each book in Classics is just a collection of PDF files, one for each chapter, and a simple XML file that acts as a chapters index. The PDF page have a specific size and I have a Pages template and some defined styles that have the right margin, page size, font size, styling and all.

I've done a simple book with a few chapters as a test and they showed up great but it was incredibly tedious. Basically, for each chapter:

Create a new blank document in Pages and apply the saved page size settings

Copy and paste the chapter text into the document

Apply a title style to the chapter heading and a paragraph style to everything else

Run a quick find-and-replace to convert straight quotes into smart quotes

Save file with relevant meta info (in case I need to manually touch-up)

Finally, print as PDF with relevant meta info

Is there any way to automate all this? I'm OK with scripting and am willing to learn Latex if that is the way but I'd rather use Applescript and use the Pages engine to format, hyphenate and style everything.

Dynamically automate my appointment calendar in IE with today's date in the link?

unclezeb — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:57:59 -0800

Help me create a short cut that opens an Internet Explorer webpage with part of the link set to change dynamically to today's date (i.e., http://boingboing.net/2009/01/27/ if I clicked on it yesterday, http://boingboing.net/2009/01/28/ if I clicked on it today). Can this be done? My office lets me see a calendar of appointments with clients through a web-page which accesses information from our intranet. It only opens via Internet Explorer. Part of the link includes the date of those appointments:
=Date(2009,1,7)

Currently, I simply created a shortcut to a given date (above) and manually change it then go to the new date as entered (i.e., =Date(2009,1,28)).

I would like to be able to have a shortcut which dynamically updates the date to "today" ... so I can click on the shortcut and be directed to a page with today's appointments rather than manually altering the date in the link each time.

Any ideas short of Autohotkey?

Thanks a million!

Automating monkeywork in Excel and Word

McBearclaw — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:15:50 -0800

Automation Filter: How can I automate the insertion of data from a spreadsheet into a Word report template? My glorious analysis job has a hell of a lot more reporting in it than I expected - way more spreadsheet-to-Word than I learned how to deal with in academia. Example: quarterly survey results that need to be reported on. One report needs responses overall and broken down by respondent category. The next wants to compare all respondents from the entire time that the reports have been going. The final set of reports compares respondents from a particular quarter across each year.

My predecessor created elaborate Excel spreadsheets to calculate mean values, etc, and then copy/pasted these hundreds of values by hand into Word. I don't even have the data for the old surveys - just the reports. So for the longitudinal reports, I have to copy the old counts, add to the new, and then recalculate the percentages.

This all strikes me as insanely primitive, and a huge waste of my time. This is what I envision: the (web-administered) survey results are given a unique ID, dated, and appended to a file of all past respondents. Once the survey is closed for the quarter, I tell the robots to hit it. They mercilessly plug new dates and updated numbers into the Word reports and save them to an appropriate folder. My sole acts: skim for errors, press send on an email, laugh diabolically at what my legion of electronic minions hath wrought.

I can think of a number of ways to do this: I'm sure there is some third-party stuff that I could buy, I could write a program to produce a LaTeX file that publishes to PDF, there's probably an official Microsoft protocol, etc. I would love to program this myself, and I would get major credit from the boss for doing it for free in this time of budget crisis. But I haven't actually DONE anything along those lines. So what I would like to know is: how would YOU do this, preferably on the cheap?

I'm familiar with Visual Basic .NET, I'm learning Python, and I'm quite comfortable in R. I'm happy to learn something new, though, especially because I have a real problem to test it on. I've got Office 2007 and Adobe Acrobat in full.

Thanks in advance, Mefites. I only hope that I might someday rock as hard as you.

Emacs wizardry for the non-programmer.

Barry B. Palindromer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:37:05 -0800

How can I automate emacs to open a file, execute a bunch of macros, then save the file in a new format? I need to extract bookmarks from large PDFs into text files importable into MS Access. I have been using emacs to open the file, then used 5-6 macros to extract the bookmarks and format it properly to be imported into Access. This gets extremely tedious, I have about 100 files to convert.

Is there a more elegant or convenient way to do this? I would love to be able to automate it in emacs. I am not a programmer, and although I have tried to figure out how to do this with elisp, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm running emacs 22.2.1 on Windows and Acrobat 6 and 7 standard.

Mass installation?

Whoop — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:59:34 -0800

What's the best way to mass install over an Active Directory network? Currently I'm running an network of around 60 computers, most of these are XP although there's some Windows 2003 and 2007 also.
The problem is all these computers remain logged in 24/7 and are locked when not in use, never logged out. I'm a novice Windows network admin and any ideas on how to push software to these computers?
I understand that you can set group policies to run .msi installers, however these are only run upon login and due to these computers rarley actually logging in...as they don't logout this isn't much use.

Any suggestions would be extremely appreciated. Thanks.

How can I automate this web browsing task?

mebibyte — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:49:22 -0800

Please help me automate a repetitive task (log in to website, then after successful login, load some pages, then log out), in a way that can be scheduled so that it runs at two different hours each day. Every day, I need to log on to a website. This part is important, as without logging in, I can't do the actions that I want to do.

After logging in, I need to load several specific pages. The pages that need to be loaded can be determined in one of two ways:

1. By programmatically loading one page, retrieving all links that say 'Add', and loading the pages referenced by those links
2. I can manually add the links to a list (or a Firefox bookmark, which is how I've been semi-automating this)

Once that's done, the script (or whatever) can log out.

I'm good with computers. I program for a living and am familiar with a bunch of scripting languages. The reason I'm asking for this is, where I currently work, I am expected to load a page twice a day (*exactly* when a catalogue refreshes, it's time-sensitive) and Add a list of products (it uses HTTP GET so I just need to follow links). It really only takes a couple of minutes, but I hate switching from one task to another and back.

I don't mind manually finding the links on my own time. I just don't want to be obligated to be online at EXACTLY the time that their catalogue refreshes.

Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. (ideal) manually adding the links to a firefox bookmark, then using some sort of firefox extension/applescript or something to use my saved login/password to log in, then load the bookmarks at a time I specify

I would like to stress that (1) would be ideal.

2. Use www:mechanize to retrieve the Add links, and then follow them using threaded requests.

Any other suggestions, or any tools built specifically for this task?

Thanks!

Is there an easy way to break pivot table rows or pages down into non-linked workbooks

willnot — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:16:51 -0800

I have an Excel pivot table for sales performance data. I want to break that down for regional managers so that they only have access to their own offices' data while preserving the nice formatting that the pivot table provides. Is there an easy way to do that? My pivot table structure is as follows:

Rows: Divisional Manager, Regional Manger, Office Name, Sales Person Name

Data (sums of): New Clients, Product 1, Product 2, Product 3

It's easy enough to check only one of the regional managers to show their data only and hide the raw data sheet, but any sophisticated manager could easily find other regions' data in that method, and pivot tables tend to be huge, so I don't want to e-mail them.

What I've been doing is check an individual regional manager only, copy, in a new workbook, paste special values (to break the association to the pivot table), paste special formats (to pretty it up), save as regional manager's name, go to 10. It works, but there are a ton of managers, and it seems like a huge waste of time -- the kind of thing computers were built to automate.

I'm sure there's some trixsy way to automate it using VB, but I don't know VB.

I found a way to explode the regional managers out into their own worksheets if they're in pages instead of rows, but that preserves the association with the pivot table, and they're all in the same workbook. There has to be an easier solution that I don't know about.

Send that email, stat !

fizzix — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:34:14 -0800

I'm working for a newer growing, small business (4-5 employees or so). We have to send emails containing the same information to existing customers. For example, we have to notify customers about their accounts (for example, their CC/billing information becomes outdated) or customers send us a question. We're looking for an efficient way to do this. Right now, we want to send out emails more efficient and rich than our current system: using Apple Mail (our office is using Mac OS X Tiger, and will continue to use Tiger, and Leopard, once Tiger is no longer supported by Apple) having a templates folder, selecting the send again button and then inserting the person's email. More importantly, Apple Mail (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't send out emails in HTML. Also, the ability to edit these emails before we send them out (like, adding an extra sentence to it before hitting send).

Instead, my boss is looking for a system that would create more professional looking emails (ones that you get from an established web business) and will allow someone with no web development expertise to send them out to customers.

Related to this, is there a way to automate this so that an html version of the email, and a plain text version is also automatically generated ?
(For this second question, I'm hoping there's an easier way
than writing a script from scratch (I'm familiar with java, but I think that isn't appropriate for this) to assign the content that changes to variables, and then inserts the content to the variables in templates that already contain the formatting.)

Forms look like a way to go, but I'm not sure if javascript or PHP is a better way. I'm leaning towards php, because I read there's the ability to integrate php with sql, eventually creating a database record of customer interaction (phone calls, emails, etc).

Undo iPhoto effects?

d7415 — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:29:21 -0800

Is there an automated (or "simple") way to undo iPhoto effects? Some look difficult, but the "pop art" effect in particular looks like if should be fairly easy to get something like the original image back.