Nodejs on Evan Coleman

A Twitter Bot for COVID Vaccine Availability in New York City

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 20:11:49 +0000

The other day I stopped to think about the collective time and energy that’s been wasted from people refreshing vaccine booking portals trying to book appointments for themselves or their loved ones.

A few months ago when COVID vaccines were first becoming available in New York, I built a web scraper to constantly check the Walgreens, CVS, and New York State vaccine portals for available appointments. If it found one, it would send me an SMS via the Twilio API. This was incredibly useful, and I managed to snag at least one appointment for a family member early on. But then I let it sit for a few weeks. As you can imagine, vaccine distributers are constantly updating and changing their booking systems whether it be to fix issues or to fit the ever-changing demands. This ultimately led to my script no longer working well enough to be useful.

Dissecting the Media Remote Protocol: Reverse Engineering an Apple TV

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 20:23:30 +0000

For me, the holy grail of home automation isn’t just being able to control lights with your smartphone. Connecting your lights to the internet opens up a ton of possibilities. Your smartphone is just one way to control them. The holy grail of home automation is removing the need to even control your devices at all.

When I watch a movie, I want my lights set a certain way. Seems simple enough. I watch everything on my Apple TV, so surely there should be a way to detect that and send the message along to HomeKit. In the past I’ve used a plugin for Plex that handled this quite well. The only downsides were that it was painstakingly tedious to program in the lighting settings, and it only worked in Plex. I figured the Apple TV must transmit its global play/pause state somehow, seeing as the Apple TV iOS app displays it.