Not sure if I'm imagining it, but I think that someone built this into a web service that you could subscribe to and it would buy things for you every day. Does anyone remember this? I can't find anything via HN search, but I'm sure it was a show HN at some point.
I wrote eachdayisagift.com and it was funny to see all this come back on HN today. I had to freeze mine as it was buying a lot of stuff from Hong Kong that Australian customs classed as 'weapons' (laser pointers, throwing stars), that got me a stern letter from the government.
Yeah, I phased out the blog a year or so back, hence why it's not on http://bieh.net any more. I wish I'd worked a bit harder not to break the links now :)
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This was done a few years back as the result of an XKCD, the original article is gone, but there's a few articles about it: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/09/xkcd-packages... http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20022153-1.html it's a cool idea.
Not sure if I'm imagining it, but I think that someone built this into a web service that you could subscribe to and it would buy things for you every day. Does anyone remember this? I can't find anything via HN search, but I'm sure it was a show HN at some point.
I'm the guy who built the original XKCD-inspired bot -- the original blog post is still around at http://bieh.net/wordpress/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/, though the images have since broken.
Possibly the web service you mean is http://www.eachdayisagift.com/ ?
bieh's had a pretty good run when it was live!
I wrote eachdayisagift.com and it was funny to see all this come back on HN today. I had to freeze mine as it was buying a lot of stuff from Hong Kong that Australian customs classed as 'weapons' (laser pointers, throwing stars), that got me a stern letter from the government.
Wait - what? You actually wrote a bot as in http://xkcd.com/576/ and actually had the problem in the comic?
Yes, that's it! Thanks. Here's the related show HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3825524
re: blog post, the wired article (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/09/xkcd-packages...) links to http://bieh.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/ which is broken (missing the wordpress I think)
Yeah, I phased out the blog a year or so back, hence why it's not on http://bieh.net any more. I wish I'd worked a bit harder not to break the links now :)
Can you put a mod_rewrite rule "^/(20[01][0-9]/.*) => /wordpress/$1" in a .htaccess somewhere?
Does anything like that exist in the states? I think that'd be an amazing and fun thing to have in my life:)