My Little Project: liljoe
Alright, let’s talk about this little thing I cooked up, called ‘liljoe’. Wasn’t anything grand, just something I needed to sort out for myself. I kept running into this annoying little task, day in, day out. You know the kind, simple but repetitive. Takes maybe five minutes, but five minutes adds up when you do it multiple times a day.
So, I finally decided, enough is enough. I gotta automate this somehow. Didn’t want to spend ages on it, just needed something quick and dirty that worked. That’s how ‘liljoe’ started. Just a name I pulled out of thin air, sounded simple enough.
First off, I just sat down and sketched out what I actually did manually. Like, step-by-step:
- Open this thing.
- Find that specific number.
- Copy it.
- Open another thing.
- Paste the number there.
- Maybe click a button or two.
- Close everything.
Looked simple on paper. So I thought, okay, maybe a simple script could handle this. I poked around with some tools I already had on my machine. Didn’t want to install a bunch of new stuff. Keep it lean, you know?
Getting Hands Dirty
I started fiddling around. Picked a scripting language I was vaguely familiar with, nothing fancy. The first part, opening the first thing, was easy enough. Finding the number? That took a bit of messing about. Had to figure out how to tell the script exactly where that number usually sits on the screen or in the file. Tried a few ways, some worked sometimes, others failed miserably. Lots of trial and error.
Copying and pasting was another hurdle. Sounds trivial, but getting the script to reliably grab the value and put it somewhere else without messing up took a few tries. Had some weird errors pop up, like it would copy the wrong thing or paste it twice. Spent an afternoon just debugging that part. Frustrating, yeah, but kinda satisfying when I finally nailed it.
Then came the button clicking part. That was surprisingly tricky. Had to figure out how to make the script ‘see’ the button and then ‘click’ it. More testing, more tweaking. It felt like teaching a toddler basic instructions sometimes.
Did it Work?
Eventually, after maybe a day or two of tinkering on and off, I had a rough version running. It wasn’t pretty. It crashed if something unexpected happened, like if the first program wasn’t open or the number wasn’t where it expected. So, I added some basic checks. Like, “Hey, is this thing open first?” and “Did I actually find a number?” Simple stuff, but made it more reliable.
Ran it a few times. Watched it closely. It chugged along, opened the things, copied the number, pasted it, clicked the button. Boom. Done. Faster than I could do it manually, for sure.
So now, ‘liljoe’ just sits there. When I need that task done, I just run the script. Takes like ten seconds. Saves me those five minutes each time. Like I said, nothing earth-shattering. Just a small tool for a small annoyance. But hey, it’s my small tool, and it works. That’s the main thing. Definitely worth the couple of days I spent figuring it out.
