Sort of related but I've really enjoyed setting up a urlwatch - https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - setup. Especially once you get past the boilerplate of pupetteer and can boot up a chrome instance to scrape websites with javascript. I start to feel like I'm taking control of the web in a push not pull way
There's an amazing power to just monitor websites with no sweat and skim in the morning
- new job openings for companies you like
- new job openings/closings from your current company
- products you're waiting to go on sale/back in stock/available refurbished (got 70% some nice headphones)
- covid sewage stats, if you want to know about spikes
- apartment listings
- github releases you care a lot about (<3 yabai)
- legal-ese for critical websites
Personally I rent a little digital ocean droplet for $5 since I also self host a RSS reader, personal telegram bot, etc (and it's very useful to set up little http site for experimentation) but could do it on your laptop since it doesn't have to run every day at the same time