[CEWren]

^^the pics from the car were the ones I took... our garage in the background and everything, so the person totally saved the pics I uploaded to ebay onto their computer and uploaded to craigslist... sad world!

[photocanadian]

Competition in Toronto is stiff. I actually know a couple of the local guys I'm competing with to find Pentax stuff, and you have to be fast on your feet to pick up anything decent. Last week I missed $1200 worth of gear listed for $200 by minutes. On the plus side the metro area is populous enough that interesting equipment shows up a couple of times a month.

I so agree - Toronto is so bad (ie. competitive) that I stopped "inspecting" it's local ad sites (not so for Hamilton/Peterborough/outlying areas). Other stuff is priced very high, sometimes I wished I lived there so I could unload some lenses. Some deals I stumbled upon were gone in 10-15 minutes within posting (I got to some of them within that time as well ;-).

Although, I was quick enough to get some excellent deals (pennies on the dollar, shipped to my town) from there, such as a -K 85/1.8 or Viv 90/2.8... Fast payment via EMT was the key.

BTW. I love the usual response when you call about something that was just posted - "But I just posted that. How did you ..."

I wonder who else we compete against ;-) haha. There is quite a bit of fun to be had doing this.

[photocanadian]

.
...

At one point I even had a perl program that would use 'curl' to pull the local listing and parse it for Pentax stuff, sending me a text when it found something That was a bit over the edge though.

.

I've taken a very similar concept and "polished" it a little. I did it purely to learn some programming a little, which then bloomed into a "product". It's only Canada-wide so all you guys across the border can sleep at night

Total latency works out to about 10-15 minutes from the time of posting.

Works for lenses, cars and houses, and is accessible from my phone as well any browser anywhere in the world (see attached)

[boriscleto]

If only I had the money The cure all for LBA/CBA.

Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic Camera from 60's in excellent condition, super Macro Takumar 1:4/50 lens, operating manual, includes Auto Strobonar 770 electronic flash in working condition, battery pack and manual .included. $100.

It's a Black SP.

[FotoPete]

Competition in Toronto is stiff. I actually know a couple of the local guys I'm competing with to find Pentax stuff, and you have to be fast on your feet to pick up anything decent. Last week I missed $1200 worth of gear listed for $200 by minutes. On the plus side the metro area is populous enough that interesting equipment shows up a couple of times a month.

You can say that again. *Shakes fist*

[Pest]

I've taken a very similar concept and "polished" it a little. I did it purely to learn some programming a little, which then bloomed into a "product". It's only Canada-wide so all you guys across the border can sleep at night

Total latency works out to about 10-15 minutes from the time of posting.

Works for lenses, cars and houses, and is accessible from my phone as well any browser anywhere in the world (see attached)

Looks pretty neat! Would you be willing to share it?

[photocanadian]

Only if you like 100% undocumented and unsupported code ;-) I'd like to keep it private for now, if anything just to keep my headaches down - for example, without proper documentation the custom descriptor files used for the rss keyword and webpage scans would be next to impossible to figure out.

The current system is quite a mish-mash of different packages, interpreters and email systems, not to mention questionable sample code that runs as a virtual linux machine - at this point I would not even want try to figure out all the dependencies let alone try to package it (and I won't distribute the vm due to other proprietary stuff running on it). I have probably been working on this for 10 years now and learning as I go, adding new features

I'll give you some pointers, however, if you're seriously considering something similar and are willing to learn. It's not that hard to set up an rss or www scanner. I can answer some questions if you'd like to put something together. The following open source packages are more-less the backbone of the entire system:

rss2email - for scanning rss-enabled for-sale sites
rss2email

Web Secretary - for scanning non-rss for-sale sites, auction sites, etc
WebSec - Webpage Change Notification

Perl WWW::Mechanize - for scanning yahoo groups and other highly-customized interfaces requiring https logins and other authontication techniques that the above package won't handle
WWW::Mechanize - search.cpan.org

Looks pretty neat! Would you be willing to share it?

[joe.penn]

I've taken a very similar concept and "polished" it a little. I did it purely to learn some programming a little, which then bloomed into a "product". It's only Canada-wide so all you guys across the border can sleep at night

Total latency works out to about 10-15 minutes from the time of posting.

Works for lenses, cars and houses, and is accessible from my phone as well any browser anywhere in the world (see attached)

Why not just use the craigslist RSS? Very simple to do, get any one of the free RSS readers (1 of the hundreds of thousands available ) and do this:

1. go to clist and do the search
2. copy the url from your browser
3. append "&format=rss" (without the quotes) to the end of the copied url
4. add (the copied and modified url) to your reader
5. set your reader options to update every couple of minutes or so

Pretty simple to do...







---

[joe.penn]

Only if you like 100% undocumented and unsupported code ;-) I'd like to keep it private for now, if anything just to keep my headaches down - for example, without proper documentation the custom descriptor files used for the rss keyword and webpage scans would be next to impossible to figure out.

The current system is quite a mish-mash of different packages, interpreters and email systems, not to mention questionable sample code that runs as a virtual linux machine - at this point I would not even want try to figure out all the dependencies let alone try to package it (and I won't distribute the vm due to other proprietary stuff running on it). I have probably been working on this for 10 years now and learning as I go, adding new features

I'll give you some pointers, however, if you're seriously considering something similar and are willing to learn. It's not that hard to set up an rss or www scanner. I can answer some questions if you'd like to put something together. The following open source packages are more-less the backbone of the entire system:

rss2email - for scanning rss-enabled for-sale sites
rss2email

Web Secretary - for scanning non-rss for-sale sites, auction sites, etc
WebSec - Webpage Change Notification

Perl WWW::Mechanize - for scanning yahoo groups and other highly-customized interfaces requiring https logins and other authontication techniques that the above package won't handle
WWW::Mechanize - search.cpan.org

vw_michael - did you realize that craigslist provides formatted results in RSS?


Also, if you are using a good web browser (Firefox) it gets even simpler...




--

[dadipentak]

Ah--so that's how it's done.

[Pest]

I didn't realize Kijiji provided RSS feeds with all the search modifiers! I should be able to figure out something that should work for me.
Thanks for the heads up.

[teetoeb]

i guess i've been lucky with craigslist in TO. I got most of my primes from the same guy a few years back, voigt 20, 43, and 77. Someone beat me to the 31 though >=/ My most recent craigslist purchase was a Zeiss 135 3.5.

[photocanadian]

You can if you like browsing 10000s of messages per day (but thanks for the suggestion)

There are probably commercial programs that do similar things, but mine really goes the extra step (and it sends the results to my phone which I like). This was my other incentive to actually put this thing together.

RSS (and HTTP/S) is essentially how I "skim" the contents ... however I filter the results by keyword (context-sensitive white list) and price and then reverse-filter out the "spam" using another keyword list (a black list).

This cuts the volume down (10000s of post per day, some miscategorized) to about a 100-200 or so (we're talking the entire country here), from the three major for-sale websites (usedcanada, kijiji and craigslist) + about 3 other websites.

Some websites (such as govt surplus websites ... cough, cough) do not know what RSS is and use HTTP/POST to get results. I have not found any free S/W to let you auto-search those
Other websites, such as yahoo group (freecycle/etc), do not support RSS and need authentication in addition. No software I know of works with that.

I have been lucky to find very nice lenses in garage sale ads, free giveaways, estate sales and general miscategorized "junk for sale" listings which an RSS reader would have probably not picked up. I have had some very good luck in little remote communities where the seller had no idea of the value of the lens. I did, however, miss a nice Pentax-K Asphercial 15mm/3.5 for $200, which got snapped despite the remoteness of the listing ... still dreaming about that one That bugger got sold on eBay exactly a week later for a very large four-digit sum ...

Why not just use the craigslist RSS? Very simple to do, get any one of the free RSS readers (1 of the hundreds of thousands available ) and do this:

1. go to clist and do the search
2. copy the url from your browser
3. append "&format=rss" (without the quotes) to the end of the copied url
4. add (the copied and modified url) to your reader
5. set your reader options to update every couple of minutes or so

Pretty simple to do...







---