Protip: How to Buy a Nexus 6

Damn thing keeps selling out! That’s okay, I’ve got a Linux box at my disposal set to load the Google Play Nexus 6 product page every six minutes. Whenever it grabs a copy that does not contain “We are out of inventory” it emails me.

There are other methods involving comparing MD5 hashes, but that’s overkill. Here’s the one-liner code buddy:

wget “https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_6_64GB_Midnight_Blue?id=nexus_6_blue_64gb&hl=en” –timeout 20 -O – 2>/dev/null | grep “We are out of inventory” || echo “Go on https://play.google.com NOW” | mail -v -s “Nexus 6 available” you@asdf.com

Then get your machine to do that every six minutes by hitting crontab -e and adding this (or just put the whole thing in cron and save a step):

*/6 * * * * /root/nexus6.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Wait for an email, and once it comes, maybe midnight tonight, wake up the wife and beg her to buy you the phone.

Doug Simmons