[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just you...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows
the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built
a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in
the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
Author : l2silver
Score : 934 points
Date : 2023-04-27 15:04 UTC (1 days ago)
| hczedik wrote:
| Type Draw Type
|
| A fun little drawing and writing game, I loved playing with
| friends and kids with pen and paper. During the pandemic I
| implemented a web version for us to play remotely. By now,
| thousands of games have been played (not only by me and my
| friends of course). You need at least 4 players (better 5 or
| more) to join one game for it to be fun.
|
| https://draw.gerty.roga.czedik.at
|
| (oh, and it is free and open source, of course)
| pketh wrote:
| Mine isn't particularly advanced or cool but I built this little
| directory of kaomojis (text-based emoji) with a cat mascot while
| I was in San Francisco for an interview at Flickr (this was a
| long time ago). At the time I was a junior designer with very
| little dev experience, so this project helped get my feet wet.
|
| http://kaomojicat.com/
|
| I originally built it for a now-ex-girlfriend, but I use it all
| the time myself to add a little spice to things like tweets or
| error messages.
| belzebalex wrote:
| Built one of the first 3d ultrasonic scanner that works in the
| air to make an autonomous drone [1] [2]
|
| [1]: https://www.alextoussaint.com/2021-04-28_How-I-built-an-
| ultr...
|
| [2]: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/15/a-phased-array-
| ultrasonic-3d...
| [deleted]
| lyziinc wrote:
| I made a custom client for the ChatGPT API, so that I can
| template and chain together prompts to automate content
| generation. I only just finished off the workflow feature to
| prompt chain (where one output goes into one of more prompts),
| but personally think its cool and has lots of applications.
|
| A little rough on the edges so probably not ready for a ShowHN
| yet.
|
| https://promptpro.tznc.net
| jim_lawless wrote:
| I wrote a set of Python/PIL scripts to arrange image collages for
| print calendars, web backgrounds, ...etc. In one particular
| script I use to build backgrounds, the images remain the same
| height but they can be different widths. The images built are
| seamless. Here's an example of some comic book covers in a
| collage using one of these scripts:
|
| https://jiml.us/bp/
| actionfromafar wrote:
| My wife has her work schedule in a mobile web app, but the app is
| really bad. Turns out the app is just a wrapper around a web
| site.
|
| So I made a KVM instance which does one thing - login
| automatically, start Firefox, login with Selenium, then uses some
| kind of other Python desktop control contraption to press CTRL-S,
| tab-tab, save the web page to the Downloads folder.
|
| Then, the python program proceeds to parse the HTML (with
| BeautifulSoup), extract the schedule times from how they are
| showed in some <div> or other (super weird ugly text format).
| Checks for changes over time and emails her what has changed. (So
| she gets a notice when her schedule changes and she doesn't have
| to periodically check in with the app.)
|
| Finally converts the schedule to calendar format and publishes on
| a web site so the schedule can also be seen in the phone
| calendar.
| supahfly_remix wrote:
| That's cool! What library/software did you get the instance to
| email?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Python has a built-in SMTP client, which I connected to my
| regular email account. So the emails are "coming from me".
| tomekw wrote:
| Almost one year ago, I've built a personal diary app with
| gamificatiin features: streaks and email reminders.
|
| My current streak is 347 days! It really made ME journaling
| daily. A number of folks who have also registered maxed at 61
| only :(
|
| https://5yearsback.com
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Moving box management system!
|
| I used AirTable as a backend and UI, added boxes with a room, box
| number, barcode and contents details.
|
| Before beginning I printed barcodes for the first 10 or so boxes.
| I used thermal shipping labels, sliced them into 3 stickers with
| 2 barcodes each and slapped them on corners so every face had
| one.
|
| Then I just packed like normal and when a box was full I took a
| photo of the contents from the AirTable mobile app, scanned the
| barcode and jotted a note about the contents down.
|
| My local machine was pinging AirTable every few seconds to look
| for new boxes with photos and would then print out 2 full size
| labels with the photo, box number large, contents and room name
| which I then put on 2 sides of the box.
|
| Arriving was amazing, every box had a destination (room) so no
| double moving. Every box had contents on them so no opening boxes
| until you are ready. Plus the AirTable made searching for an item
| and it's containing box trivial.
| StuGoss wrote:
| I like to fish at night. So I built 3D printed bobbers with an
| LED diode and scavenged LiPo batteries from vapes inside. It has
| a dime sized wireless charger receiving coil that is glued inside
| to a slightly flattened bottom. Externally I built a mini solar
| panel that charges a scavenged 18650 that charges the battery
| with a wireless transmitter. The bobber is about the size of a
| golf ball. I used a slow blinking LED diode that changes color of
| the bobber. Haven't caught a fish with it yet but it is
| mesmerizing watching it change colors and bob on the water.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| Kirby's Adventure for the NES, one of my favorite games, ignores
| your controller inputs sometimes. I dove into the ROM, figured
| out the problem and fixed it:
| https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7595/
|
| I'm currently hacking the SNES mouse into Sim City.
| pwpw wrote:
| That's great! I really appreciate these rom hacks that fix
| errors in the original game to allow for an ideal version. How
| do you go about hacking a SNES rom? What tools and language do
| you use?
| nicetryguy wrote:
| Right now, i'm using the assembler WLA-DX to inject the
| SimCity base ROM with code changes, and using the SNES
| emulator Mesen with it's wonderful debugging tools to figure
| out what the hell i'm doing. I have a keyboard shortcut in
| Notepad++ that activates a .bat file, injects the base ROM,
| checks if it built properly, uses a powershell script
| (written by ChatGPT!) to convert WLA-DX generated labels
| (.sym) to Mesen debugger (.mlb) format, and if all is well,
| it starts the emulator with the built ROM and label file. I'm
| coding in raw 65c816 ASM.
|
| My setup looks something like this:
|
| https://nesblast.com/img/snes_hacking_setup.png
|
| If you have basic ASM experience, the SNESdev wiki will tell
| you everything you need:
|
| https://snes.nesdev.org/wiki/Main_Page
|
| If you don't have basic ASM experience, i would start here:
|
| https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/
| bombcar wrote:
| This reminds me of the person who fixed the infamous Atari ET
| game: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
| 2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote:
| Made a desktop app for homebrew beer recipes.
|
| There are plenty of brewing tools out there, but ito data model
| and workflow they are all basically descendants of ProMash. I
| wanted something that approached home brewing with a focus on
| process instead of ingredients.
|
| My data model of a "recipe" is a DAG of typed process steps each
| of which can have ingredients attached. Liquid volumes move
| through the DAG and are modified at each step. Outputs of the
| recipe are at the leaf nodes. This model can represent any wacky
| brew day you can dream up - including and not limited to multiple
| mashes, splitting or combining volumes pre or post
| mash/sparge/boil/cool/ferment/whenever, packaging wort, etc. The
| regular tools usually can't even represent a partigyle batch
| properly.
|
| Honestly for my regular 20L single-infusion no-sparge brew day it
| is probably slightly less convenient than say Beersmith. But for
| unusual situations it shines. For eg this past festive season I
| found myself needing to stock up quickly. Designing a 40L "one
| mash, one boil, two different beers [1]" double batch brew day
| was easy, and hitting all the numbers along the way for such a
| mad-hatter exercise was incredibly cool.
|
| [1] Scottish Export and Sweet Stout
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I built myself an automated hydroponic grow tent.
|
| It measures and corrects pH, electrical conductivity, oxidation
| reduction potential, temperature of the air and water, water
| level, and humidity. It also automates pumps, lights, and fans (I
| know people normally advise against this). None of it is
| particularly sophisticated, but I'm really proud of it.
|
| I initially used a deep water culture and later moved on to the
| nutrient film technique. It produces a lot of greens and herbs --
| way more than I ever expected -- and it's remarkably hands off. I
| recently left it to do its thing for almost 3 months before I had
| to intervene, and the problem wasn't the water, nutrients, or the
| system failing explicitly. The plants just got too big for their
| channels and as they became stressed, they developed some pest
| issues. It was such a cool and empowering experience to see real
| world automation Just Work.
|
| The whole thing is powered by an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.
| It's a great little controller.
|
| I'm currently designing my first PCB to consolidate the system
| onto a single board so my friends can easily build their own.
| It's not extremely cheap, but it's not too expensive either and
| you get a tremendous amount of food from it. It's such a fun
| hobby.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > It produces a lot of greens and herbs
|
| If that were NL at this point your whole audience would be on
| the floor laughing. 'Suuuure...'. What some people won't do to
| get decent tomatoes.
| nemonemo wrote:
| Sorry for my ignorance, but is NL Netherlands? Also, could
| you give me some more context on why the people would be
| laughing?
| madmads wrote:
| NL is meant as Netherlands here and the context is that
| since you can't talk about growing cannabis in the open,
| people talk about their "vegetable" gardens or "herbs"
| instead. The comment you're responding to is implying that
| the grow tent is used to grow cannabis but he's covering it
| up by saying it's a vegetable garden.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Almost: if it were NL I would imply that it is to grow
| cannabis but since the OP is obviously 100% sincere I
| don't doubt they're doing the legit thing.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Haha, I forget sometimes that I've totally normalized growing
| greens and other people associate it with cannabis. I've had
| a couple people come into my workshop and end up looking
| suspiciously at the grow tent humming along on the corner.
| When they see that it's actually just lettuce I think they're
| kind of surprised.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Np, I just thought it was very funny. I've had a similar
| thing here where I ordered 500 ziplock backs and the guy on
| the other side goes '5 gram or 25 gram'? So I asked why the
| bags are so heavy and hilarity ensued. I needed them as
| parts bags for Lego... but it turns out they almost
| exclusively sell to gardeners.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Hey don't judge my pursuit of dank tomatoes
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Fingers crossed for full legalization in Minnesota today.
| Including grow your own!
| RajT88 wrote:
| You joke, but I have heard radio ads for hydroponic supplies
| in Canada, which very much had the tone of "wink, wink y'know
| for your veggie garden".
|
| There was even a chuckling group of people in the background
| when they mentioned "veggies". This was in Toronto around
| 2011.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not from NL, but already started smiling at "hydroponic" :).
| safety1st wrote:
| Would love to see a blog post on this or something!
| addisonl wrote:
| Same!
| imdsm wrote:
| Same here.
| xcubic wrote:
| Same!
| maxboone wrote:
| Same!
| Goofy_Coyote wrote:
| Same!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Same!
| modriano wrote:
| Not OP and not OP's project, but I saw a fantastic automated
| hydroponic project on YT a few years back that is very
| similar. YT: [0] Blog Post [1] GitHub for the environmental
| control system [2]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyqykZK2Ev4
|
| [1] https://kylegabriel.com/projects/2020/06/automated-
| hydroponi...
|
| [2] https://github.com/kizniche/Mycodo
| Dazzler5648 wrote:
| I built a system like Kyle Gabriel's (using his tutorial)
| and I grow mushrooms with it in a small tent, running
| Mycodo on a Raspi. This has probably been my most
| interesting tech I built just for myself, and my sanity.
| But credit where it's due: thanks Kyle!
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Kyle is amazing. He's still very active and supporting
| people with Mycodo. I learned a lot from him.
| lifty wrote:
| Do you use fish as well to balance the system or you do it
| directly using the right chemicals?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I'd love to try using fish some day. I use some buffers I
| mixed from sulphur and potassium bicarbonate. I get them to
| an approximate pH and then let the system measure gradually
| as small amounts are dosed into the system.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Have you checked out flux.ai for PCB design?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Yes actually, that's what I'm using to learn along with
| YouTube. I tried other software, but flux kind of hits a
| sweet spot for me.
| itsmeste wrote:
| Do you know of a good source of information on how to recognize
| any plant's nutrient deficiencies accurately?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Unfortunately no, there's a lot of misinformation everywhere
| I look. I try to record my own experiences and stay on top of
| tracking results so I can know what helps under which
| conditions. Hydro seems to have mostly eliminated those
| concerns for me, though my outside garden still runs into all
| kinds of problems that are tricky to diagnose.
| thendrill wrote:
| Can you please share a list of the sensors you use? I am very
| interested in this.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I've been collecting them over time so I don't have
| everything handy, but here are some:
|
| pH: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2069.html
|
| EC: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2565.html
|
| Water temperature: https://www.adafruit.com/product/381
|
| CO2: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5190
|
| Air temp and humidity: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3251
|
| There are others but I'll have to dig into it! I think you
| could spend less on alternatives, too.
| Kapura wrote:
| thank you! i am also super interested in something like
| this
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| You should absolutely go for it. Start even simpler and
| with lower investment if you want, too. These systems are
| easy to get running and you can gradually add sensors and
| automation as you go.
|
| I wish I started a lot earlier, but I was constantly
| trying to have the right stuff, or enough stuff to get
| started with the perfect setup. It turns out that makes
| no sense. You're going to make mistakes, learn stuff,
| figure out what you like and don't like, etc.
|
| Starting with a bare bones setup using NFT, not even in a
| grow tent necessarily, you'll figure out really quickly
| what you want to do with it and how to move forward.
|
| Something I also didn't really understand or consider is
| how easy it is to add sensors or update firmware
| gradually. Each of the sensors I use is useful
| independently or together; it's totally fine to start
| with just one. Though most important is arguably water
| and air temperature; you'll use those to accurately
| adjust other sensor readings, and in the short term,
| they're immediately critical to plant health.
|
| I've got a small system running on my old deep water
| culture equipment in my outdoor greenhouse, and I
| actually check its pH with plain old pH testing drops, a
| vial, and a card with the colours to match against. It
| works totally fine. While it won't teach you about
| automation, it'll get you familiar with how your system
| responds to different conditions, what the pH tends to do
| with the plants you're growing, and so on. This is all
| invaluable and I wish I knew it before I started
| automating. I would have written better code from the
| beginning.
| prenoob wrote:
| I'm assuming you have several tanks with ph+ and ph- solutions?
| Are you using off the shelf ph sensors? How about EC?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| That's right, I've dissolved sulphur and potassium
| bicarbonate into separate containers, and peristaltic pumps
| dose a small amount every 15 minutes when the nutrient
| solution goes beyond the acceptable parameters for an hour.
| 15 minutes is enough time for one dose to register on a read
| of the pH level so that it doesn't go too far.
|
| As for EC, I can only correct it if it's too low. If it's 100
| points below where I want it, I dose from two containers of
| pre mixed nutrient concentrate. They're in separate
| containers because they'll actually precipitate some of their
| constituents if they're combined at high concentrations,
| which is too bad (it would be nice to use only one
| container).
|
| The pH sensor I use is apparently lab grade, but only cost
| around $70 CAD. It has been holding up just fine for close to
| a year now. If I were doing this on a larger scale, I think
| I'd go for one that's a bit more expensive from atlas
| scientific. They seem to stand by their products and claim
| their pH probes will operate for years if taken care of.
|
| My EC sensor was quite a bit more -- something like $150. I
| forget where I got it, because I had the idea to build this
| maybe 10 years ago and that was one of the first components I
| picked up! Looking around it seems like you can spend quite a
| bit less now, and it seems like they're durable.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I'm very interested, is it possible for you to open-source it?
| Also, what are its absolute dependencies? Does it depend on
| daylight? Fresh air from outside? Stored chemicals? Is
| water/air recyled? What is the reason behind you making this?
| I'm preparing for Collapse and want to do such a thing soon. If
| you can open-source it, it would be very cool and helpful.
| primax wrote:
| I am intrigued and would like to subscribe to your newsletter
| system2 wrote:
| How do you keep water touching sensors working long term? I
| tried similar sensors but they all get rusted / oxidized to
| work properly after a certain time.
| ljlukkar wrote:
| You need industrial level sensors and the water needs to be
| flowing constantly through them. I built something similar
| about 15 years ago and tested many sensors. In the end I had
| to pay about 1000 dollars for ph and ec meters that did the
| job reliably. To be honest there is nothing new here. This is
| how big greenhouses have been operating for decades.
|
| In small scale there is more work maintaining the automated
| setup and calibrating the sensors than it would take to do
| the measurements and dosing manually.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I think it can cost quite a bit less now, but you're right
| -- it isn't cheap.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| These sensors are designed to withstand contact with water
| and to minimize hydrolysis, and I haven't had issues with
| that so far. I've been running this system for close to a
| year and they still seem to calibrate just fine.
| netsectoday wrote:
| You can use capacitive water sensors taped to the outside of
| non-capacitive containers (aluminum foil, a resistor, an
| arduino, and a plastic 5 gallon container), but honestly all
| you need are DNI timers to "automate" any grow operation. Put
| your lights and pumps on a schedule and there is absolutely
| no reason to get more creative. If you do anything besides
| low-level timers you're making it complicated and brittle
| with no added benefit.
| hksoftware wrote:
| I've seen a clever setup with the sensors in a dry container
| above the water tank. There is a hole in the bottom. Before
| testing, a pump fills the container up with the tank water,
| flooding the sensor probes. When the pump stops, the water
| drains back out into the tank.
| ljlukkar wrote:
| The ph sensor will die fast if it the membrane is kept dry.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| You'd need to wash the sensors and return their caps with
| protective fluids. It would be totally possible to
| automate, but perhaps the same overall cost as buying
| industrial grade sensors which can handle long term
| submersion.
|
| You'd also need to ensure the caps contained enough storage
| solution at the right concentration. Over time the probes
| would introduce drops of nutrient solution (unless you
| rinsed them with distilled water, in which case you'd
| dilute the storage solution), and you'd need to replenish
| it.
| rytis wrote:
| not OP, but one of the tricks is to activate the sensors only
| when measuring, so there's no constant DC applied to the
| sensor wires/pads. once you have that, reduce measurement
| frequency, so to mainimise the time when voltage is applied
| to the sensors. for example once every hour for moisture is
| sufficient, and 1/sec isn't really going to help much.
| amelius wrote:
| Would alternating the polarity work?
| jesprenj wrote:
| Off-topic but perhaps interesting:
|
| That's what they do when performing catheter ablation (a
| medical procedure for curing cardiac fibrilation by
| destroying minute parts of muscle with electric current).
|
| DC would work just as fine on this procedure, but due to
| electrolysis of water, oxygen and hydrogen bubbles would
| form, which could get stuck somewhere. Using a square
| wave AC quickly reverses the reaction every period, like
| you suggested for the moisture meter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catheter_ablation#Technique
|
| I don't know the answer to your question, but it would be
| worth trying.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I built a Frigate event listener and notifier service for Mobile
| phones that makes use of Pushover.
|
| The currently supported setup of Frigate alerts using
| homeassistant seemed to be very profoundly complex and I just
| thought I could use the Frigate API and wrote a small tool with
| Nodejs. It has been working flawlessly, including sending photos
| of events to my Android phone.
| l2silver wrote:
| What's the use case for this?
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Getting motion detection events along with video clips and
| images in push notifications for iPhone and Android, from
| Frigate, which is a selfhosted NVR for your security cams.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I made - A screenshot to text copied to clipboard - Another
| variant had translation from one of the local languages that I
| can't read to english - Built a keyboard identifier for windows
| that could know which USB keyboard the keypress came from and
| then suppress keystroke and then launch the program
| (differentiating keyboards is unnecessarily hard btw) - A python
| app that could pin any app 'on top' or change it's opacity %
| gonzus wrote:
| Some 30 years ago, I reverse-engineered the format of Prince of
| Persia's save files and wrote a little C program that would
| create a save file for any place / level in the game. Just
| because I could...
| xcubic wrote:
| We do these kinds of things a lot of the time because of the
| same reason "Because we can..."
| bombcar wrote:
| These things are quite useful for speed runners and other fans;
| it could be worth digging it up
| tojikomorin wrote:
| I have a "icon switcher for chatGPT".
|
| I know it has no value, but I can't stop using it.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personalized-chatg...
| lxe wrote:
| I made a thingy that receives pictures of the earth from a
| geostationary satellite:
| https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2
| uppa wrote:
| Sounds super simple, but was awesome at the time. In the 90s when
| all of my music was either on CD or ripped to MP3, I built an FM
| transmitter to broadcast my computer audio (sonique or winamp) to
| any radio or receiver in the house. It was a perfect solution
| that didn't take long to implement. I didn't know anyone else who
| did this.
|
| About 5 years ago, I had a car stolen and lamented what
| affordable tracking mechanisms I could use. I cobbled together an
| extra cell phone and a data only SIM. I kept the phone running in
| the back of my van plugged into an auxiliary cigarette lighter
| port. It uploaded data to google spreadsheets every 15 minutes. I
| had to root it to have it automatically boot when connected to
| power. In the end, it was flawlessly reporting its location every
| 15 minutes. While I was testing this, my car was stolen. The
| google spreadsheet pointed me to the GPS location where it was. A
| phone call to the police and a 40 minute wait for them to arrive
| got my car back only hours after stolen. Dude was sleeping with a
| big knife next to him, so I'm glad I let the professionals speak
| with him.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| An app that let anybody convert an otherwise-useless phone into
| a gps tracker might do well. Those trackers can be expensive.
| ajuc wrote:
| Not very cool but was useful for my hex-crawling D&D campaign:
| https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/
| wetpaws wrote:
| That's pretty cool actually, going to steal it.
| rehevkor5 wrote:
| This Speak & Spell simulator: https://sha.nnoncarey.com/
|
| The only one I've found that's as accurate is the emulated
| version at https://archive.org/details/hh_snspell But mine also
| has two expansion modules to choose from :)
| bombcar wrote:
| I'd love to see a piece of hardware like this that you could
| reprogram easily; or the spin-and-say or whatever it was.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| A few projects:
|
| - a in car audio system that has physical buttons and text to
| speech output instead of a distracting display panel. Worked
| really well for a few months but my soldering wasn't (then) up to
| par so it eventually fell apart.
|
| - a Bash replacement shell, which I later open sourced and now
| have a few users beyond myself. But it started out as a personal
| project not intended to be used by anyone but myself. like is in
| my profile (if anyone is interested)
|
| - home automation software which manages everything from internet
| management through to some physical stuff like lights. At one
| stage I did also have Alexa skills and an Android app written to
| interact with it but I rarely ever use them so didn't bother
| keeping those Alexa skills nor Android app up to date and just
| use the web portal (or SSH) the very few times I need to override
| any default automation.
|
| - back in the Windows 95 / 98 era I wrote a desktop shell to
| replace the standard one. It was inspired by Linux desktop
| environments though I probably didn't realise it at the time.
|
| - currently I'm building a robot with my son. It has object
| detection, wheels, speakers and will have some rudimentary Alexa-
| like voice control.
| nhaehnle wrote:
| A tool called "diff modulo base":
| https://git.sr.ht/~nhaehnle/diff-modulo-base
|
| Given two version (old and new) of a Git change (i.e., individual
| commit or patch series from a pull request) it produces a diff
| that is actually useful for reviewing purposes, assuming you've
| already reviewed the old version of the change.
|
| It's sort of like `git range-diff`, but where `git range-diff`
| produces a "diff of diffs" that is very hard to impossible to
| read, this tool gives you a direct diff between old and new
| versions, but filters out any irrelevant changes that were
| introduced because the author rebased on a more recent version of
| the target branch.
|
| I hope that makes sense - I never know quite how to put it into
| words for somebody to understand who isn't intimately familiar
| with Git. It is very powerful though if you combine it with a
| minimal amount of setup e.g. for fetching all PR branches from a
| GitHub repository. I use it almost daily as part of my code
| review workflow.
| difflens wrote:
| I'm the author of DiffLens (https://www.difflens.com/). I
| initially built it for myself too (and use it everyday) and
| it's currently free for anyone to try. It's an attempt to use
| abstract syntax trees to make diffs more readable. Happy to see
| another diff project here!
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Maybe you can put a small example of code changes that
| illustrates this. The diagram helps but actual output based on
| a toy example would drive it home, I think.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| If I understand correctly, this is like normal Git three way
| diff except you don't need the full source of the original
| base?
| scubbo wrote:
| This sounds very cool! I recently moved from a FAANG company to
| a smaller one, and I'm _really_ missing the functionality their
| development tools provided (including this, which I agree is
| fantastic and sorely missing from the core GitHub experience).
| cknight wrote:
| I just made a simple sprint calendar so I could keep track of my
| team's big dates more effectively at work, at a glance from my
| phone etc.
|
| https://sprintcalendar.com
|
| My team runs with:
|
| https://sprintcalendar.com/3-week-sprints/start-2023-03-23/r...
| rakoo wrote:
| I combined mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze), fzf
| and standard UNIX tools to build my own CLI MUA in under 300
| lines, most of which is shell scripts.
|
| When UNIX is your platform you don't need a complex UI framework
| with thousands or millions of lines of codes, and you get to
| reuse knowledge you've already built elsewhere.
|
| I need to write more about it
| bobbylox wrote:
| My wife and I built our own Laser Maze for our front yard so kids
| could try it out on Halloween.
| https://www.tiktok.com/@bobbylox/video/7163380326008425770
| greenie_beans wrote:
| a soil moisture sensor using capacitors as the sensor. it's how i
| learned to code. i found a few different versions of the project
| online. couldn't get them to work very well but i was able to
| piece together enough knowledge of basic circuits to get the
| sensor to work well with my own circuit design.
|
| once i got it to work, i left it on my desk for a few months and
| then cleaned it up/removed the circuit. only documented the
| circuit by a couple of bad photographs, so i'm not sure how to
| recreate it. i might could figure it out again if i spent the
| time, but i've been focused on other projects.
|
| https://github.com/smcalilly/sensor
| l2silver wrote:
| Be nice to hook that up to some kind of watering system to
| always have the perfect moisture.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| yep, that was the goal. my friend had a small organic farm
| but he lived an hour away and needed a good, cheap watering
| solution. led me to down a rabbit hole and now i'm a software
| developer. i'll probably revive it once i have some space to
| do more serious vegetable growing
| DANmode wrote:
| Geeky misconception: the wet/dry cycle _can_ be optimal.
| HKH2 wrote:
| I have a music playlist program which deals with the problem of
| getting used to music. It's effective because I seldom want to
| choose a track to play, and I don't find myself skipping a lot
| consecutively.
|
| I have a dedicated key for skipping (and I keep adding meta keys
| to make it skip more (each meta key is x2)). The next track to
| play is automatically selected based on the combination of two
| factors: being skipped less and being played less.
|
| I get to hear my whole collection in a way that's far more
| enjoyable than an unweighted shuffle.
| is_taken wrote:
| A PDP11/40 emulator for the Teensy 4.1 development board.
|
| https://github.com/gounselor/Teensy11
| nicolapcweek94 wrote:
| I have a very basic "content repository" that started out as an
| RSS reader and now has pocket/instapaper like link saving,
| notetaking and basic GPT integrations (summary for rss
| entries/saved links + chatgpt like interface since it's now
| blocked in italy and it sounded fun to reimplement it).
|
| It's been fun having a project where i can just throw in stuff i
| want to learn (started out as a go + go templates app, then
| turned into go backend + vue frontend from scratch, now go + vue
| with vuetify) and where i can just implement features i want
| (pocket import for saved links, gpt stuff, linking between notes
| and saved links/rss entries, ...) that are extremely specific to
| my use case and thus hard to find in anything else.
| cryptonector wrote:
| In 2011 and 2012 in between jobs I wrote a few bits of software,
| of which
|
| - one was a SQLite3-based, all-SQL reimplementation of a subset
| of UName*It (an object-oriented database from the 90s meant for
| storing NIS/DNS/etc. data)
|
| - another was an RCU-like lock-less, very fast user-space data
| structure written in C, born of frustration with read-write locks
| in Solaris
|
| Of those the latter ended up being useful to me about 5 years
| later, and I still use it in production, though I originally
| wrote it for myself.
| theearling wrote:
| Over the past 3 years, I've been building "FreeCRT", a 24/7
| Twitch streaming setup dedicated to casual Smash matches. Since I
| don't have a coding background, I used Node-RED to create custom
| flows that help manage the stream by connecting a MSI Gaming
| Laptop, Intel NUC, and Raspberry Pi 4. OCR and Node-RED extract
| text from the switch, while performing arena error logic, which
| connects to the Raspberry Pi to run macros to reset the open
| arena if it's closed. I just recently whipped up a Twitch Chatbot
| called FreeGPT that hosts the arena anytime. I've built it up
| slowly but it's been such a fun long term project.
| rzzzt wrote:
| A desktop application with double countdown timer, styled as a
| digital clock. One counter measured the days until a friend's
| farewell party before they move abroad, the other was going
| towards a festival's opening date at a later time (when we would
| see this friend again).
|
| I didn't really plan this part, but since going past their target
| date they started counting upwards and have accumulated 4500 days
| or so.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| How do you find time and resources to build all these cool
| things?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'd say almost everything I've written, has been for personal
| use, even though I publish as public open-source.
|
| I write a lot of modules and SDKs, and regularly consume them in
| my own work. Comes out great.
|
| Lots of folks ignore my work. I won't bother speculating as to
| why, but I'm fine with that, as everyone that depends on my work
| means I need to take them into account, when maintaining. If I'm
| my only customer, then I can do whatever I want. I write stuff
| that _I_ need.
|
| Publishing as "classic" public open source, forces me to do a
| good job, so that means that really significant parts of my
| projects are pretty much "worry free."
|
| You can see my stuff in my GH orgs (I don't really have much in
| my personal repos).
|
| https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#here-on-github
| xenodium wrote:
| - A ChatGPT shell that integrates well into my editor of choice
| https://xenodium.com/chatgpt-shell-available-on-melpa
|
| - A scriptable screenshot/video capture utility
| https://xenodium.com/recordscreenshot-windows-the-lazy-way
|
| - An iOS habit tracker that's neither cloud-based, nor needs an
| account, social, wants my attention, data, etc.
| https://flathabits.com
|
| - An iOS scratch pad that removes further friction than typical
| note apps https://xenodium.com/scratch-a-minimal-scratch-area
|
| - An iOS org mode app 'cause there are lots of Markdown ones but
| almost no org mode ones https://plainorg.com
|
| - A way to easily record more complex commands (ie. ffmpeg) and
| make them reusable for the future https://xenodium.com/seamless-
| command-line-utils
| georgebcrawford wrote:
| _scratch_ ed an itch - instabuy from me. Thank you!
| xenodium wrote:
| Thank you!
| Evan-Purkhiser wrote:
| Hey wanted to say I love the styling on your blog!
| xenodium wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| It started as a single org file for personal notes (and still
| is) exported to HTML. These days, it's a chunky org file, but
| hey if it works...
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xenodium/xenodium.github.i.
| ..
| tojikomorin wrote:
| I love chatGPT shell. Liang i!
| xenodium wrote:
| Hey that's great to hear. Thank you!
| King-Aaron wrote:
| I mean, I put a 4 litre V8 in my mx-5, which I guess is 'tech I
| built just for myself'
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's got to be so much fun to drive :)
|
| Triumph had the 'Stag', I suspect this is much the same effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_Stag
|
| (talk about problem cars...)
| tagh wrote:
| A simple script that tallies up my cycling mileage based on
| Garmin activites, and makes me a reminder on my Google calendar
| when it's time to re-wax my chain.
|
| Scheduling the script to reliably run via Task Scheduler
| (Windows) was was its own project!
| thisismyuser wrote:
| CitiBikeHistory.com
|
| I CitiBike a lot around NYC and this gives me (and my
| friends/coworkers) access to the full station history
| terran57 wrote:
| That's great! Which APIs are you using?
| stiray wrote:
| Proxy server with full mitm support for removing / blocking ads,
| modifying cookies to per session cookies, injecting of anti-
| fingerprinting javascript into pages, caching, various blocking
| lists, cname resolving, ASN blocking,...
|
| It was written as I got sick of particularities of squid proxy.
| Using it for 5 years for home network as transparent proxy, never
| released it.
|
| "A picture is worth a thousand words":
|
| Application Options: --listen=
| Listening ip and port (format "address:port") (default:
| 127.0.0.1:8080) --ini=
| Path for .ini file, if not there it will be created with defaults
| --id= Unique id,
| used for caching and avoiding detection of injected js. (default:
| machineid)
|
| Certificate Authority: --cakey=
| CA Private Key for MITMing https connections (default: ca.key)
| --cacrt= CA
| Certificate for MITMing https connections. It must be imported
| into client(browser) as trusted CA (default: ca.crt)
| --cagen=[512|1024|2048|4096] CA Private
| Key (and CA Certificate) generation, keysize. (default: 1024)
|
| Upstream Proxy: --upstream.proxy=
| Upstream proxy (format "address:port")
| --upstream.cacrt= Upstream
| proxy CA certificate
|
| Lists Options: --list.update=
| Update databases interval for https paths (default: 24h)
| --list.path= Path for
| caching downloaded lists (default: lists) -D,
| --domain.blacklist= File/url
| paths with domain blacklist --domain.whitelist=
| File/url paths with domain whitelist -U, --url.blacklist=
| File/url paths with url blacklist --url.whitelist=
| File/url paths with url whitelist -A, --adblock.blacklist=
| File/url paths for adblock rules
| --adblock.whitelist= File/url
| paths for adblock whitelist rules -N, --cname.blacklist=
| File/url paths for cname masked domain blacklist
| --cname.whitelist= File/url
| paths for cname masked domain whitelist -S,
| --asn.blocklist= ASN address
| ranges to block (macros:"facebook", "google", "microsoft",
| "apple", "amazon") --asn.whitelist=
| ASN address ranges to whitelist (macros:"facebook", "google",
| "microsoft", "apple", "amazon") -R, --regexp=
| File/url paths for regular expression replace rules
| --inject.list= File/url
| paths with js injection rules --inject.cache
| Inject into cache, faster, updating script require cache
| invalidation
|
| CDN caching: -C, --cdn.blacklist= File/url paths for cache
| forever cdn rules --cdn.whitelist=
| File/url paths for cdn whitelist --cdn.expires=
| Defines expiration for CDN cache (default: 30d)
|
| DNS resolve: --dns=
| File/url path to list of dns servers to use
| --dns.change= Defines
| timeout for changing the dns (default: 10s)
| --dns.timeout= Defines
| timeout for dns to respond, if exceeded it will be excluded
| (default: 250ms)
|
| User Agent: --user-agents=
| File/url paths to list of user-agents used --user-
| agents.random= Generate specified
| number of random user agents --user-agents.change=
| Defines timeout for user-agent randomization (default: 300s)
|
| Privacy Options: --header.cspreport
| Allow CSP reporting --header.cache
| Allow cache headers reach clients
| --header.expectct Allow
| Expect-CT header --header.etag.remove
| Enable removing of ETag used for cookieless tracking
| --header.hsts.remove Enable
| removing of HSTS header (we are doing mitm anyway)
| --header.dnt.enable Set Do-Not-
| Track header --image.reencode
| Enable re-encoding of images to remove hidden tagging
| --amp.allow Allow AMP
| redirection --cookie.validity=
| Change domain cookie validity ('0' is per-session cookie, off for
| disabled) (default: off) --cookie.validity.3rd=
| Change 3rd party domain cookie validity ('0' is per-session
| cookie, 'off' disabled) (default: 1h)
|
| Documentation: -v, --version Version information -l, --licenses
| License information --man
| Generate man page --txt
| Generate text documentation
|
| Caching: --cache.compression.disable
| Disable all compression --cache.sharing.clients
| Enable clients share same cache
| --cache.sharing.xsite Allow cache
| sharing for 3rd party domains --cache.media.enable
| Cache media content (disk & memory impact!)
|
| Memory Caching: --cache.mem.disable
| Disable caching --cache.mem.size=
| Maximum size, if reached expire oldest entries (default: 512mb)
| --cache.mem.expires= Maximum time
| before it expires (default: 24h)
| --cache.mem.nocompression Disable
| memory cache compression --cache.mem.min=
| Minimum content size to cache (kb, mb, gb) (default: 512)
| --cache.mem.max= Maximum
| content size to cache (kb, mb, gb) (default: 2mb)
|
| Disk Caching: --cache.disk.disable
| Disable caching --cache.disk.path=
| Path for on disk caching (default: webcache)
| --cache.disk.size= Maximum
| cache size in megabytes (default: 1024mb)
| --cache.disk.expires= Maximum time
| before cache expires (default: 30d)
| --cache.disk.ttlexpire= Timeout to
| execute task for expiring cache values (default: 10m)
| --cache.disk.nocompression Disable disk
| cache compression --cache.disk.min=
| Minimum size to cache (kb, mb, gb) (default: 512)
| --cache.disk.max= Maximum size
| to cache (kb, mb, gb) (default: 10mb)
|
| Developer Options:
| --log.level=[trace|debug|info|error|fatal|panic|off] Logging
| level (default: error) --log.output=
| Logging output filename or stdout, stderr (default: stderr)
| --log.json Logging is
| formatted as json --header.debug
| Enable sending debug headers to clients
| --db.optimize Enable
| statistic database optimizations
| --threadpool.size= Size of
| thread pool (0 disables thread pooling) (default: 200)
| --threadpool.proxy.disable Disable
| thread pool for proxying
| --threadpool.filter.disable Disable
| thread pool for filtering
| --threadpool.tools.disable Disable
| thread pool for tools --domain.resources=
| Proxy resource access domain (default: my.proxy)
|
| Help Options: -h, --help Show this help message
| jaredandrews wrote:
| I've been meaning to write a blog post about this but the code is
| so messy I keep telling myself "I'll clean it up first and then
| show it off"...
|
| Growing up I had an alarm clock that you put a CD into and it
| would fade in the CD instead of an alarm noise. I really loved
| this, though having to wake up super early for school everyday, I
| will admit that I developed negative associations with the first
| track on many albums.
|
| I created an improvised version of this a few years ago: a timer
| switch hooked up to a light, a cassette player and a water
| heater. When the timer went off all three would turn on. This
| worked but wasn't great cause nothing faded in.
|
| I remodeled my bedroom last summer and wanted to replace this
| alarm with something more sophisticated.
|
| I used a Raspberry Pi to do the following: - At the set alarm
| time, access my media server and generate a playlist of 10 random
| songs. Start this playlist and slowly increase the volume. - I
| bought a separate module to hook up to a lamp that points at
| where I sleep. This module lets me slowly turn up the brightness
| of the lamp as the music volume increases.
|
| The water heater is hooked up to a timer in my kitchen now. But I
| just finished building an arduino based wifi switch, so once I
| get it integrated, that switch will get turned on 5-10 minutes
| before the alarm is set to go off and heat my water for coffee.
|
| I built a dashboard for all of this using HTMX. It lets you set
| the alarm time, snooze, play arbitrary playlists, adjust the
| light etc. I also added a weather widget and I have a JSON file
| of all important birthdays in my life, so it tells me whos
| birthday it is when I go to review the weather.
|
| Something that HN may appreciate, I have it setup so when I ssh
| into the Pi, I get dropped into a tmux session where an instance
| of emacs is running with the actual alarm code being executed
| inside of it. This makes editing and trying the new functions
| sort of like a lisp machine. You get dropped into emacs and can
| tweak all the scripts and test them in a sort of live environment
| (you have to restart the server to update the dashboard but
| everything else is 'live'). I have a dream of rewriting this so
| it really is a lisp machine and everything can be `c-x c-e`'d to
| run but I doubt I'll ever get around to that.
|
| I would also like to integrate motorized blinds and open them up
| when I wake. I'm still researching this, if anyone has
| recommendations.
| susam wrote:
| https://mathb.in/
|
| I wrote this 11 years ago for my friends and myself who were
| going through a phase in our lives when we used to challenge each
| other with mathematical puzzles.
|
| The use of this tool spread from my friends to their friends and
| colleagues, then schools and universities, and then to IRC
| channels. Now it is the oldest mathematics pastebin that is still
| online and serving its community of users. Visit
| https://github.com/susam/mathb for the source code of this tool.
| Tossrock wrote:
| I made a visual programming / node editor environment similar to
| TouchDesigner, vvvv, Unreal Blueprints, etc, on top of Unity:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyDpnzfSg_o
|
| It was originally created to drive a particular large LED
| installation I work on, but I've generalized it to the point of
| being able to drive other installations as well. It passes
| texture data between nodes running compute shaders to chain
| together patterns/effects, which is a fun and powerful paradigm
| for creating visuals. Not as powerful or featureful as "real"
| solutions like TouchDesigner, (which, if I'd known about when
| starting out, I probably would have just used), but I do know all
| its ins and outs and can change it exactly how I want, which is
| nice.
| Luke00126 wrote:
| Not really that high-tech or that interesting, but I've made a
| firefox add-on that sorts YouTube video tabs by duration.
| Recently I realized that someone else actually uses it too (he
| left a review), so I got motivated to patch it
| rajangdavis wrote:
| I made an app to control my pedalboard via WebMIDI
|
| https://github.com/rajangdavis/macrocosm_js
|
| Was inspired by some existing editors so I made my own and
| extended it to create macros for sending sysex/PC messages to
| multiple devices.
| franciscop wrote:
| I made a flashcard site with spaced repetition for learning
| Japanese (I moved to Japan few years ago). I love the idea behind
| Anki, but both the interface and having to take decision while
| trying to memorize were a drag on me, so I made the flashcards
| for a simple "did I know it or not?".
|
| I attribute around half of the Japanese I still know to repeating
| cards incessantly one after another for months, few years ago:
|
| https://core.cards/
| jckahn wrote:
| I made https://chitchatter.im/ because I don't trust third
| parties not to spy on me. I can trust Chitchatter because I know
| how it works and I built it myself. :)
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I have a wonderful group of friends from back home, ranging all
| over the age spectrum, who all golf together almost religiously
| every weekend. I made them an app that resembles the PGATour's
| live scoring, so folks can be on the course and input their
| scores on the holes and get a live leaderboard of how everyone is
| doing, factoring in everyone's handicap. There are some
| commercial apps that kind of do this, but the issue with us there
| are several members who for one reason or another don't. have
| phones to input their scores themselves, so my app lets one
| person in the group put their scores in for the other ones.
|
| After I left the country, this has had the wonderful side benefit
| that I can still follow along with everyone's game, and has been
| instrumental in me staying in touch and connected to my friends,
| so that when I come to visit on vacation it's like I never left!
| leblancfg wrote:
| Definitely a marketable idea right there, ChicagoBoy11
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I created an optimizer for helping me make ship loadouts in the
| game highfleet. I put it online and added ship-sharing. Had a ton
| of help from a frontend dev, I mostly worked in C using SCIP,
| IPOPT, and such to solve the constrained optimization problem.
|
| https://hfopt.jodavaho.io
| allochthon wrote:
| I built a web app that keeps track of every link I ever find to
| be interesting. It allows for fine-grained topics (e.g.,
| individual academic papers, or topics more specific than that).
| It groups the topics in a DAG, so that you can get to a topic via
| more than one path from the top. And it allows you to look at
| intersections of transitive closures over topics in order to
| narrow down a search.
|
| It keeps a history of every change to the graph in Git, so one
| day you could potentially implement some form of time travel and
| see what the graph looked like at an earlier point in time
| without too much difficulty.
|
| I have used the app every day for years. I feel like there's
| something promising there that is of general interest, but I have
| not figured out how to communicate the value.
| shruggedatlas wrote:
| That's an intriguing idea. What is the purpose of it? Can you
| share screenshots?
| allochthon wrote:
| My own purpose in using it is to be able to get back to any
| link that I've read or have potentially wanted to read at a
| later point in time. You scan see screenshots here:
| https://github.com/emwalker/digraph.
| leobg wrote:
| Sounds very interesting. Do I'm having trouble picturing how it
| works. How do you get the links into the system? I'm assuming
| this won't work for links that you find on your phone, i.e.
| when not on your on your computer? And how do these links get
| indexed? By the stuff that's on the page? What's an example use
| case of where you use that system to find a link?
| allochthon wrote:
| It's pretty manual at this point. The indexing is done by
| hand. The idea is kind of crazy, but I think it can be made
| to work, in the same way that Wikipedia is maintained by
| hand.
|
| https://digraph.app/
|
| https://github.com/emwalker/digraph
|
| If you can crowdsource the indexing, you get yourself a
| manually curated search engine with a nice topic graph that
| can be traversed. A piece of this puzzle that hasn't been
| tackled yet is a reputation system to keep the signal-to-
| noise ratio high and deal with spam.
|
| > What's an example use case of where you use that system to
| find a link?
|
| An example use case is that I come across some interesting
| long-form article on a topic I'm following, e.g.,
| Shackleton's expedition, that's published on a nice website
| and that I don't have time to read. I can just drop the link
| in the right topic and get back to it without too much
| difficulty. Or that's the hope, anyway. (Doesn't always work
| out that like that.)
|
| Another thing I'm interested in is what the topic structure
| ends up looking like as it's more fully fleshed out. So
| sometimes I'll drop in random links even if they're not that
| interesting, just to build out the topics.
| ziffusion wrote:
| I built some groundbreaking technology to make it easier to
| browse torrents on the RARBG website.
|
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/36751-rarbg
| semaj123 wrote:
| When I was in college, registering for classes was always a pain
| since a lot of classes would fill up almost instantly once online
| registration opened, then it was just a game of constantly
| refreshing to see if any seats had become available.
|
| After struggling through that for a few semesters, I decided to
| automate it. Started out with a script that would take course IDs
| as input and check for openings every few minutes (used
| selenium/beautiful soup I think) then text me via twilio whenever
| a seat was available. The next semester I updated it so it would
| even sign me up for the course automatically.
|
| Also came in handy to get myself and a few friends into the
| coveted wine tasting class our senior year.
| Luke00126 wrote:
| Not really that high-tech or that cool, but I've made a firefox
| add-on that sorts YouTube video tabs by duration. Recently I
| realized that someone else actually uses it too (he left a
| review), so I got motivated to patch it
| lalunamel wrote:
| I built a native mac app called FileWatcher. It watches the
| filesystem for events like read, write, open, mount, stat, etc
| etc. I wanted to investigate how xcode's build system worked [1]
| (which relies on `stat` to determine whether or not a file needs
| to be recompiled) and couldn't find any tool that would do the
| job.
|
| I was astonished when I couldn't find what I needed - surely this
| had already been solved by someone else! There are things like
| inotify and watchman, but they don't provide process information
| about the events.
|
| I haven't figured out how to distribute it quite yet because the
| API it uses to collect file system events isn't allowed in apps
| distributed on the app store. I recently made a short video demo,
| though[2].
|
| [1] https://blog.codysehl.net/2023/Understanding-the-XCode-
| Build... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhMWXzoBWY
| _trackno5 wrote:
| Pretty cool project!
|
| Why don't you distribute through your own website though?
|
| It doesn't seem like the kind of tool people that only use the
| App Store would be interested in :)
| lalunamel wrote:
| Thanks a lot! Yeah, my current plan is to create a small
| static site and put a download link up on there, but I've yet
| to get the certificates and signing straightened out with
| apple.
| gonzus wrote:
| Recently, I used Zig to write a utility that runs on my NAS (ARM-
| based) and trawls through all directories looking for SRT
| subtitle files; it then cleans up these files, getting rid of any
| subtitles that match any of a set of patterns (such as "Please
| suscribe to XXX"). The utility does almost zero work for already-
| scrubbed subtitles, and only does work for new subtitles.
| flir wrote:
| Very simple one. I geofenced my workplace with IFTTT, and used a
| tiny bit of javascript glue to drop a line in a google sheet.
| Instant timesheets.
| yurishimo wrote:
| How reliable/accurate do you find it? I've always had issues
| with IFTTT in the past when it came to background geolocation.
| flir wrote:
| Reliable enough, for me. Big fence (it extended as far as the
| tube station), and I was there for 8 hours. I was on Android,
| for what it's worth.
| elmerfud wrote:
| Way back in the day before space was a non-issue I bought a used
| pioneer 720 disk DVD changer. Wrote a frontend to control it and
| mount the DVDs over iscsi for my media center.
|
| Also many years back when I was traveling all the time I created
| a thing based off the what 3 words data where I could geo drop
| messages at a location. My friends and I used it for a while but
| then just forgot about it.
| john_shafthair wrote:
| Whoa, that DVD changer is almost as big as a server rack. I'd
| love to have that in my garage.
| l2silver wrote:
| That geolocation messaging sounds brilliant. I guess Pokemon Go
| stole your idea.
| elmerfud wrote:
| It was neat but I never thought it would go anywhere. The
| idea was kind of like being able to leave virtual graffiti.
| So anyone could leave their "Kilroy was here" but without
| actually defacing anything.
| Tepix wrote:
| That seems like a cool idea, a bit like web annotations
| (which never took off) but for real world locations.
|
| Ideally you can subscribe to different databases unlike say
| Google Maps reviews.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Fun idea, maybe I'll add something similar to my
| https://wherewords.id
| hardcopy wrote:
| https://ppg.report
|
| Shows a nicely formatted weather report for flying my paramotor,
| pulling data in from many different sources :-)
| l2silver wrote:
| Alright, i'm buying a paramotor. Thanks a lot.
| 5bolts wrote:
| dang thats nice. good job
| GeorgeHahn wrote:
| I wrote a server that bridges Subsonic clients to my Spotify
| library. I like that it lets me to stream anything on Spotify but
| I can still fill in favorites that aren't available.
| rollcat wrote:
| I've written a minimalist replacement for Ansible. It started as
| a weekend hack, and I'm still using it daily after 7 years.
| Perhaps it's not technically impressive, but so wasn't the
| original UNIX, which served as a direct inspiration: how much
| work can you do with the simplest design and the least amount of
| code?
|
| https://github.com/rollcat/judo
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I hooked up an analog phone to Whisper, ChatGPT, and TTS. I used
| of one of those old timey candlestick phones you'd see in a 1920
| gangster movie. Initially this was a prop for a murder mystery
| party I was hosting (ChatGPT would give clues if you said certain
| words), but now I use it for a silly distraction here and there.
| Ask ChatGPT a question by picking up a phone like it's last
| century! I think it is fun.
|
| I am using Asterisk on Debian that calls my python script. The
| analog phone adapter auto dials when the receiver goes off hook,
| because rotary dialing sucks that much and the answering
| extension is chatgpt role playing different characters based on
| prompting.
|
| I think it is neat. I need to work on better voice synthesis and
| improve latency a bit still, but it is a nice toy.
| danlindley wrote:
| That sounds like a lot of fun, and really interesting to boot!
| I hadn't heard of Asterisk until today.
|
| Have you written anything on the development of this project,
| or is this something you'd consider? I would love to build
| something similar, and the idea of combining old analogue
| technology with modern tools and integrations- especially PBX-
| is quite intriguing.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I haven't written anything up, but I might do that.
|
| Asterisk is extremely powerful and reliable with good
| documentation. Because so many companies use it, I knew if
| something wasn't working that it was definitely on my
| configuration. Once you have Asterisk running on the LAN, you
| can you use any VOIP softphone app to connect and make
| "calls" to your scripts for testing.
|
| I bought an analog telephone adapter (ATA) to connect the
| phone to the LAN as well. At that point, the ATA is the
| bridge between the PBX and the physical phone and it can now
| make and receive calls (to destinations reachable by the
| PBX).
|
| If you want to make your scripts and devices accessible to
| the "real phone system" (PSTN) you can hook your ATA to a
| phone carrier (some ATA support this with a secondary port)
| or have asterisk connect to an external provider. I have not
| done this step.
|
| There is definitely a bit of steps involved, so it would make
| a good write-up. A lot of potential to do some fun things
| with it.
| troebr wrote:
| I bought one of these LED screens (you get 64*32px, so not a
| lot!), and I wrote an app to view my local surf conditions on it
| (so I know what I'm missing out on while working). But because it
| doesn't support a way to run local apps that fetch from APIs, I
| had to add a way to show the forecast for other spots and make it
| "official". No idea how many people use it, but I saw it on
| instagram ads so that was some kind of validation haha. It looks
| like this:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMi996lVIAAQMI3?format=jpg&name=...
| l2silver wrote:
| wicked, I love these display projects
| cm2187 wrote:
| Created a fuckup counter for my team on an old ipad. Inspired by
| the "x days with no accident" from the Simpsons, a webapp that
| shows in kiosk mode the number of days without a fuckup and a
| reset button.
| latexr wrote:
| > the "x days with no accident" from the Simpsons
|
| Though no doubt most of us know them from all the parodies1,
| those signs are real.
|
| 1 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XDaysSince
| nonoesp wrote:
| I wrote a live video/audio marker creator with OpenAI's Whisper.
|
| A Stream Deck XL button runs a Python script that creates a
| timestamp for ongoing video and audio recordings which I use for
| live stream and podcast chapters while I'm streaming or
| recording.
|
| Different buttons on the Stream Deck create markers with
| different labels, e.g., Introduction, Break, Marker, etc.
|
| But as it's hard to name markers for every section and you have
| to go back to the recordings to infer what each section was
| about, I added a dynamic marker script that trims audio around a
| marker with ffmpeg, locally transcribes it with Whisper, and
| appends the transcript to the marker, so I can easily guess what
| the marker title should be without having to scroll and watch the
| video.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| I built a Chrome extension to be able to use spaced repetitions
| for chess puzzles/exercises that I found online. Used it for a
| couple years and gained at least 200 Elo rating with it :)
|
| Recently I built a public facing website for that, if anybody is
| curious: chess.braimax.com
| andy800 wrote:
| Built a compilation of local happy hours, lunch specials, and
| other cheap eats at https://fullprice.no (as in, "do you want to
| pay full price? No."). The idea isn't all that original but I
| thought my layout and presentation was rather unique, for example
| the 24-hour slider as opposed to a clock interface.
|
| I thought it would be easier post-launch to get restaurants to
| participate and add their own information (nearly-free
| marketing), but that was a faulty assumption. The admin interface
| is also pretty cool, very simple to specify blocks of time when
| the specials are active.
|
| Unfortunately it hasn't been updated in 4 or 5 years. When Covid
| first started, I launched a sister site just to list restaurants
| that were open, I took that down about 6 months ago.
| ghbarton wrote:
| My dad wanted a analysis tool for Flight Sim, ended up having to
| build one himself that tracks flights then generates loads of
| reports and maps for you. The map shows you landmarks you flew
| over with short descriptions, a 3D model of the flight, various
| charts describing things like glidescope, GForces, speed,
| pitch/yaw and a bunch of other stuff like runway alignment. He
| spent so much time that he decided to make a product out of it
| that's doing quite well: https://myfs.flights
| zehome wrote:
| was going to buy a house miles away from any DSLAM. As I use
| internet a lot, I wrote something to help handle the lack of
| bandwidth [1] mlvpn.
|
| Then mptcp came, and I just did use a socks5 proxy with mptcp,
| which handles fluctuations of the link quality much better.
|
| Used it a lot at work tho, for VPN redundency
|
| [1] https://github.com/zehome/MLVPN
| zaphar wrote:
| I built a simple recipe meal planner and shopping list generator
| to manage family meals or dinner parties.
|
| The recipes are stored as free text and the ingredients are
| parsed out of the text so you can just copy paste most recipes or
| record them the exact same way that your old family recipes were
| written down.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| Ported X11 to iOS
|
| https://maxleiter.com/blog/X11
| withinboredom wrote:
| A deadman's switch connected to a manner of things. It basically
| works by 'non-existence' instead of existence and fires a webhook
| once something stops. For example, if my computer is turned off
| for a couple of weeks, it will send an email to loved ones. When
| I go day hiking, something similar happens when my phone loses
| service/power for more than a couple hours and sends a low-
| quality gps track. Basically it's if-this-then-that but more like
| if-this-stops-then-that. I have it tracking all kinds of things,
| like git-commits-per-person, server/device health metrics, and
| things like that.
| sowbug wrote:
| You could imagine a combination of a Tor-like architecture and
| Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme to construct a scavenger-hunt
| encryption system. Maybe 10 dead-man-switch utilities around
| the world agree to reveal X when Y happens (or doesn't happen),
| but their policies aren't even revealed until the first N
| secrets are broadcast. That way you can distribute the risk of
| collision, and meter the rate of a final secret being revealed
| or job being executed.
| parentheses wrote:
| I'd love to see the code for this. Seems useful.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I have been working for a while on a wooden sailing ship model,
| where at times one will reference model parts in terms of real
| dimensions - e.g., a 4" x 18" piece of wood. But that has to be
| translated into the model's scale when measuring the model parts.
|
| To streamline this, I made a little Arduino-driven device with an
| OLED display that can plug into the digital output port that many
| digital micrometers have. It takes the current micrometer
| measurement, applies the scaling factor, and displays the scaled
| dimension on the OLED.
|
| So that means I can take a small piece of wood from the kit,
| measure it with the micrometer, and directly see its full scale
| dimension - e.g., it's a scale 8" thick plank. Or I can take the
| micrometer to the 8 foot measure, and use it to mark off a piece
| of wood that I want to be that long.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Smart RSS reader that, right now, ingests about 1000 articles a
| day and picks out 300 for me to skim. Since I helped write this
| paper
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0312018
|
| I was always asking "Why is RSS failing? Why do failing RSS
| readers keep using the same failing interface that keeps
| failing?" and thought that text classification was ready in 2004
| for content-based recommendation, then I wrote
|
| https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/
|
| a few years ago, after Twitter went south I felt like I had to do
| something, so I did. Even though my old logistic regression
| classifier works well, I have one based on MiniLM that
| outperforms it, and the same embedding makes short work of
| classification be it "cluster together articles about Ukraine,
| sports, deep learning, etc." over the last four months or
| "cluster together the four articles written about the same event
| in the last four days".
|
| I am looking towards applying it to: images, sorting 5000+ search
| results on a topic, workflow systems (would this article be
| interesting to my wife, my son, hacker news?), and commercially
| interesting problems (is this person a good sales prospect?)
| embit wrote:
| I do something similar for my personal news reader. [1].
| Originally I had done it so I can read my tech news quickly.
| Now few of my friends also have started using it.
|
| [1] https://embit.ca
| md_ wrote:
| Amusing. I, too, wrote my own ML-powered newsreader. (Not
| linking here because I don't want to de-anonymize my HN
| handle.)
|
| I guess this is a thing people do. ;)
| ambicapter wrote:
| What do you mean by "outperform" in this context?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Area under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_c
| haracteris... curve.
|
| It's by no means perfect. For one thing if I have a choice of
| 0.78 ROC based on 40 days worth of data and 0.77 based on 10
| days worth of data I'd take the later because I know the
| later one adjusts more quickly to my changing preferences.
| Also my selection algorithm breaks up the input into (say) 20
| clusters and shows me the (say) 15 top results in each
| cluster and I know I like the results from that better than
| if I just take the highest ranking results.
| kasrak wrote:
| Cool!
|
| I've been hacking on a related side project -- in my case, I
| wanted something like this but for Twitter. Right now it's
| using gpt-3.5-turbo to cluster related Tweets & rank based on
| my interests.
|
| Source is here: https://github.com/kasrak/feedpaper
| imirzadeh wrote:
| I also wrote my own feed aggregator (https://mofeed.news)
| from scratch in Go. It can connect to twitter, reddit,
| spotify/itunes(podcasts), rss, medium, youtube, etc.It has a
| good search engine (meilisearch) and also supports newsletter
| (each user has an inbox).
|
| I'm currently testing it and have a few test users for
| feedback. I hope I can open source it sometime this year,
| after integrating the feedbacks, and polishing the code.
|
| It's not intelligent for now, but that's by choice. Instead,
| I prefer to have custom rules for filtering (e.g., adding
| tweets from user X to feed only if the likes are above a
| threshold). I may use GPT for summarization later, but
| honestly most of the posts are either short (e.g., tweets),
| or they come from websites that have description/summary in
| their meta tags.
|
| Please shoot me an email to `hey@mofeed.news` if you want to
| test it :)
| nergal wrote:
| Nice approach! I added a very basic keyword filter in my rss
| reader (https://github.com/lallassu/gorss) to do some sort of
| "cleaning". But having a section in the reader that would
| filter out the articles more intelligent would be very nice,
| and maybe bundled them into clusters.
| 6510 wrote:
| I too have an (private) RSS "laboratory" project!
|
| It isn't the elegant machinery you describe here as I'm quite
| unfamiliar with the technique you describe.
|
| If I'm actively using it the feed list grows to about 35-40 000
| at which point I find as many new feeds as I lose old ones.
|
| I maintain a dozen categories of badwords, if any of those are
| in the headline it will be removed.
|
| With many subscriptions things look quite different, higher
| frequency publishers start dominating the top of the newest
| list. The faster they publish the higher the standards I hold
| them to.
|
| What is quite amazing is that some really terrible news
| websites use long titles that are highly descriptive. I have a
| good few of those, they get to stay around because the badword
| filter purges so much I hardly ever see them. For every 2000
| bad ones business insider has a great article. It's a terrible
| website but their use of descriptive words in article titles is
| the best in the world.
|
| The key insight imho is that the internet is much more of an
| echo chamber than people think.
|
| As soon as you get rid of Musk and a few hundred other people,
| a few hundred companies, a dozen countries and a few thousand
| other topics you are left with a world of infinite other
| subjects. People are writing about stuff no one else ever
| thought of.
|
| If everyone in the world is reading and writing about FOO it is
| absolutely amazing to get rid of FOO. There is no such thing as
| an important football match. (joking sorry)
|
| Everyone is praising normality but you should really wonder who
| creates these norms. If they are good of bad people is besides
| the point. Musk says 1 something interesting per day I'm sure.
| For every 100 000 topics inserted into the collective we chose
| 1 then, by the tens of millions, we talk about it. Every day is
| Musk day.
|
| It doesn't matter how hard you resist participating, eventually
| you will learn that space x launched a rocket. There is no
| avoiding it.
|
| Autonomy is something fucking amazing. I imagine millions of
| articles are published per day. 99% things said before. What
| part should I want to read? The 1% with the most traffic?
|
| You should get on the train to nowhere just like everyone else
| - they say. Stop wandering around on your own, you should get
| on the train just like me!
|
| I'm not usually telling anyone not to get on the train. If
| people want to discuss "rss is dead" for the ten thousandth
| time, let them. They think they chose the topic themselves.
|
| There is 13 billion years of history, 6000 sq km of earth, 7.9
| billion people alive, 100 billion dead, 8.7 million species of
| plants and animals, 350 thousand chemical compounds, 130
| million books since the printing press, 100 billion stars in
| the milky way alone. What to spend my time on? The Trump
| investigations? Really?
|
| I'm sorry for not being very technical.
| PcChip wrote:
| Interested in your filters, or a link to your results!
| greenie_beans wrote:
| this is cool, thanks for sharing
| internetter wrote:
| Do you have public source code for this? Looks great.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's something I'm thinking about.
|
| The system right now is highly reliable, I have no fear of
| doing a live demo of it, but live demos come off as strange
| because my feed is a strange mix of arXiv abstracts, Guardian
| articles about association football, etc. so it comes off as
| idiosyncratic and personal. (Oddly when I started this
| project I loved the NFL and hated the Premier League, when I
| started doing feature engineering as to "Why does it perform
| so well for arXiv papers and so poorly for sports" I started
| studying football articles in detail and started thinking
| "How would I feel if my team got relegated?" and "Wow, that
| game went 1-0 and it was an own goal" and next thing I knew I
| was hanging on every goal in every game Arsenal and Man City
| play -- it changed me.)
|
| It's not even that hard for me to swap algorithms in and out
| but it should be easier, for instance I like the scikit-learn
| system for model selection mostly but there are some cases
| like SVC-P where I want to bypass it and I am not so sure how
| to comfortably fit fine-tuned transformer models into the
| system.
|
| Another problem with it is that it depends on AWS Lambda and
| Suprfeeder for ingestion, it costs me less than $5 a month to
| run and about 10 cents per feed but (1) that's not cost-
| effective if I want to add a few hundred blogs like
|
| https://www.righto.com/
|
| and (2) I know many people hate AWS and other cloud services.
|
| If somebody were interested in contributing some elbow grease
| that would help the case for open source, alternately a
| hosted demo of some kind would also be possible but I'm not
| ready to put my time and money into it. Contact me if you're
| interested in finding out more.
| rolisz wrote:
| > If somebody were interested in contributing some elbow
| grease that would help the case for open source,
|
| Sent you an email! I've been wanting such an ML powered RSS
| reader for quite some time. I'd love to help make it open
| source if possible.
| podviaznikov wrote:
| - build a tool to easily connect and analyze public datasets. Eg
| connect dataset for country population with the dataset on
| international students in the US and get new dataset on
| international students in the US per capita - build a tool to
| publish my personal website from my Apple Notes
| jen_h wrote:
| * A script that periodically screenscraped booked-up campsite
| reservation sites for cancellations during dates I wanted and
| sent me text messages (thanks, Twilio!). We got to stay at a
| bunch of amazing places at the last minute this way. We're
| currently grounded, but I recently ran it again for my parents
| and was shocked to find it still worked!
|
| * An Alexa app that provides a search interface to Old Time Radio
| shows on archive.org and saves your place (this was technically
| for my mother-in-law, the proof-of-concept with arcade sounds for
| my spouse). We all ended up using it a ton, though, it was kind
| of magical (the random function was really fun). I also set up an
| Alexa app to read me recent CVEs, but it's more of a goofy parlor
| trick than useful. ;)
|
| * A Rube Goldbergian bunch of terrible scripts that I can feed
| PDFs to, OCR, poorly-translate (using the expected engines or my
| own diymodel) and generate epubs from. And a bunch of scripts
| that convert Markdown to LaTeX and epub for personal book
| publishing projects.
|
| Thanks for asking this question, it's so neat to see everyone's
| responses! I might ping my spouse on this post, too, who's
| developed a crazy amount of personal projects that combine
| software and hardware to fixup our/our families' lives.
| karakanb wrote:
| I lived in a family apartment growing up, and we'd lock the door
| to the entire building at night when everyone was home with a
| sliding lock so that it could only be opened from the inside.
| However, that'd mean you need to ensure at least one person from
| every apartment was home, otherwise you'd need to go downstairs
| and let the others in in the middle of the night.
|
| All the 3 apartments in the building were sharing the same wi-fi
| device, therefore I built a simple scanner to find all the
| devices in the network, connect them to the individuals I knew,
| and show the devices I found on the network in a simple website,
| which then I installed on my parents' devices as a PWA. The
| scanner would run in a Raspberry Pi I had lying around.
|
| In the end it wasn't very reliable, the router kept failing
| occasionally due to nmap, and after a few failures we stopped
| using it, but it was a fun experiment for me.
| rmholt wrote:
| I struggled with procrastination a lot so on top of Pi-Hole I
| built myself an automatic procrastination tracker and blocker,
| this setup helped reduce my procrastination from several hours a
| day to almost nothing (over the period of several years of slowly
| unlearning the bad habits)
| plastic_bag wrote:
| As someone who is struggling with procrastination, I'd love to
| know more about how it works and how it helped you overcome the
| bad habits.
| parentheses wrote:
| I'm slightly embarrassed that in terms of building personally
| relevant things, my proudest (digital) work is always shell
| scripts I use daily. Most of my personal projects are non-
| technical meat-space things like building with wood and the like.
| Here's some that I've open-sourced:
|
| - A git interface using fzf that works pretty nicely and is very
| composable. https://github.com/bigH/git-fuzzy
|
| - An interactive evaluator, perfect for interactive `sed`,
| `grep`, `jq`, etc. If properly configured, it'll keep history per
| command or using whatever key you give it. I find myself using it
| often with `jq`. https://github.com/bigH/interactively
|
| There are many other shell functions/scripts that are interesting
| from my `dotfiles`. Particularly interesting snippets for anyone
| who wants them:
|
| - A recursize `which` that follows symlinks and stops at a real
| file.
| https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...
|
| - A `watch` alternative that runs in the current shell.
| https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...
| seanw444 wrote:
| You accomplish things in real non-computer life? Nerd.
|
| For the downvoters, that's what we call a "joke". I appreciate
| when I hear from not-terminally-online people on here.
| parentheses wrote:
| Upvoted ;)
| alin23 wrote:
| I'm a long time user of git-fuzzy, thank you for that!
|
| I am also grateful to hear about "interactively", I always had
| to write some kind of half baked implementation, it's great to
| finally have a defacto solution.
| akhayam wrote:
| About 8 years back, I was leading an engineering team which was
| the escalation path for customer support. We were sitting on a
| large corpus of support tickets but didn't have any insights. I
| was amazed when word2vec came out and blew my mind. So I built a
| language model that trained on support ticket data. I modeled
| system logs attached to support tickets as an NLP model to
| predict what was going to fail next and for which customer.
|
| Never made it to prod but was a great tool for me to see where I
| want to budget my team's time.
|
| This is way before all the LLM and Generator models, but it was
| such a fun project.
| onesphere wrote:
| We have a corpus or database of programs that follow logic but
| with no simulation, so it represents knowledge to solve a
| problem yet all we have control over is the parameters
| (inputs). In this case, input is functional logical content (a
| program), describing the resolution of corpus details. The
| model solves its integrated, corporate logic, and our output is
| an interpretation of that individual program.
|
| Now our task is to swap out this entire database for something
| like it, but not exactly the same. The output becomes the input
| to this new matrix. The individual program persists, but
| everything is the next generation. With a little book-keeping,
| the programs do our will...
| akhayam wrote:
| Don't think I quite follow. Is the new program (operating on
| the output of the earlier program) supposed to reason about
| why you are seeing the result that you are seeing? Or is it
| doing more post processing to make the earlier output
| directly consumable by your corporate systems.
| onesphere wrote:
| The new program's purpose could be to do more post
| processing to make the interpretation of that earlier
| program directly consumable (inter-generationally), or it
| could simply start producing more problems to solve.
| akhayam wrote:
| Gotcha! That makes sense. I would recommend looking at
| LangChain though, as it does a good job at modeling
| multi-stage learning / inference environments.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| >This is way before all the LLM and Generator models, but it
| was such a fun project.
|
| That means something more sophisticated _has_ to exist today
| and should be commercially available. Can anyone explain to
| what extent companies use this stuff in their interaction with
| customers, and how successful is it? (Somehow I still see AI
| still as one-off things people do for fun or AI being used to
| hype up rather mundane software.)
| akhayam wrote:
| It should exist and would be super powerful considering all
| the recent advancements in language ML. Here was the mental
| model of my model: the canonical representation (i.e. a
| representation after taking out run-time populated fields) of
| a log line represents the smallest meaningful unit of this
| "log language": _a word_. Taking this analogy further, an
| event is a collection of logs that occur together (mostly in
| order)--just like words spoken together form _a sentence_.
| Finally, collections of events that occur in close proximity
| (in time) represent _paragraphs_, while paragraphs occurring
| in a certain order constitute _chapters_. Using this mental
| model opens the door to apply all the new AI techniques for
| text extraction, summarization and generation to extract the
| semantic structure of any "log language" and then learn and
| classify behaviors observed at run-time. The eventual
| objective function is not generation though--it's reasoning
| with the optimal FP-TP tradeoff on a ROC curve.
|
| I haven't seen anyone do it yet. Maybe companies like Splunk
| and Elastic will take a lead here. I am happy to engage,
| advise and contribute if there is an open source project
| around this. Has anyone else seen something remotely close to
| this?
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks!
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| A TDCS device. Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation, mostly
| experimental, somewhat proven for short-term depression and
| cognition improvement. Motivation was my solution would be
| simpler and easier to control as well as include triple safety.
|
| I had little trust for the Chinese IC steered devices nor the
| early US attempters at pop market that refuse to describe even
| their safety approach.
|
| Pleased with my personal results. Would not openly recommend
| doing it, because the DIY route as well as adopting TDCS do
| require that you can competently read medical studies. At least
| half of those I browsed fail good science test even at first
| glance.
|
| And then of course the manufacturers and sellers are even worse,
| such as they are quite good at parroting misquotes of study
| results for marketing and PR.
|
| Next plan is build an ECG and my own medical ultrasound, although
| with that one it is probably best to wait for about 5 to 7 years
| till the new-tech ultrasound generators get to market.
| yeswecatan wrote:
| If you're in the area, Stanford's Brain Stimulation Lab is
| always recruiting for clinical trials:
| https://bsl.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/
| wholinator2 wrote:
| So did you build the device or research and purchase a personal
| one? I've been thinking of doing this for probably approaching
| a decade and been terrified of the potential consequences.
|
| What do you use it for? Just the typical depression type thing
| or have you experimented with it at all? Super interested
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| Its probably too late to comment for anyone to see/respond, but
| I've been working for a long time on a personal workstation
| automation/configruation project:
|
| - https://github.com/joelmccracken/workstation
|
| At this point, its basically ready to go. Its a weird feeling.
| I've been working on it for so long, and now it... works.
|
| Being able to use github actions with macos runners makes this
| project so, so, so much easier.
|
| Another project I've been working on is a custom authoring format
| - think markdown, but customized to my needs (specifically, the
| format is extensible). Think markdown/xmlish hybrid. There is a
| lot of churn though so I'm not quite ready to demo it, but once I
| get something interesting I'll share it more with folks.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| It's a Firefox extension for just me. [0] I've posted it here
| before, and one user said they'd start using it. I hope someone
| else finds it useful again. The problem: I wanted to be able to
| mute League of Legends streams in between games with a hotkey,
| and without changing visibility of any windows in the process of
| doing so. This is a much harder problem than you'd think, even
| with the existence of Autohotkey, and NirCmd, and ControlSend,
| because Firefox is really annoying. [1] It ended up requiring me
| to write an entire Firefox extension as well as use an AHK that
| uses ControlSend.
|
| Anyway, yeah, that FF extension. It represents the culmination of
| about 5 years of me trying to solve this problem with
| progressively more complex and incrementally better solutions
| until I finally arrived at a ridiculously over-engineered version
| that actually works as it should.
|
| [0] https://github.com/RheingoldRiver/MuteTabsMatchingPattern
|
| [1] https://river.me/blog/global-hotkey-mute-firefox-stream/
| antirez wrote:
| A DNS server, many many years ago. Just to avoid using bind:
|
| https://github.com/antirez/yaku-ns
| Aeolun wrote:
| What's wrong with using bind?
| bombcar wrote:
| Many, many years ago bind was an absolute giant complex ball
| of security holes.
| mind1master wrote:
| Self-driving LEGO car that uses iphone as a lidar/camera and runs
| computations on a macbook air https://blog.mind1m.xyz/posts/lego-
| car-part-1/
| 7723 wrote:
| Maybe not the most interesting but a CLI utility that would do 2
| things (gaming related):
|
| * guess the gameserver tick rate based on network traffic
| patterns between game client/server (cs:go for example) and
| display it in grafana
|
| * collect keyboard inputs while playing and display them as a
| heatmap on grafana
|
| All of this for no real reason.
| can3p wrote:
| I've built two projects that I'm very happy with.
|
| I'm still using livejournal.com social network nobody cares about
| today and when I was really into common lisp I decided to build a
| cli client to it. What makes it cool is that it's just markdown
| files locally and the client works almost like git, you can even
| pull and push posts. After I wrote it I was able to pull all my
| posts since 2007 or so from the service and have them locally as
| markdown files, any updates would be synced.
|
| The other thing I've built mostly for my self is a notes taking
| service https://dabdab.org which allows to take notes the way I
| want it. What was cool about it was that I was able to almost
| reinvent django or rails but in go, so everything is fast, but
| still compile checks. From the product side I've managed to get
| to the same level of comfort one would get with github issues
| (markdown, image upload etc).
|
| Both things have 1 user at the moment (me) do I think that counts
| :D
| dang wrote:
| Definitely my HN moderation browser extension, which lets me flip
| through HN super fast and do routine mod tasks without gruntwork.
|
| If I live long enough, I will factor out a general-reader version
| of this that will bring joy to HN power users everywhere.
|
| It requires a keyboard, though. Do the kids still use those?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Ah, browser extensions and user scripts are _so great_ for
| improving websites.
|
| Most of my current user scripts:
|
| * Hold z to make a currently-playing audio or video go at 4x
| (the fastest you can go before Firefox cuts off the audio).
|
| * Auto-admit in Google Meet (wish they'd implement this
| themselves). There were a couple of browser extensions to do
| that, but I looked at their source and was appalled at how
| badly and/or stupidly they implemented it, and so wrote this,
| which is better (... so long as you use English--one of them
| supported I think it was Japanese as well) _and_ more
| efficient: new MutationObserver(() = > {
| document.querySelector("[aria-modal='true'][aria-label*='join']
| [data-mdc-dialog-action='accept']")?.click();
| }).observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
|
| * Retitle a few web apps that have consistently useless
| document titles, by pulling in actual document contents. I gave
| this to my sister, who regularly has hundreds of VicFlora tabs
| open, which used to be all titled "VicFlora"; last year they
| fixed that but got the endianness wrong, "VicFlora - <Page
| title>", so I fixed that to "<Page title> - VicFlora" so you
| can actually see the useful part in the tab bar. (Document
| titles should be little-endian.)
|
| * Find <video autoplay> and turn on controls (since I have
| autoplay blocked--incidentally, this is something disabling
| autoplay should probably automatically do, at least until you
| start the video).
|
| * Kill aos-* animations on pages, which stupidly tend to make
| the page invisible until their JavaScript loads. (This is
| important for me because I disable JavaScript, but those "fade
| in when the page loads or as you scroll" animations are really
| annoying even when they work, killing them makes things
| better.)
|
| * Fix Cloudflare "[email protected]" stupidity without having
| to run the page's arbitrary JavaScript. (Basically: take their
| deobfuscator script and just run it myself if it gets used.
| Only people that deliberately block JavaScript are likely to
| have seen this, but it's quite common. The filter they use is
| evidently very dumb, obfuscating quite a few things that are
| not email addresses, including things like "package-name@1.2.3"
| (not even valid--IP address hosts have to be in square
| brackets, and DNS doesn't use numeric TLDs) and "user@host" in
| console logs.)
|
| * Put the current weather into the favicon on
| weather.bom.gov.au (... except that they this shut down last
| month for no obvious reason, with no equivalent replacement
| unless you run Google Android 6+ or iOS, which I don't on _any_
| device, let alone my laptop; so I'm stuck with just their old
| site which completely lacks a _lot_ of the information this
| other thing had exposed, _and_ is served over HTTP only but
| their server accepts HTTPS connections in order to 307 redirect
| to _a different path_ on http: scheme as well in order to say
| "we don't support HTTPS", which interacts horribly with "HTTPS
| Only" mode (because even when you add an exception for the
| duration of the session, you lose the path part of the URL),
| and is the only site I've ever encountered doing such a stupid
| thing, and in all this they have never responded to my
| enquiries like they claim they will).
| mydriasis wrote:
| I for one would happily use a keyboard to browse... If only...!
| nextaccountic wrote:
| https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser
| anjanb wrote:
| not a kid! but I use keyboard as my main interface!
| tra3 wrote:
| Is it emacs?
| dang wrote:
| Everything I do is emacs. But I'm not sure which sense you're
| asking about.
|
| (HN isn't emacs, though. pg uses vi.)
| bombcar wrote:
| > It requires a keyboard, though. Do the kids still use those?
|
| I'm sure your server logs will tell you what percentage of
| visitors are NOT mobile.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Maybe you're overthinking it? Just push it to GitHub and call
| it a day. Someone else will turn it into the general-reader
| version.
|
| Unless it has a bunch of secret stuff in it. Then I guess you'd
| have to.
|
| Don't underestimate the tenacity of HN readers though. Lots of
| us would do that kind of thing just for fun. You don't have to
| do it all yourself.
| dang wrote:
| There's a bunch of secret stuff in it, in the sense of
| moderator-only.
|
| I don't think there's anything sinister, but it wouldn't be
| very nice to release in the current form.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Eh, just backspace the mod-only stuff and push it to
| GitHub. We'll clean it up.
|
| Easier said than done maybe, but please don't feel like you
| need to get it perfect. We'll do a lot of the legwork for
| you.
|
| Also don't underestimate how cool it is to get to see what
| you use in its current form, even if it's rough. There's an
| archaeological component to this that's quite gratifying.
| suby wrote:
| In 2017 I spent a while messing around and creating a system to
| code and control my computer via voice. I was experiencing RSI
| pain at the time, and thought I should be proactive and have a
| strategy where I could still work and use my computer in case it
| kept getting worse and it became an impedance to create such a
| tool. I tried every voice to text I could find, and unfortunately
| for me the only acceptable one in terms of quality was Dragon
| Naturally Speaking, which was commercial and Windows only (I use
| Linux). I decided to build a virtual machine running Windows XP
| which ran the voice -> text translation, and then run a local
| server on the Linux side which would receive packets of text from
| the virtual machine. It was then a matter of parsing the string
| for language primitives, as you'd need a custom alphabet of
| keywords to do certain actions like type any given key
| combination, and inventing your own primitives for this reduces
| ambiguity (voice detection is only so accurate and the use case
| here means it's going to be less accurate than usual since you
| are not speaking in expected english, plus you want everything to
| be single syllable).
|
| The process of building a dictionary of primitives and shorts was
| very much akin to what court reporters / Stenographers do to type
| fast, and was also probably related to my RSI given that I
| started my career out as a Stenographer. Something I regret in
| retrospect.
|
| In terms of voice coding, things really have gotten so much
| better since then where we now have amazing free and open source
| options for text to speech, and we've also seen a proliferation
| of apps used to code via voice. I'm partial to Talon, though I
| don't do any voice coding today. https://talonvoice.com/. Github
| also just announced a voice to code copilot type thing, and at
| this point given the advances we're seeing in AI I'm sure I'll be
| okay if my RSI gets bad. This video was one of the things I
| watched and helped me in building the system,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
|
| I'm also building a video game, and plan on building many more.
| I'm writing it in a monorepo where I have a common shared
| foundation, and then apps using and building on that foundation.
| I believe in dogfooding my code, and have built a bunch of things
| with it towards that end
|
| The thing I'm happiest with and use the most is a small and
| simple music player. I never could find a replacement Foobar2000,
| so I wrote my own. It runs nearly 24/7 on my PC's.
|
| I've also built a breathing app after discovering that breathing
| exercises were like magic in terms of improving mood and reducing
| blood pressure. The one I built was modeled after
| https://github.com/jithware/brethap, and I mainly built it
| because it was trivial to do and Firefox kept putting the web tab
| to sleep. If you have high blood pressure, I 100% recommend
| exploring different breathing exercises.
|
| I've also built two different GUI wrappers around image
| generators. The first app was built around VQGan+Clip back before
| Stable Diffusion, and it supported swapping the backends to
| change generators. I built it as a web app with Svelte, and it
| let me explore the images and auto-generate based on a theme or
| with a given sentence structure where parts of the sentence could
| be sampled from a pool. The second one was much the same, but it
| was built with my monorepo, it was built around Stable Diffusion,
| and I added an image-to-image component where I have a simple UI
| to draw on the input image through the app. The usefulness of
| this project is near 0 as there are better open source versions
| out there.
|
| I also built a static website generator in Ruby for my personal
| website. I've since soured on Ruby though, and my website is no
| longer online. There are other things but I'll leave it there
| because this is already too long.
| reductor_app wrote:
| a web and android app (free) for lossless jpeg recompression
| (saves me some space on the phone)
|
| https://reductor.app/
| fghorow wrote:
| Prior to the 2017 "Great American Eclipse", I made reservations
| at two hotels -- each within a day's drive of my location that
| were near the path of totality. I then built a screenscraper from
| one of the weather sites (WUnderground, IIRC) that took the cloud
| forecast for the eclipse and presented it as a time-series. (Yes,
| I knew there was significant uncertainty involved!)
|
| About 3 days before the eclipse, I decided which site to visit
| and ditched the other hotel reservation.
|
| It worked well. My wife and I each saw our first total solar
| eclipse!!!
|
| There's one coming up in 2024 too. Maybe some enterprising soul
| would like to expand on the idea and create cloud-coverage
| forecasts for the entire path of totality?
| epiccoleman wrote:
| One of my big "side projects" over the last few months has been
| my personal website and blog (https://epiccoleman.com). It's not
| very interesting per se - I mean, who doesn't have a blog these
| days - but it has been really educational and fun to work on.
| It's a really simplistic stack which makes working on it pretty
| frictionless. I spent a lot of time tweaking the look and feel of
| the site and am pretty happy with how everything has turned out.
|
| I've also been putting a lot of work into a React component that
| renders a nice looking SVG Circle of Fifths, and just recently
| got to a point where I felt I could call a release "1.0.0". This
| has also been a really educational project and I'm super proud of
| the component. It's a little basic right now, but it looks very
| nice, and I have a lot of cool features planned.
|
| It's licensed MIT, so if this sounds like something you'd like to
| use in an app, you can check it out here:
| https://github.com/epiccoleman/react-circle-of-fifths. I'd love
| any feedback, issues, etc.
|
| Edit: Oh, I just thought of one other thing - a single line of
| code I wrote which frequently gives me great joy. In zsh you can
| define a function called `command_not_found_handler` which gets
| invoked whenever a command ... isn't found.
|
| Mine says: `figlet lol, $@`, so whenever you make a typo like
| "gits status" or something, you get a big "lol, gits tatus"
| printed out, which is amusing.
| ifend wrote:
| I built a site that visualizes continuous glucose monitor data.
| Everything is stored in your browser's database so there is no
| server and I (you) don't have to worry about securing or sharing
| your data.
|
| https://www.opencgm.com
| gigatexal wrote:
| I built my blog around fedora's extra nice pandoc markdown to
| html
|
| https://gigatexal.blog/pages/building-a-blog-from-scratch/bu...
|
| https://gigatexal.blog/pages/blog-update-1/blog-update-1.htm...
|
| It's not very fancy but it is for me. I know next to nothing
| about web/html and I wanted to do something myself than going
| with the really good ghost or other static blogging tools.
| castis wrote:
| I attempted to build flight control software for a quadcopter[1].
| I had a few major life changes around this time and it got packed
| up and I stopped working on it before I got the PID controllers
| worked out. But I essentially wrote a small game engine and had
| to learn a little calculus along the way.
|
| [1] https://github.com/castis/currant
| adityapurwa wrote:
| I built https://playtune.app to have rhythm game with unlimited
| musics because it uses YouTube as the music playback provider. I
| play it often with my daughter.
|
| I consider removing the restart feature (or maybe just for her)
| because she kept restarting whenever she missed just a single
| note
| tndata wrote:
| About 30 years ago I reverse-engineered my Sega Mega Drive game
| console and built my own hardware dev kit from scratch. I did
| blog about that project here:
| https://nestenius.se/2022/01/18/how-i-built-my-own-sega-mega...
| samsquire wrote:
| I created a text editor that was meant to be programmable like a
| spreadsheet but interactive like a IPython notebook.
|
| There's screenshots here:
|
| https://github.com/samsquire/liveinterface
|
| The code is Angular 1 legacy codebase.
|
| https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface
|
| There's a screencast here https://github.com/samsquire/live-
| interface/blob/master/scre...
|
| It's not buildable at this time due to dependencies...
| onassar wrote:
| I built a Chrome Extension called Bookee
| (https://onassar.github.io/extensions/bookee/)
| (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookee-instant-boo...)
|
| Not used by many people, but accomplished what I set out to: an
| extension that is accessible easily via keyboard shortcut at all
| times, that allows me to visually (open graph images,
| screenshots, thumbnails) search any bookmarks saved to Chrome.
|
| The search is super-quick, and it has a bunch of other keyboard-
| shortcuts to quickly navigate my bookmarks.
| edbrown23 wrote:
| I've been slowly working on a web app that keeps track of
| cocktail recipes and all the liquor bottles in my home bar, then
| it tells me what drinks I can make right now. It's been a fun way
| to spend way too much money at the liquor store buying "just one
| more bottle", and I've found some new favorite drinks via these
| recipes.
|
| It doesn't do anything amazing yet, but it's been fun to tinker
| with it over time and get back to coding as I do more and more
| management at work.
|
| The website itself is here: https://barkeep.website, and I've
| been blogging about it here: https://edbrown23.github.io/blog/
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Raspberry Pi temperature monitor in a big freezer full of breast
| milk. It would email me if the temperature got above some
| threshold for a certain duration.
|
| It only fired once (outside testing anyway). But that one time
| made the whole endeavor more than worthwhile.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| mablopoule wrote:
| I work in front-end development, and am very frustrated each time
| I encounter a front-end framework with auto-refresh without an
| easy way to disable it (looking at you, Next.js).
|
| As a result, I wrote a (Chrome only) Web extension[1], which
| monkey-patch the WebSocket object, so I could 'plug' or 'unplug'
| them by simply clicking the extension's icon. So far I'm very
| happy with it [2], and can finally have multiple tabs of the same
| page without my 'reference' tab refreshing itself while I'm
| working on CSS.
|
| [1] https://github.com/MarcMonchablon/toggle-hmr
|
| [2] It gets the job done, even if in some case (such as the Zola
| static site generator), where I had to put the link to the
| plugin's code in the index.html, otherwise the code would be
| injected too late.
| Champagn3Papi wrote:
| I've built a CRM (https://www.bizzey.com) for myself to automate
| my accounting / business administration. I was freelancing on the
| side and noticed that many of the business solutions where either
| crazy expensive for a single person business or looked like they
| were made in the 80's.
|
| It has since exploded into fully fledged CRM with all kinds of
| features you can choose from. I originally built it for myself to
| keep track of everything expenses, recurring invoices, ... At
| some point a freelancer saw me working in it and asked what I was
| using.
|
| Told him what I was working on and he became my first customer,
| since then it has spread through word of mouth.
| yazan94 wrote:
| This is actually really cool, I may have to give it a shot!
| Thanks for sharing
| donatj wrote:
| I have been working on a note taking app with a fully open API
| since 2008 on and off. I intended to open it to the public around
| 2010 but SimpleNote popped up and drank my milkshake. I even
| switched over myself.
|
| Since then however they've closed their formerly open API. This
| inspired me to pick it back up.
|
| I've got a mobile friendly webapp, an official SDK, a basic cli
| for scripting. Basically everything _I_ wanted.
|
| The UI of the webapp is pretty spartan as I prefer, so I'm scared
| it doesn't have mass appeal. It's super fast however.
|
| I have hundreds of notes in it, use it for all my note keeping. I
| am it's only user. My friends have access, but they don't use
| regularly.
|
| I want to open up to the public eventually, but these days I'd
| really want to get e2e encryption working before doing so and
| just have not found the time.
| wiz21c wrote:
| I fixed the go*amn toilet. Not so cool but super effective.
| bombcar wrote:
| Things that get things at home working again are so amazing,
| even if you still need to call for assistance later.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| Hard to answer. Because the most technically challenging and
| interesting work I've done has been for employers or clients, and
| under NDA, closed source, and now part of their IP or trade
| secrets.
|
| Whereas for myself in my own free time I bias more to the
| ruthlessly pragmatic, which often means the simplest or easiest
| solution, so I can move on to the next thing.
|
| Random pick from those:
|
| - many many years ago I once wrote a Terminal-like UI widget for
| Java AWT/Swing apps. This was in the very very early days of
| Java. To scratch my own itch. It gave me a way in my Swing/AWT
| desktop apps to embed a console/REPL-like widget (which could be
| kept invisible/inactive by default, then only appear when a
| special key pressed) to let me issue CLI-like commands in-app,
| for example for cheat codes or dev testing or to provide extra
| features to advanced users. It provided an API for registering
| comands and their handlers. Had built-in commands like "help" and
| to repeat the last command, etc. So my Java GUI apps could have
| the best of both worlds: the "friendliness" of the GUI and the
| power and conciseness of a terminal workflow. Super simple. Only
| ever used in a few of my hobby apps (and a few games I considered
| selling then.)
|
| I named it, originally, in private, SwingShell. Then renamed it
| to Grio, because that had more personality. (Obligatory Pulp
| Fiction reference.) I even devised my own little theme song for
| it. Okay more of a tune. A melodic catchphrase. Why? Here let me
| show you my nerd license. Hold still, please. This will only take
| a second.
| fellerts wrote:
| Our apartment has a key fob system to open the front door as well
| as an intercom system so people can call up and request to be let
| in. I put a Raspberry Pi Zero W inside the intercom receiver unit
| hooked up to the "open door" button. The Pi receives on a webhook
| that I control from a shortcut on my smartphone, so I can let
| people in even when I'm not home (or let myself in if I've
| forgotten the fob). The Pi also texts me whenever the doorbell
| rings. Not the sexiest project, but definitely the one that gets
| the most use!
| samhuk wrote:
| TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of
| Storybook.
|
| So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end
| (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of
| mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.
|
| Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite
| a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.
|
| Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't
| support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives
| me a feeling that it is an Uber engineer's 20% project to learn
| some new tech.
|
| So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle.
| Something that's a bit more customizable and full-fat than Ladle,
| but something simpler, less intrusive, and less "framework magic"
| than Storybook.
|
| This led me to create Exhibitor
| (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor)
| (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).
|
| I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up
| being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and
| supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a
| tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy
| about it!
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Very nice! This should definitely get some more attention as
| this space needs some serious competition as Storybook is
| terrible at the best of times.
| samhuk wrote:
| Thanks! Personally, I have immense respect for Storybook and
| the engineers behind it. It supports a dizzying amount of
| use-cases.
|
| Having said that, however, I think that they did go too far
| down some paths that I would have liked to not see it go
| down. I feel like them supporting so many use-cases came at a
| cost of usability. In addition to this, there is quite
| obviously too much framework-magic, causing obscure
| undesirable behavior.
|
| However, it's still an awesome tool. Just a little too full-
| fat for some of my more simpler use-cases :)
| skimdesk wrote:
| I built a small websocket server [0] that helps me write simple
| multiplayer backends. It spawns a process for the first client in
| a room, and routes subsequent clients to the same process.
|
| [0]: https://scalesocket.org
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| My Raspberry Pis all netboot. I have a bunch of them around the
| house. Some play music, some play games, some are smart TVs.
| Because they all boot from the LAN, there's no card to wear out,
| and I can change what OS they boot into just by renaming a file.
| It's simple, but intensely useful.
| maherbeg wrote:
| What are they netbooting from? Presumably there's a root device
| somewhere?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Yes, a TrueNAS box running a TFTP server for /boot and NFS
| for root.
|
| The server is discovered via DHCP.
| [deleted]
| james-revisoai wrote:
| I built a 3D visualiser that overlays semantic topics and
| sentences of documents with different "embedding types and
| orders"[1] using Natural Language Processing.
|
| It colours each document with the same colour. You can see how
| two documents overlap, semantically - it's pretty awesome for Job
| Role/CV overlays for example, or educational resources and exams
| - a mix merging of colour shows both equally discuss something...
| missing colour means one document doesn't.
|
| Since it's semantic, depending on the embedding, the gaps in-
| between spots make a lot of sense intuitively, and you can
| sometimes even see how the conclusion of a document ends up in a
| different semantic space to the start as such (even though there
| is no time data, you just notice the later topics are
| semantically in a different space to the earlier ones for the
| same document)
|
| [1] Similarity based, NLI based, GPT-raw etc.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| I did not join social media until very recently but wanted an
| easy way to send pictures to close friends and family so built
| this small python script that sends N pics out of a text file
| list (so if even if I sort 100 in one day I only send 5 per
| batch) sends one pic per email, reduce the size of the pics, sets
| a custom from field, hide the recipients' addresses in the BCC
| field.
|
| https://github.com/dorfsmay/emailFiles
|
| There's nothing extraordinary about it, it's not far from a
| standard spam bot! What's interesting about it is that I've been
| using it for more than a decade with fairly little maintenance.
| antgiant wrote:
| I live in a Hurricane/Typhoon zone and wanted a way to watch
| storm live status without all the panicked commentary. I had an
| old Chromecast laying around and discovered that it is just a web
| browser so I built a simple html image bouncer that auto
| refreshes the latest satellite image of the storm, lets you crop
| in, etc. It works amazingly well for days of peaceful live
| coverage. An unexpected side perk is my kids can now tell the
| category (strength) of the storm based purely on the satellite
| image. Turns out the code works for pretty much anything with a
| browser and any situation where there is an updating image at a
| static URL. So I've used it for a number of other things too. I
| put it all at https://github.com/antgiant/GOES-East-Big-Screen
| i4i wrote:
| A Random Movie Maker that looks at my 4 TB collection of personal
| history... digitized journals, email, photos, digitized
| cassettes, phone messages, and home videos, and creates a random
| 15 minute movie. Each video will include about 50 clip sources.
| It's a crazy trip down memory lane.
| kwertyops wrote:
| I built a tool that auto-generates guitar chord-melody
| arrangements with tabs and chord diagrams, given a jazz leadsheet
| (melody + chord symbols) in MusicXML form:
|
| https://chordmelody.io/
| l2silver wrote:
| Where does one get musicXML files from usually?
| kwertyops wrote:
| It can be exported from any major sheet music software
| (Musescore, Finale, Sibelius).
| jmathai wrote:
| I founded 2 photo startups (2004 and 2012). My second startup was
| focused on data portability and was open source.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trovebox
|
| After failing to integrate the software into Western Digital's
| MyCloud NAS line of productions, I left and decided to try
| something different. I created a photo management tool that could
| feed into other photo programs. It's open source and available on
| github.
|
| https://getelodie.com
|
| https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
|
| I started off using it with Google Photos. Explained here,
| https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
|
| I've since switched to using it with Synology Photos.
|
| 8 years and counting.
| abtinsetyani wrote:
| Personal assistance with chat interface for keeping notes, link,
| with a lot of extensions to make use of the information. It's one
| of my side project. https://zettel.ooo/
| gdulli wrote:
| I'm a big SNL nerd and have favorite sketches/memories going back
| over 30 years. I find it very rewatchable, but streaming services
| don't have full episodes, and even downloading full episodes
| wouldn't make it easy to find individual sketches. So I built a
| Plex library of over 500 individual sketches using some
| automation.
|
| I used yt-dlp to download the metadata for over 6,000 videos on
| the SNL Youtube channel. I put it into a database, parsing out
| season/episode into fields where possible. Then I wrote a small
| Flask app to search or browse seasons/episodes, from which I
| could flag for download the sketches I wanted.
| l2silver wrote:
| Awesome! I hope you make this public one day.
| nvartolomei wrote:
| A "note taking" app after spending years looking for "the right
| one". Nothing ground breaking, similar to most other "connected
| notes" apps but with one small difference: everything is built
| for my brain workflow rather than the other way around.
|
| https://nvartolomei.com/omniverse/
|
| Maybe, one day, after I'm satisfied with its functionality I'll
| make it open(-source). For now, in the interest of keeping
| friction low, moving fast and breaking things, it's pretty
| private.
| [deleted]
| bussyfumes wrote:
| When I was a student there was this power-of-two game on my
| friend's iPhone that I was literally addicted to. I didn't have
| an iPhone and eventually the game even disappeared from the
| AppStore. I missed it very much and my friends jokingly mentioned
| building a copy just for me. They never got around to it but at
| some point I thought "maybe I should give it a try?". So I gave
| it a try with no game dev knowledge and the second iteration
| turned out just fine for my needs:
| https://kiryhas.github.io/memechain/
|
| I've considered rewriting it to make the code better many times
| but every time I sit down to do that I think to myself "it works
| just fine, why touch it" and leave this idea for a while :)
|
| BTW the idea of the game is to combine cubes with the same number
| and color until there are only 4 left.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| That's really addicting! :D
|
| If this is mobile responsive I will probably use it a lot.
|
| EDIT: Works flawlessly on my phone. Wonder if I can host it
| locally on my Android, so that I don't even need an internet
| connection...
| bussyfumes wrote:
| I've never had big hopes for the project but I feel
| incredibly happy that you like it!
|
| The original I played on my friend's phone was just that -- a
| phone game, so making sure it works on my phone was a
| priority :)
|
| I don't have an Android but last time I tested it was
| playable even though the cubes were bigger than I'd like them
| to be on some screens.
|
| I've made an offline version for myself in the past to play
| while traveling by train. Copying the contents of the .js and
| .css file into the HTML file into <script> and <style> tags
| was enough. I wonder if I can make it easier for other people
| like you by storing it somewhere on git...
|
| P.S. Here's the source if you want to create an offline-first
| version yourself: https://github.com/Kiryhas/memechain
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Yeah your game just scratches an itch I had for a long
| time. Mobile games are filled with ads and in-app purchases
| and I never found a simple game I could play and enjoy
| while waiting for public transport. Want to fully clear a
| seed now, haven't gotten that far yet ;)
|
| Ahh, a single .html would probably work, too, sounds way
| easier!
|
| I downloaded Termux, installed git and python3 and now your
| game is running locally on my phone with "python3 -m
| http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 9000" :)
| bussyfumes wrote:
| Seeds are absolutely random and some of them can't be
| solved. I've had people complain about it but I consider
| it to be another aspect of the challenge of this game
| because there are cues you can notice that tell you if
| it's not possible to solve it.
|
| Yeah, you went the extra mile spinning up a local server
| :)
|
| If the trip you're taking is not a long one, you can just
| make sure to load the page while you still have
| reception. The game doesn't make any AJAX requests or
| load any resources after that and prevents the default
| 'pull-to-refresh' gesture so if you don't refresh the
| page accidentally, it'll stay available.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| It's a difficult challenge I must say. Played about a
| dozen games now, furthest I've gotten is 4280 points.
| Have you ever cleared a full seed?
|
| Yeah I looked at the files to see if you make any
| external requests. I guess I just found it entertaining
| that there's a web-game running locally on my phone :)
| bussyfumes wrote:
| Yeah, I've cleared it many times. Sometimes no matter how
| skilled you are luck is not on your side :)
|
| Maybe the game could benefit from a mode that verifies if
| a seed is solvable but I haven't gotten past it being
| just an idea.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It definitely would benefit from that, people like to
| have success. (And know who they can blame in case of
| failure)
|
| The easiest solution is probably brute force, have it try
| all the potential moves and see if it solves the game and
| if it does, make it a valid seed. Can be pregenerated,
| but should be doable in real time, also from a
| smartphone.
|
| Also, I think I was just blocked from my first clearing,
| because I could not access all blocks.
|
| Rotating the view and angle would be quite nice, but
| depending on your implementation, not trivial.
|
| Maybe I implement it with babylonjs or threejs these
| days, it is a fun game.
| roveo wrote:
| Thank you for your game, kind stranger, I've just wasted my
| day.
| bussyfumes wrote:
| Only a day? This has been my go-to time killer for the last 5
| years!
|
| On a serious note, you're welcome, glad you enjoyed! :)
| brongondwana wrote:
| Back in 2001-ish, looking for a rental house with good public
| transport. Screen scraped the entire realestate.com.au database
| overnight, then fed the addresses into some mapping API that gave
| me coordinates, and caluclated the distance from those addresses
| to the addresses of Zone 1 train stations.
|
| Also had descriptions, so wrote a simple regex based scorer that
| classified the descriptions by keywords that I valued. Spat out a
| hitlist of likely candidate houses to go inspect.
|
| ...
|
| Also wrote a basic wedding registry that allowed people to scan
| our list of things we wanted and say they had purchased them, or
| were interested and it gave a list of others who might want to go
| in on a group purchase. No privacy, but it was only sent to
| friends. Circa 2004.
|
| ...
|
| Finally, wrote a diary and calendar tool which took emails with
| very simply structured subjects and built a static website
| showing travels through Europe in 2002. Could email from any net
| cafe with any email address and it would update the travel diary,
| or a website with a calendar saying which city we were in and how
| we were traveling to the next one. Friends could elect to get
| immediate updates or a daily summary. Purely static built from
| cron and email archives. Worked like a charm.
|
| ...
|
| More recently, hmm... as treasurer for various choir things I've
| written a ton of little commandline tools which give very quick
| access to data and allow tracking who owes what and logging their
| payments into a database, and tools which generate email invoices
| and receipts.
|
| Everything else is either opensource or work stuff. And I don't
| code so much these days either, though this week I started diving
| into Python to create tools that help keep data for our marketing
| team up-to-date without manually copying stuff around, and some
| maintenance work on code I wrote 15 years ago which is still
| running really nicely but needs some updates.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I'm always building random quick solutions to problems we happen
| upon. In one instance, I'm gathering data for a large stream from
| their chat and writing ways to search and process it. Another I'm
| writing renaming automation.
|
| Most recently, my partner and I were using Anki to learn country
| flags but found the user experience to be annoyingly over-
| engineered and kind of stressful. We just wanted to be able to
| sit down and go through 5 flashcards while microwaving something
| or go through 100 in a day. With Anki it always felt like I was
| messing with some algorithm if I stopped early or didn't do my
| required number of cards for the day. Plus we were finding it
| annoying that the flash cards with Anki always seemed sorted. If
| I was looking at Albania's flag and had no idea about the next
| one I could guess it was maybe Algeria, etc.
|
| So I built a python app that will tear open .APKG files and
| extract relevant information (currently, due to the file spec,
| it's specific to this because the notes are not consistently
| formatted but could be reused for whatever). It'll unpack and
| rename the images based on the media file and, in the case of the
| country flags deck, spit out a JSON file that matches the
| "challenge" (the image) to the answer.
|
| Then I had ChatGPT build me a simple front end with HTML and
| Javascript for going through them at random and hosted it on one
| of my websites for the 2 of us to go through whenever we want.
| I'm working on doing the same with top-level domains and country
| codes! Turns out APKG files are a great dataset that happen to
| just be shoved into a somewhat over-engineered (in my opinion)
| file format and shoved into a software that, while great, doesn't
| feel conducive to casual learning where I don't have specific
| needs or dates the information will be come relevant. I just want
| to know these things not be a prisoner to them while I learn
| them.
| dioxis wrote:
| I created an IOT 3d printed, Raspberry Pi Pico powered WIFI fish
| feeder with a rotating dispensing carousel with an 8 food pellet
| capacity. I could have made it higher capacity but NJ is a
| restricted state (gun joke). I plan on improving it by adding
| battery backup and an RTC, so I can travel and be sure that my
| fish still get fed in case of a power outage.
| mvcalder wrote:
| I trained the raccoons that visit my house at night. I started
| them out getting a peanuts from a water bottle. Then I tied the
| bottle to a rope. Then kept raising the bottle higher. At that
| point, I built an automated feeder system using a linear actuator
| activated by pulling the rope with the bottle attached. It had
| LEDs that were green / red to show when the feeder would /
| wouldn't dispense peanuts. It was all driven by an ESP32, it even
| had a web page on our LAN reporting how many correct / incorrect
| pulls were done. Over the coarse of a few nights they figured it
| out. Raccoons are so cool.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Man, I'd have trained them to put coins in a little hopper for
| the food. Start by leaving the coins on a string similar to how
| you did it. Then set it up so pulling on the string drops the
| string+coin into the hopper, triggering the food. Then leave
| coins on the ground near the hopper. Then... start leaving
| fewer coins around. Soon, an army of racoons will be bringing
| you street coins in exchange for peanuts.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| One feeder for racoons, and another for crows! Then over time
| you scale it up by having feeders with cheap snacks and
| feeders with expensive snacks. Then have a leaderboard to see
| which animal brings in the most money!
| irchans wrote:
| Some LLM AI is going to read this and create a similar
| apparatus for training humans.
| carapace wrote:
| Raccoons and crows already know how to use vending
| machines. They don't do it because they don't want to be
| made to work. It's the same reason orangutans don't talk.
| xcubic wrote:
| This is so geeky and awesome at the same time!
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Now teach them how to do simple taxes and you'll have an army
| of ghost CPAs that can do a similar amount of good to Batman
| with much less violence.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Next, train them to raid other houses for shiny things and
| deposit at your house.
| ern0 wrote:
| I've written a bouncing color bar for Amiga, which was running
| without the processor.
|
| Amiga computers have
|
| - a main processor (MC68000 or higher),
|
| - a bit blitter, which can perform memory various operations in
| memory (using 3x source and 1x target, it can AND, OR etc. them),
|
| - and a Copper, which have own "program", it can interpret 2 type
| of instructions: WAIT for a scanline position (4-pixel
| precision), and COPY value to a specified regsiter.
|
| It was the name, which made me think: "Copper" is coming from
| "coprocessor". Well, it can run WAIT and COPY instructions, but
| the program's time-scope is somewhat restricted, the program is
| running every screen refresh cycle only once. Is it possible to
| write a program for Copper, which is doing some more, like
| animation?
|
| I've generated several color bar frames for Copper, which adds up
| as a bouncing bar, and as the last instructions, I've added a
| COPY instruction, which sets the address of the Copper List to
| the next frame (the last one pointed to first frame).
|
| So, it worked, the bar was bouncing without any support from the
| processor (besides initial generation and setting of the Copper
| List address first time).
|
| Blitter and audio DMA is fantastic, it's a big help that the
| processor just puts an order to a hardware and it executes, but
| Copper is a degree more bigger magic, it can make things
| autonomously, which I was demonstrated.
| mmmm2 wrote:
| I wrote a few things I use all the time.
|
| 1. A youtube bookmark manager for Emacs using Sqlite as a back
| end. - You can keep track of individual videos. - Manage series
| that span multiple videos. - remember interesting moments.
|
| 2. A system to help manage my finances by tracking what percent
| of my assets are in a given category. This helps with
| maintaining, say, a 60%-40% stock vs bond split across multiple
| financial institutions.
| mieubrisse wrote:
| Not nearly as cool as all the other stuff here, but still my
| favorite piece of tech for myself:
|
| IMO, Vim + Markdown is one of the best ways to take notes,
| brainstorm, or just explore ideas. However, I found the questions
| of "Where should I put the notes in my dir hierarchy?" and "How
| do I find the notes again?" and "How do I ensure I have my notes
| across all devices?" to be inhibiting.
|
| I wrote a CLI "journal" tool that says "forget putting them into
| folders", dumps all the Markdowns into a single Google Drive
| folder, and instead focuses on providing really good search.
|
| Now, in my day to day, I can do "journal new some-meeting-with-
| dan.md" and I get a fresh Markdown. I can also do "journal find"
| to search by name, date of creation, or tag, and then open notes
| in either Vim or as rendered HTML in Chrome (for copy-pasting).
| Behind the scenes all the information is just encoded in the
| filename (so it becomes "some-meeting-eith-
| dan~2023-04-23T22:10:23~tag1,tag2.md", with no extra DB needed).
|
| I'm also now trying to rewrite the frontend as a Charm TUI, which
| is another whole fun growth path!
| freeplay wrote:
| Seems really cool. I love Vim + Markdown as well.
|
| If you haven't heard of vimwiki yet, check it out. Right in
| line with what you're working on.
|
| https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
| j3d wrote:
| Shared Slides Clicker [1] - an extension to allow for multiple
| people to remotely drive a single Google Slides presentation. I
| created this because it drives me insane when I hear people
| saying "Next slide please"! It leverages React and Firebase.
|
| Simple Weekly Meal Planner [2] - a very simple, free PWA for
| deciding what you want to make for dinner each week and tracking
| all the ingredients you need to get from the market. I built this
| because meal planning is one of the most annoying parts of
| adulting. It was built with Svelte and Firebase.
|
| Audiobook Locker [3] - a Tauri-based desktop app for managing
| your audiobooks. Think calibre-for-audibooks. I created this
| because I wanted a nice way to keep track of which audiobooks I'd
| completed and which to read next. It uses Svelte for the UI and
| Rust on the backend.
|
| [1]: https://fonner.gitlab.io/shared-slides-clicker/ [2]:
| https://simpleweeklymealplanner.com/ [3]:
| https://fonner.gitlab.io/audiobook-locker/
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I've built a few audio effects that only I've used. The only one
| that really stuck around is a guitar pedal delay effect with
| pitch shifting where the pitch shifting only happens on the first
| repeat, it doesn't accumulate as the sound repeats. It also has
| an envelope follower so notes can repeat infinitely when there's
| no playing, and once you start strumming/picking again the
| feedback of the repeats drops to zero until you stop playing and
| it goes back to the knob setting (Which can go from 0-150%
| feedback). Unfortunately I've got no good sound demos except some
| Facebook videos I'm not willing to share ;p
| noizejoy wrote:
| Very cool! Is that hardware or vst plugin?
| dhuan_ wrote:
| mock - language agnostic API mocking and testing utility
| https://github.com/dhuan/mock
|
| I built it because I needed an easy way to set-up API endpoints
| that weren't implemented yet by some other team. After a while I
| open-sourced it.
|
| wikicmd https://github.com/dhuan/wikicmd
|
| Navigating through mediawiki to get pages edited all time
| requires a bunch of clicks. I wanted to be able to quickly edit
| wiki pages using any editor program instead of the browser.
| codpiece wrote:
| Not sure if it counts as tech, but I created a voiceboard for my
| mother to help her communicate while in hospice. She had a
| massive stroke and could no longer speak.
|
| I thought of a tablet app, but the stakes were too high, so it
| wound up as a laminated paper. You can read about my design
| decisions here:
|
| https://voiceboard.org
| l2silver wrote:
| Definitely counts. Very cool.
| Suppafly wrote:
| They make something like that for autistic people and others
| that are non-verbal. The commercial product, which is
| essentially just a binder with printed words or pictures, is
| surprisingly expensive so lots of people DIY them.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| This absolutely counts. This is such a great testament to how
| simple engineering and thoughtful design can do good in the
| world. You're a good son!
|
| Is there a reason besides preventing commercial use that you
| don't just have a PDF link on your site?
| codpiece wrote:
| I tailor them upon request. I would like to make a self-serve
| site, but don't have the time or skills. I would prefer to
| give this away, people are usually in their worst moments, so
| a little generosity makes me feel like I make the world a
| better place.
| codpiece wrote:
| Actually, I think I just forgot to put the newer, generic
| version up on the site for download. Good thinking!
| sllabres wrote:
| Thanks for designing and publishing your work! I was
| surprised too, that there is nothing similar when I was at
| a stroke unit for a relative.
|
| I wish you all the best for your mother. Keep caring for
| her, before caring for the website.
| jawns wrote:
| When my sister was in the ICU at a hospital in a big city, I
| created something similar for her. The nurses complimented me
| on it and said it made their lives easier, but I was shocked to
| learn that they didn't have anything like it unless families
| made them themselves.
| codpiece wrote:
| I was shocked to find that out too. A friend pointed out it
| helps for people on ventilators, was that your case?
| psychomugs wrote:
| My robotic graduation caps for my undergrad (2015) and PhD (2022)
| ceremonies:
|
| https://psychomugs.github.io/gradcap
|
| My wrist-mounted Spider-Man-inspired coilgun:
|
| https://psychomugs.github.io/webshooter
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Some developer tools that spun out of my current product (but not
| launched thus counts as "built for myself" and nowadays
| "ourselves"):
|
| - A build system that is simpler and easier to use than Gradle.
| It also has a much better rendering of progress and output for
| tests when they fail. I mostly use it to run tests, actually.
| Supports parallel incremental and cached work.
|
| - A Kotlin Scripting runtime that exposes a high-level UNIX
| shell-like API along with many other useful utilities like
| printing markdown, tracking progress of long operations
| (including hierarchically), working with files and remote
| programs over ssh and many other things. We have almost entirely
| replaced bash with it.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Most "useful" thing I've lego'd together from parts was RSS feed
| of TV show torrents and multi-threaded torrent library that would
| then push the shows into Plex server and send a notification to
| my phone, but none of this was actually created by me. I was just
| integrating ready made software. Although this has been
| dismantled for years now ever since I started earning money and
| was able to pay for the streaming services.
|
| Most "created" thing was a fishing bot for a MMORPG that used
| computer vision to navigate the interface and detect when you had
| caught a fish and reel it in.
| awesomegoat_com wrote:
| I have finally built myself reader app that fulfills my own needs
| first.
|
| I totally absolutely enjoyed every minute building my own thing
| and I highly recommend it for the burnout developers.
|
| https://awesomegoat.com
| lallysingh wrote:
| Profiling tool with custom instrumentation, low overhead, and CPU
| perf counter support.
|
| https://github.com/lally/ppt
| scrollaway wrote:
| I wrote a hearthstone simulator when the game came out.
|
| https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace
|
| It was used and referenced by a few scientific papers and phds
| since. It's my little pride, even though it would really need a
| rewrite at this point to work properly with all the additions in
| the game.
|
| It contains its own little python driven dsl for actions. I could
| talk about it for hours. All that work led to me starting a
| company around hearthstone (I have since left it behind but it
| eventually grew into other games).
| l2silver wrote:
| cool!
| golergka wrote:
| Automatic stand-up message generator powered by GPT-4:
| https://github.com/golergka/standup_generator
|
| I've only spent about 6 hours on this, but it helps me every day.
| amir734jj wrote:
| IceCast stream ripper website. Listen, download mp3 from online
| radio stations.
|
| https://stream.local.hesamian.com/
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Not sure about interesting, but I wrote a cli tool to apply
| boolean set operations on lines of text, so e.g. I can get the
| intersection of the lines in three different files, or all lines
| piped into stdin that do not appear in a certain file, or merge
| the lines from multiple files without duplicates. I made it
| because this specific task came up repeatedly in my bash
| scripting but solving it in bash is ugly and really, really slow.
|
| And right now I am working on my own modal text editor which
| might never be used by anyone else. Just for fun and to see
| whether some Vim features could be improved or done in other
| interesting ways. tl;dr so far: Vim does things really damn well,
| sometimes to a point you don't even think about it because it
| simply never fails. That said I did manage to finally solve a
| tiny issue with the keybinding system that always bugged me,
| resulting in support for smooth text macros as a side effect.
| zbendefy wrote:
| My own gpu accelerated neural network trainer using
| backpropagation: https://github.com/zbendefy/machine.academy
| mindcrime wrote:
| This thread is giving me a complex. Why? Well, because the answer
| is basically "nothing". I mean, don't get me wrong - I've built
| all sorts of stuff, and plenty of it was not for my $DAYJOB. And
| I think (at times) of myself as being fairly creative and having
| lots of "ideas". And yet... at least in the context of this
| thread (the way I'm interpreting the OP's question anyway) I just
| don't have much to offer up.
|
| FWIW, I interpret the question as being strictly about stuff one
| built for oneself in the context of everyday, day-in, day-out
| life. Stuff to use _yourself_. And on that front, I just realized
| I almost never build anything strictly for myself. I work on Open
| Source projects and work on projects at Fogbeam that I
| (want|hope|expect|whatever) _other_ people to use, or things I
| would use myself _in a business context_. But I just don 't build
| handy little gadgets to use around the house, or in my truck, or
| when out and about.
|
| This may be one of the first times I've really felt a strong case
| of the "imposter syndrome" that one hears so much about. I feel
| like I _should_ have some answers for this, so why don 't I? :-(
|
| OK, to be fair, I did built at least _one_ thing just for myself.
| I have a couple of lamps that are positioned in an out of the way
| location in my living room, and I have having to walk to them and
| stretch to reach the switch(es). So I did the whole "IP
| controlled lamp" thing with a relay and an Arduino Nano 33 IoT
| board. The power strip the lamps are plugged into is controlled
| by the relay, and I can send an HTTP request to turn the relay on
| or off. I created a shortcut on my phone's homescreen so I can
| easily control it from my phone. But that's such a chintzy
| project I almost feel worse for admitting to it. :p
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I saw this while looking through this thread and I just wanted
| to say you're not alone.
|
| In my free time I play videogames mostly. I dream of making
| them myself, but I never have. And I generally don't do cool
| tech projects like this for myself either.
|
| I made a canvassing app for my friend who was running for mayor
| of his town once, but yeah.
|
| I barely even have my own github account.
|
| So please don't feel like an imposter. It's ok to treat tech as
| a day job. :)
| psidex wrote:
| I built a web extension that lets me use customised bangs when
| searching (similar to duckduckgo but fully editable to search
| whatever you want), makes my regular searches much quicker
| https://github.com/psidex/CustomBangSearch
| jonplackett wrote:
| I made a gender swapping algorithm for my own use only. You put
| in any text and it outputs the exact same thing with all the
| genders reversed. Man to woman, he to she, Prince to princess,
| witch to wizard.
|
| Then got a book deal to create a series of gender swapped
| illustrated books 'Gender Swapped Fairy Tales' and 'Gender
| swapped Greek myths'
|
| It seems like a simple enough task but gets complicated in weird
| ways. For example - his can swap to her or hers depending on the
| context. And her can swap to his of him depending on context.
|
| The idea is to show the biases in the original stories that you
| are blind to because you've been reading them forever.
| shoo wrote:
| tangentially to swapping gender in text, there's a section in
| Delany's novel Babel-17 where one character is trying to teach
| another character the concepts and language of "I" and "me" and
| "you", and the other character is getting these ideas mixed up.
| As a reader you're trying to follow this process from the
| dialogue.
| millzlane wrote:
| Not very interesting, but used VB script to make Netflix sleep
| timer for the active tab. (looks for the browser process, makes
| the windows active,sends a ctrl+W to the window to close the
| video player, and finally sleeps the display.
|
| This way I can fall asleep to noise that doesn't later wake me
| up.
| l2silver wrote:
| I feel like there's a whole suite of tools that we need to be
| used with netflix to make our lives easier.
| Jalad wrote:
| At work we have a perk where we can expense $x,000 a year for
| assorted benefits such as gym memberships, public transit tickets
| etc. The pain point is that you need to submit receipts for them
| to reimburse you, which doesn't take too long, but is a pain if
| you forget.
|
| I made a small service which aggregates receipts from assorted
| sources (usually webpages, pdfs), takes a screenshot of them,
| parses the information out, and uploads them automatically for
| reimbursement.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| I was studying maths as a hobby and made myself a LaTeX editing
| environment in Emacs with inline rendering of mathematical
| content: https://github.com/dandavison/xenops
|
| A handful of other people use it I think but I made it for myself
| and don't have time to maintain it when I'm not studying maths.
| jakear wrote:
| A website to see a map of the world's tides, and bidirectional
| predictions for individual stations (edit: worldwide too, forgot
| I added that). The UI/UX is... archaic, but that's just how I
| wanted it. It works fully offline. https://solunar.pages.dev
|
| Most fun part was transcribing 70+ year old NOAA tide calculation
| mathematic/astronomic/hydrologic research papers into modern
| TypeScript. Approach is semi-documented here:
| https://github.com/JacksonKearl/solunar
| wxce wrote:
| That is really cool!
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I've wanted to do this with Canadian data for years! My wife
| works for the organization which tracks our national tide data
| and builds our prediction models. It's extremely fascinating
| stuff.
|
| I'm looking forward to digging into your work. I haven't really
| known where to start, but I can probably get a lot of
| inspiration here. Nice work!
| jakear wrote:
| Cool! Would love to have some extra datapoints. This is what
| the raw data I use looks like
| https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/harcon.html?id=9410580#
| geoffreypoirier wrote:
| That's just cool.
| itake wrote:
| that is cool, but I'm curious when the highest tide vs lowest
| tide of the year is.
| jakear wrote:
| It will change station to station, but if you open the
| station details page, adjust X Range to something like 28/180
| days, then tune low pass to filter out all the high frequency
| (daily) fluctuations, you might get your answer. Some
| stations don't have strong Solar contributions, and won't
| change much on an annual basis, you can enable the Harmonics
| toggle and see if any show up on the outside in yellow
| (disable Sun).
|
| I did consider adding a "max finding" mode of some sort, but
| that's never really been my use case.
| ggforpp wrote:
| It's a very nice, UI. The "viewing port" concept is very nice.
| A slider for timescale in the viewing window would be great!
| Also would be great to see worldwide cities tides :) edit:
| using the x-range view is an interesting time slider - I found
| the options toggle
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I use MouseGestures so I often get fun surprises on projects
| like this when I right-click and then drag my cursor to close
| the tab. Yours might have been the best one yet!
| stefanv wrote:
| Because I work with a lot of currencies and I used to do a lot of
| multi-currency calculations, I've built a convertor
| (https://4ex.ro) that accepts formulas and displays the results
| in all selected currencies. The rate is the one offered by the
| National Bank in Romania (a legal requirement for transactions
| that happen between companies in Romania - maybe I'll add
| different data sources in the future). Oh, and you can add a
| formula in one field and then continue in another field using the
| previous result. Something really easy to accomplish, but there
| was no solution doing this a few years ago. Almost nobody is
| using it, but I do and this is a sufficient reason to keep it
| (a)live.
| nielsole wrote:
| At the beginning of COVID i switched to weekly shopping and
| realized that it takes a significant time to inventarize the
| storage to make sure I make it through the week.
|
| I built a storage shelf that self-inventorizes based on strain
| gauges. Through the change in weight distribution it can
| determine the weight and 2D location of the item added or
| removed. LED strips give immediate feedback. https://www.niels-
| ole.com/arduino/iot/2021/03/21/storage-sys...
|
| I used this to automatically add the items consumed throughout
| the week to my shopping list.
|
| I only ever built a single shelf board (subsequent boards had
| issues) and I never fully implemented the advanced usability
| features of adding new items for the first time and automatically
| determining good places for them, but it was a very fun project.
| _qua wrote:
| So does each type of item have its own designated spot on the
| shelf or is it figuring out the item identity based on weight?
| nielsole wrote:
| Each item type had its area in a database with x_start,
| x_end, y_start, y_end and weight. These areas could overlap
| though. I had an error function that picked the most likely
| option: https://gitlab.com/nielsole/logistics-
| board/-/blob/master/se...
|
| Manually adding areas for all items would not have been
| feasible(>100 different product types with sometimes multiple
| SKUs from different brand for the same product type), so my
| idea was to add a hand-scanner and when a barcode gets
| scanned, it checks if it knows the product. If it doesn't, it
| would tell you to put it in a special weighing position.
| After wheighing it would light up all the boards in
| accordance of how well the item could be placed there. This
| could have taken into account the total weight of the board
| and the likelihood for the item weight to be mistaken for
| another product already on the shelf.
|
| In the end I gave up before getting these usability
| improvements in.
| gossterrible wrote:
| I made my first browser extension to allow you to download
| substack video and view them using mp4 format instead of hsl
| streams.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/substack-video-dl/...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/substack-vide...
| evandev wrote:
| I created a todo thermal printer so that I can write messages
| whenever I remember something. For example when I'm lying in bed
| and I remember that I have to do something or reading a book and
| think that's a great thought that I should look more into
| someday.
|
| Basically I have a mobile app that I can send a message to a api.
| Sometimes it's just a note, sometimes it is a todo item.
|
| Then I have a raspberry pi that polls the api for new messages
| and prints them onto a receipt/thermal printer on my desk. Then
| every morning I usually look and see if there is a todo item, or
| more long term item.
|
| I haven't exactly thought of how to store the messages, but
| basically when the "receipt" gets to CVS level, I rip it off and
| store it in in a document shelf organizer. Every few months I'll
| go through the receipt for any long term touch items.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Interesting project. What's the advantage of this over, say, an
| inbox folder in a todo app like Todoist or a note in Keep?
| ycombinete wrote:
| This sounds awesome, would love to see some pics of this. Or
| even a video of it in action
| ffitch wrote:
| Love that! I want to setup a little thermal printer connected
| to an endpoint too. Any tips on how to do this the easiest way?
| are there any prebuilt solutions, or kits?
| billconan wrote:
| broca, a chatgpt powered dictionary + vocabulary book I'm working
| on.
|
| https://github.com/shi-yan/broca
|
| on each of the computers I use, I have a open sublime text tab
| documenting words I don't know.
|
| they are scattering around, unorganized, get lost when the file
| tab is closed.
|
| I want to synchronize my vocabulary on different devices using
| git.
|
| broca saves to plain files that are git friendly. And using
| ChatGPT as a dictionary allows me to search for
| idioms/slang/phases with unlimited example sentences.
| l2silver wrote:
| I might actually use this. Always looking for vocab helpers.
| ww520 wrote:
| Detect garage door opened or closed using ordinary magnetic
| sensor.
|
| Browser extensions that I use everyday.
|
| Emacs packages that I use everyday.
| Dave_TRS wrote:
| In 2010 I was at my first job out of college and frustrated that
| iTunes took over such a huge amount of resources on my PC. But I
| loved the UI look and function and the way it had playlists, and
| didn't like the other options on the market. So I hired a cheap
| overseas freelancer to build "Litetunes", which I requested look
| and function exactly like iTunes but be <2MB file with no
| installation required that would open quickly just like notepad
| or calculator. I thought of distributing it but ended up using it
| just for myself, it worked great.
| mmdtdev wrote:
| I've built a simple website to watch other People's mood around
| the world! https://mymood.today/
| tanng wrote:
| I have built VS Utils [1] mostly for myself since I work with
| WordPress and they use serialize(), unserialize() functions a
| lot, and sometimes I need to convert base64, timestamps value
| without leaving the editor. I find it's easier to write an
| extension for daily use functions and publish to VS Code so I can
| download it easier, sync across devices. Hope it helpful for
| others too.
|
| [1]
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tanftw.v...
| leblancfg wrote:
| My wife has a goal to run 1000km this year, and uses an Apple
| Watch to track them. But getting to the YTD total is a pain in
| the fitness app.
|
| So I made the worlds most basic iPhone app with React Native,
| that grabs the data from HealthKit and shows it across a
| percentage of the year.
|
| Simple but effective.
| bombcar wrote:
| I should learn how to do iPhone apps, I want a really simple
| app that can communicate between an iPad and a iPhone/watch and
| just show a speaker timer: https://www.dsan.com/speaker-timers/
|
| As two iPads are cheaper than a genuine hardware one ...
| Bad_CRC wrote:
| I built a home brewing system with an Arduino, a 4G router,
| mqtt/pyton stack and a grafana frontend :D
| o_nate wrote:
| I used a Raspberry Pi with a Hifi-berry card to make a web-
| controlled MP3 player hooked up to my stereo. It's a fairly bare-
| bones app but I wrote it myself (Flask, VLC) and it works great!
| almog wrote:
| I'm currently working on a service that would allow me to place
| orders using a satellite messenger.
|
| Some background: When I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail few years
| ago, I used to order items that needed to be replaced or that I
| lost to the next or town stop using my phone (most towns have a
| general store or a supermarket, often not an outfitter).
|
| However, it's not uncommon for sections of the trail to be
| outside cell service for days between town to the next one.
|
| Anyhow, since the next trail that I plan to hike, the Continental
| Divide Trail, is even more remote than the PCT, I started to play
| with a prototype of a satellite messenger backed service to let
| me order items from a predefined list (each can match multiple
| items of a different priority) and be shipped to a predefined
| shipping address (post offices of trail towns along the trail).
|
| So, for example, assuming that one of my contacts is a phone
| number that my service is monitoring, I can text a message like
| that: items: shoes, tape, filter, usb cable, ice
| axe; to: Chama; eta: 2023-07-01;
|
| And it should place an order of a predefined pair of shoes, water
| filter, Leukotape and USB cable and ice axe to Chama, NM.
| Messages are limited to 160 characters before they get split, and
| so to keep it simple, I might use shorter abbreviations for some
| items.
|
| If any item on the list can't be delivered until 2023-07-01 using
| prime shipping (unfortunately it's the easiest option), it should
| be dropped from the order. Alternatively, if the guaranteed
| delivery date is off by 1 day, I might just place it on a
| separate order, hope for the best and if it doesn't show up on
| time, it'll get returned individually after not being claimed.
| l2silver wrote:
| Would this be like an app on your phone, or something else?
| almog wrote:
| While an app that can sync the predefined items and their
| code, as well as format the text properly would be ideal, my
| time constraints might not allow me to build that, and since
| it's for personal use only, and under the assumption that
| I'll only have to use it a few times over few months, I think
| that hand crafted text messages, sent using the Garmin app
| should be good enough for me.
| scary-size wrote:
| - Desktop app for creating a static blogs. Electron and React:
| https://www.project-daily.com
|
| - Instagram-like, private photo feed, where my partner and me can
| share pictures of our kids with relatives and friends. Posting
| works via e-mail, cron job generates the feed html. Imagemagick
| output multiple image formats, supports iOS live photos too. The
| feed isn't paginated, but with lazy loading the images it's still
| very performant.
|
| - Most recently and still ongoing: A recipe clean-up tool.
| Removes all the gunk and fluff from online recipes. Shows just
| the ingredients and instructions. Also understands units and
| quantities, so unit conversion is up next. Here it is:
| https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....
| davchana wrote:
| Tell me more about private photo feed system.. thanks..
| edelans wrote:
| Control your fan speed with your heartbeat.
|
| I created this while setting up a home trainer for bike training
| in my garage during the lockdown in 2020. One issue with home
| trainers, unlike biking outdoors, is that you don't get the
| benefit of the wind generated by your speed that cools you down.
| So you sweat a lot, and this creates dehydration. Not cool (pun
| intended).
|
| The solution is to use a fan. But when you are lazy (and focused
| on your workout) you don't want to have to get up and adjust fan
| speed (and I don't have a remote for my fan, and it's much cooler
| to have it automated instead).
|
| https://github.com/edelans/Heart-Rate-Smart-Fan
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Brilliant!
| rikschennink wrote:
| It's a tool that helps me generate code examples for multiple
| JavaScript frameworks.
|
| Input is a JSON string describing the code, out comes code
| examples in plain JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and
| jQuery.
|
| Helps me generate extensive docs on my own.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Building a small quadcopter back in 2012 or so (before cheap
| toy/consumer drones were everywhere) was a fun project.
|
| Back then, it involved an Arduino, the internals of a Wii
| MotionPlus (cost effective way to get the gyro sensors), a
| plywood frame, and the open-source 'MultiWii' code.
|
| That first build never flew well, but soon afterwards it started
| to become much easier to build a very stable quadcopter, as all-
| in-one flight controller boards started to appear, along with
| more knowledge of which brushless motors, props, and ESCs worked
| well together.
| thegoleffect wrote:
| A custom, DIY smart monocle from off-the-shelf parts, 3d
| printing, and custom electronics: 1080p60hz, 8-11hrs of battery
| life on a belt-clip battery + computer combo, has wifi &
| lte/cellular, can run ML models on device. One third the weight
| of upcoming Apple AR/VR glasses and one-sixth the cost. Just
| having it working has increased my efficiency a ton without
| obstructing vision or requiring me to look at secondary monitors
| or phone.
|
| Working on replacing my wireless keyboard and trackpad with some
| "gloves" so I can use it while on hikes or just generally
| outside. Then, gonna integrate some custom AR and ML/GPT.
| pjdkoch wrote:
| Care to share more details on how you're achieving that?
| thegoleffect wrote:
| Which part? The glass is an Epson BT-40 cut in half with some
| soldering to bypass needing both eyepieces; this cuts the
| weight & power consumption by ~40%. Mounted onto a printed
| carbon-fiber nylon frame similar to bone conduction
| headphones. The computer is a single-board computer I had
| lying around, but I will upgrade to 12-core 30W SBC next
| week. The battery is one made for video cameras, and I gave
| it a belt clip and strapped the SBC onto it. The SBC has
| camera & mic inputs as well as GPIO for whatever I want to
| add.
| mech422 wrote:
| Zak ?
|
| Edit: my bad... the cut in half BT-40 reminded me of
| someone else...
| brightball wrote:
| I built a system in 2008 that would let me design a database and
| the automatically generate an entire admin backend, granular ACL
| rules for different users and roles, related records and
| interactive table fields like toggle switches. It wasn't
| statically generated so it easily adapted to changes in the
| database over time too. Could also swap out the UI theme per
| customer. Among other things.
|
| Called it The Intersect because I was and still am a huge fan of
| "Chuck".
|
| It sped up my client projects so much that it killed my hourly
| income.
|
| Now there are lots of systems that do this type of thing, but at
| the time I was very proud of that system. It was nice to be able
| to focus on web project from a purely data design back approach.
| simonw wrote:
| I built a personal data warehouse just for myself, with
| everything from my Tweets and LinkedIn data to my Swarm checkins
| and a copy of my genome.
|
| I gave a talk about that (with a lot of video and screenshots)
| here: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-
| warehous...
| madisp wrote:
| not sure how interesting but definitely useful :D I like to
| listen to Albums and I missed the "Give me a random album from my
| collection" functionality in Spotify so built a tiny webapp to do
| exactly that - https://shuffle.ninja.
|
| It uses the Spotify web APIs to fetch your album collection and
| gives back a random album from it. I use it daily.
| GeorgeHahn wrote:
| I love this idea! Thanks for sharing, I'm looking forward to
| trying this out day to day.
| barnabee wrote:
| This is great!
|
| I've always wished for a replacement Spotify UI that's entirely
| album focused.
| dserban wrote:
| As a data engineer who is looking to leave a toxic workplace
| behind, I built a data streaming application to surface new
| dataeng jobs being posted on ATSes (Applicant Tracking Systems).
| There is a constant stream of new JDs being posted, which fans
| out to a bunch of RSS/Atom feeds for combinations of skillset and
| location. Most startups post JDs to either greenhouse or lever,
| statistically speaking.
| [deleted]
| bhouston wrote:
| I wrote a WebGL, WebGL2, and WebGPU statistics tracker:
| https://web3dsurvey.com. Well it is useful at least.
| modzu wrote:
| time machine
| l2silver wrote:
| go on...
| ihatepython wrote:
| I did the same thing, but not for myself, it was to send other
| people away that I didn't like
| cptaj wrote:
| This is exactly the type of shit I see benevolent AGI doing for
| us
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35740720. It's not super
| terrible but it's off topic and the parent thread was making
| the page top heavy.
| amalcon wrote:
| I mean, didn't Pandora spend like a decade pretending to be
| that? We don't exactly need AGI for that, we just need Pandora
| with some specific problems fixed.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Yeah why not? Just replace the thoughtfulness of creating
| something for a loved one and the human ingenuity to do it
| (however simple) with an AI. I do not yearn for a future where
| everything is replaced by AI.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm not sure how much overlap there is between the
| "everyone's just a consumer these days! That's awful, they
| should be creators!" set of posters, and the "needing fewer
| people to do _anything at all_ is always a good thing, bring
| on the glorious AI future! " set, but I suspect it's at least
| non-zero and I find that rather confusing.
|
| Yes, let's make it so anything short of world-class creative
| talent (if that, even, if "AI" keeps advancing) is something
| that's of no monetary or _social_ value, then wonder why
| people don 't spend more time creating stuff. You're not
| motivated to play violin in your bedroom for nobody, or make
| paintings to hang in your own closet because nobody wants
| them? Or, there's no need for you to build this kind of great
| thing for your elderly relative because an AGI can do it
| instead? And now you're a couch potato struggling with
| depression and wondering what the point of living even is?
| _Quelle surprise_!
|
| It's _as if_ solipsistic intrinsic motivation is _shit_
| compared to having others want or need what you can do for
| them, and like maybe we _need_ the latter in order to be
| healthy. But no, let 's race toward further reducing our
| value to others as fast as we can, what could go wrong?
| mcbits wrote:
| > Or, there's no need for you to build this kind of great
| thing for your elderly relative because an AGI can do it
| instead?
|
| Just like there is no need to design and build the FM
| transmitter from scratch because [factory] can do it
| instead. Some of us still think it's fun to build things
| like that as a hobby, but those who don't can still have an
| FM transmitter to start with and create something more
| exciting from there.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I'm not convinced the costs would make that a viable use of
| resources versus just making an appropriate product, or using
| something that already exists like Spotify playlists. Even an
| LLM is expensive to keep running.
| b33j0r wrote:
| Hear me out. We can bootstrap these costs by mining crypto!
| We'll use the waste heat from that to power the AI's, with
| 110% carnot efficiency.
|
| Unfortunately, the physics of this work out so that every
| playlist generated is composed of Nickelback and "Sweet
| Caroline" covers.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Nickleback is a fundamental concept of physics, you will
| always see echoes of it in any work you do. One way to be
| sure is to snap a picture, look at this photograph and
| every time it will make you laugh.
| b33j0r wrote:
| I have often wondered if Chad is the actual source of
| dark matter:
|
| 1. Never made it as a poor man
|
| 2. Never made it as a blind man stealing
|
| 3. This is how I remind you, that I'm really MOND.
|
| Sometimes the answer is just staring you in the face. A
| Canadian face, that should have been from San Antonio,
| TX.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Even an LLM is expensive to keep running._
|
| In a decade, it'll cost pennies a year.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| But we aren't there yet, and grandma is going to be dead in
| a decade, and the source code for the radio playlist
| gimmick already exists, as does Spotify.
| DougMerritt wrote:
| I definitely agree, specifically because of software
| improvements (not because Moore's Law will make it that
| cheap).
|
| Conversely, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to predict that
| it will always be as expensive as it is today.
|
| Well, I guess "pennies" is a radical prediction. Cheap,
| anyway.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Isn't it already relatively cheap to run? Training is
| costly, but there are examples of running LLaMA on your
| laptop. It doesn't seem like it will take decades to
| commoditize this stuff ... it is just the cutting edge
| might keep moving ahead.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Not relative to a permanent and much more simplistic
| solution that already exists in the form of the source
| code for the original radio project mentioned in the op.
|
| I'll give you an example: fabricating an ASIC is
| expensive. Using FPGAs is cheaper if the potential sales
| are low, but they're less performant.
|
| If a hypothetical AGI a decade from now can do the radio
| gimmick, but it incurs an ongoing cost, but it's going to
| have wide appeal, it makes more sense to make a simple
| utility.
|
| Better yet, the simple utility already exists and doesn't
| need a hypothetical "benevolent AGI". It doesn't even
| need an LLM. It's here today.
|
| This entire sub-thread went off at a tangent of trying to
| shoehorn AI into somewhere it has no place being, just
| like the fetishizing of blockchain and attempting to
| shoehorn it into everywhere a database would be cheaper,
| more flexible and more performant.
|
| A hypothetical "benevolent AGI" is going to be incredibly
| larger in scale than an LLM, thus much more expensive.
| You won't be running one on a laptop. We may not even
| have enough compute globally for a hypothetical
| "benevolent AGI".
| smirth wrote:
| Why would you keep one running. You don't need to run an LLM
| except perhaps to rotate the playlists. First time it might
| help setup the code. Even making requests can be done by
| simply queries. Pennies at most for a few thousand tokens
| every now and then.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Why would you need one whatsoever? If someone has already
| done the work as in the op, why not just cut out the
| hypothetical "benevolent AGI" and utilize the existing
| source code?
|
| You're invoking LLMs, but "benevolent AGI" was what got
| invoked originally. Don't conflate a hypothetical AGI with
| an existing LLM. Anything of the scale required to create a
| hypothetical AGI is going to be expensive. Period.
|
| Is grandma really going to use a hypothetical AGI any
| better than she's able to use Spotify? Come on.
| pxc wrote:
| Part of what makes this nice is that it's a handmade product of
| love for a family member. I think if you commoditize something
| like this, it loses much of its charm and even some of its
| purpose.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I've been playing around with Node-RED[0] and built a completely
| pointless svg manipulation flow[1] which then makes this page
| https://demo.openmindmap.org/ui/#!/7
|
| The idea is create a tool for creating a global mind map but
| instead it's a svg!
|
| [0]=https://nodered.org
|
| [1]=https://demo.openmindmap.org/omm/#flow/3ebb65fdbecb182e (not
| really mobile conform)
| kolinko wrote:
| When I was 15 years old and my sister was 4 or 5 years old, I
| wrote a pascal program that showed a big letter on a screen when
| my sister pressed such letter on a keyboard.
|
| She had fun pressing letters on a keyboard and then seeing them
| on the screen - possibly learning alphabet and keyboard layout at
| the same time :)
| davchana wrote:
| My first program was in C, input two dates in yyyy-mm-dd format,
| one by one,and tells the age. I used to call it Age Finder.exe
| Second version of it could work with dates entered in either
| order i.e. oldest newest or newest oldest.
|
| Now I use javascript & html. The most used ones in recent past
| was my own timesheet log app. Html form submit data to Google
| sheet through Google script. Another page shows the monthly
| summary & details.
|
| A telegram bot which logs my msgs as todo list to a Google sheet.
| I manually mark things done when done.
|
| Many others at apps.bydav.in
| __tyler__ wrote:
| I made a portfolio rebalancing tool to help automate my
| investment purchases.
|
| https://github.com/TylerHillery/RePort
| ccosmin wrote:
| Built my own music player for mac which I use every day. I have a
| large collection of ripped mp3s and I wanted to control exactly
| where they are stored, order in which they are played (album
| order) etc. It just snowballed from there with other features.
|
| https://snowlinesoftware.com/apps/mac/mamusique/index.php
| mkw5053 wrote:
| I recently constructed a compact compost freezer. In San
| Francisco, we have a municipal compost collection service that
| picks up large bins from the curb. However, using a smaller
| container on the countertop often results in unpleasant odors,
| flies, and torn, soggy bags. My (now) wife introduced me to the
| idea of storing a small compost bag in our freezer, which solved
| these issues but consumed valuable freezer space. To address
| this, I designed a mini freezer with the form factor of a small
| floor trash can, featuring a foot-operated lid.
| ScottWRobinson wrote:
| I made a "bot" server for myself, which is really just a server
| and app framework to host a bunch of scripts. The framework
| handles:
|
| - Running bots periodically - Receives webhooks - Handles OAuth -
| Provides a shared DB - Posts updates to and receives commands
| from Slack
|
| It's not very innovative, but super helpful. I love that I can
| deploy a new script so easily and already have all the tools I
| need so I can just focus in the logic. A few bots I have running:
|
| - I run a site with thousands of articles, so one bot checks
| 10-15 articles per day for spelling mistakes, broken links,
| broken images, poor formatting, etc. Tasks to fix these are then
| posted to Notion. - Monitor Hacker News and Reddit for mentions
| of the sites/apps that I run so I can respond. - Sync calendars
| between apps without having to make them public - Gather
| financials and reports from various sources for bookkeeping -
| Monitor all of the servers we run and sync their status to Notion
|
| Probably at least half of the automations could work on something
| like Zapier, but this is more fun and I get a lot more control
| over them.
| BryantD wrote:
| This wasn't terribly hard, but I built https://seattle-
| movies.innocence.com/ because I really wanted an aggregate indie
| movie theater calendar. Then I added an RSS feed cause someone
| asked for it. It has vastly improved my quality of life around
| movies!
|
| (I'm a hack but the code is as general purpose and adaptable as I
| could make it, just in case someone wants to use it for another
| city.)
| muzani wrote:
| I was playing a MMO with a market. Sometimes people would make
| mistakes, e.g. selling 100 iron for $1,000,000 instead of selling
| 1,000,000 iron for $100. I made a little tool that polls the API
| and sends a notification when someone made a mistake.
|
| Eventually I got bored of grabbing these mistakes and left the
| tool with my clan. It had the side effect of getting people
| active on Discord, and making people more actively involved in
| countering raids. We ended up building one of the most elite
| clans in the game until some other whiz kid built a better bot.
|
| There was also this little augmented browser tool that calculates
| the best order and timing to attack in the game, and the
| statistically likely result.
|
| We'd joke that all the tools we built for that game were probably
| well worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and that's around the
| time I decided to quit and spend my time on something more
| useful.
| hohg wrote:
| @dang regarding pagination // Get the anchor
| tag element const anchorTag =
| document.querySelector('.morelink'); // Add a scroll
| event listener to the window object
| window.addEventListener('scroll', () => { // Check if
| the user has scrolled to the bottom of the page if
| (window.innerHeight + window.scrollY >=
| document.body.offsetHeight) { // Fetch the content
| from the URL stored in the anchor tag's href attribute
| const xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); xhr.open('GET',
| anchorTag.href, true); xhr.onload = () => {
| // Append the fetched content to the page const div
| = document.createElement('div'); div.innerHTML =
| xhr.responseText; document.body.appendChild(div);
| }; xhr.send(); } });
| jpatters wrote:
| My company has a budget for health and wellness that I use for my
| GoodLife gym membership. GoodLife doesn't send receipts and
| instead makes you go to their website, fill in a bunch of
| information, and request the receipt be emailed to you. So I made
| a little app that simply fills in the form automatically every
| two weeks. I set it up on GitHub actions and now I don't have
| this annoyance to deal with. It's pretty small but made my life
| better.
|
| Not much for instructions but it's here is anyone is interested.
| https://github.com/jpatters/goodlife-receipts
| raphaelty wrote:
| I build my personnal search engine which record things I like on
| twitter, blog posts etc.. It automatically calls those APIs using
| Github Action and store them in an open source database (json
| file)
|
| I actualy use it at least twice a week to retrieve content I
| bookmarked, so I'm happy to have created such a tool.
|
| The app: https://raphaelsty.github.io/knowledge/?query=bayesian
|
| The Github: https://github.com/raphaelsty/knowledge
| sidwyn wrote:
| Built a Chrome extension to save myself money last Christmas:
| https://getscore.app/chrome?ref=hn.
|
| Ended up saving thousands of dollars for myself so far (I shop a
| lot online), and friends & family really love the product. We
| also applied to YC - so let's see how that goes!
| akkartik wrote:
| As it happens, I just built the minimal, hackable tool for
| drawing boxes and arrows that I've always wanted.
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/snap.love
| lemure wrote:
| I've implemented a Bayesian optimizer for stable diffusion model
| merging [0]. This is because I do not have patience and/or time
| to try all different block combinations by hand. It started as a
| personal thing but now multiple people are working on it and a
| small community was born.
|
| [0] https://github.com/s1dlx/sd-webui-bayesian-merger
| vitorbaptistaa wrote:
| Back in university, a friend and I built an old-school arcade. It
| as a wooden chest with an old PC inside running Linux. We then
| got the arcade buttons and joystick for 2 players, connected to
| the serial port, and wrote a Linux driver to understand the
| presses as a keyboard. We even added a coin door that accepted
| quarters. At the time, I was the president of the CompSci student
| body. We had a room in the university, where we placed the
| arcade. There were some great games between classes, and it gave
| us some funds for random small stuff (printer toners, etc.).
|
| ---
|
| Another one is https://shellshare.net. I use Linux for a while,
| and from time to time someone would ask my help with something.
| If you ever tried debugging a problem in someone's else terminal
| over the phone, you know how frustrating it can be. So I built it
| as a way to share a read-only stream of your terminal with a one-
| liner command.
|
| It's been a while since I used it myself, but there are some
| people that use it for teaching in universities.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| Games of what? were you running MAME or something?
| vitorbaptistaa wrote:
| Exactly!
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I'm writing my own app for practicing the piano. The goal is to
| make practicing fun, while also making steady progress.
|
| I'm not a good player at all, and I've struggled with practice
| for years. But I have no problems playing (practicing) difficult
| video games, that require a lot of repetition (think Celeste).
|
| I think I've identified two major reasons why I never enjoyed it:
|
| 1. Classical music notation (sheet music) is just awful. It goes
| against most modern principles of easy-to-grasp information
| design. So I've come up with my own notation that is much easier
| to read and can be generated from musicxml files.
|
| 2. Practicing takes too much decision making and discipline. If
| you want to make progress, you have to constantly remind yourself
| to practice the parts that you're not good at yet - this is a
| surprising amount of mental overhead and requires lots of
| discipline. So the app I wrote listens to you play via MIDI and
| keeps track of which segments of a piece you're already good at,
| and automatically gives you those you still need to practice more
| - zero decision making required. You just play whatever the app
| gives you and after a few weeks/months you're suddenly able to
| play the whole piece.
|
| The app is no where near ready to be shown, but I'm confident at
| this point that the concept will work.
|
| I've been planning a longer write up on this for a while, if
| you're interested in reading more about it, please let me know,
| that would be very motivating :)
| taf2 wrote:
| I have a esp32 board that listens to voice commands and turns on
| and off the lights in my workshop. For fun and for the kids it
| has a rainbows mode since it controls multi color led strip of
| lights.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Some background: - Samsung Galaxy phones have "Routines",
| background tasks that can fire based on a number of conditionals,
| including time, geofencing, messages received, etc. - I have a
| good friend who I regularly grab dinner with at Texas Roadhouse.
| In fact, for over a year, we went twice a week or more after we
| each bought $1200 worth of gift cards for $900 during a promo
| that was intended for businesses (we both have LLCs we were able
| to use). - Our Texas Roadhouse has crazy long wait times during
| peak hours. Like 45 to 90 minutes. This was especially
| frustrating given my friend was about 10-15 minutes from that
| location, with traffic. - Texas Roadhouse offers an online
| reservation system. You fill out the form, and they will send you
| a text with the estimated wait, to which you must respond to
| confirm your reservation. - Once you are texted again to be
| notified your table is ready, you have 20 minutes or you lose
| your reservation.
|
| As VIP customers (the entire restaurant knew us both on a first
| name basis, we always tipped generously [e.g. $20 on $40 of
| food], we often received preferential service from staff. One of
| our waiters was actually a young man with a budding tech
| interest, who, after considerable encouragement, mentorship, and
| a quality boot camp some of my former coworkers enjoyed, is now a
| software engineer making several times more income than he made
| as a waiter.
|
| We were very pleased with this arrangement in all but one way:
| while we could talk to several of our waiter friends who were
| staff members of the restaurant to get a table without a
| reservation even when it was 1 table short of being packed, it
| often was packed, or our waiter friends were not working that
| night, and we did not like waiting in a noisy, crowded lobby.
|
| I picked apart the reservation website and found a very simple,
| wide-open API. I quickly hacked together a script to make a
| reservation with a single GET request to my own site, with
| reservation options in URL parameters, then created Samsung
| Routines such that when I arrived within 100 feet of my friend's
| house between 3pm and 9pm, it would automatically send a properly
| formatted GET request to my website, which in turn made a
| properly formatted POST to the API, and then it would also
| immediately respond to the incoming text confirming the
| reservation. Before I'd even made it to his front door, we'd have
| an ETA, so we could decide on whether to start a movie, play some
| split screen diablo, etc. I'd then get a text a short time later,
| and we'd leave for TRH. Upon arrival, we'd walk up to the
| counter, mention our reservation was called up, and proceed to be
| seated immediately regardless of how busy it was, or whether any
| of our waiter friends were working that night.
|
| DIY VIP Reservation system :)
| throwaway874839 wrote:
| I always loved listening to music. However, the past few years I
| started more actively exploring new (old) music around the world
| and actually listening to whole albums. (I'm always amazed by the
| vast amount of good music that exists out there, waiting to be
| discovered and experienced)
|
| I've a few friends that have the same itch and so we were
| constantly exchanging recommendations via different communication
| channels (Signal, email, Slack etc.)
|
| So I started building a website that's "like Goodreads, but for
| music releases". You can mark albums as "want to listen",
| "listened" and "dig" (loved), organizing your lists with tags and
| notes and share them with others. You then have a public activity
| profile and you can add other users as friends and see their own
| activity.
|
| Original Show HN post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
| esseti wrote:
| the time tracker https://github.com/esseti/-schrodinger
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| A bootable mini-CDROM that I would pop into two dozen computers
| in a computer lab after hours that would turn the lab into an
| OpenMOSIX SSI cluster and auto-eject the CDs. All I had to do to
| reset the lab is ctrl+alt+delete on all the machines.
|
| I also built a CarPC back before we had smartphones that could do
| everything. I wrote some custom Perl software for it:
|
| - An audible user interface that allowed a remote control, a
| keypad, or voice commands to speak-navigate a series of menus, to
| allow running programs, selecting music to play, etc. It was
| extremely low-latency, fast and clear, to allow very rapid
| navigation. No need to look away from the road, unlike every
| annoying car navigation menu I've ever used.
|
| - A music interface to allow selecting playlists, shuffling
| music, pausing/skipping, etc
|
| - A program to play the next of a pre-written instruction when
| approaching a GPS coordinate; basically, ghetto turn-by-turn GPS
| nav
|
| - A wardriving interface to tell you when a new access point was
| captured and if it was unencrypted and high signal
|
| - A video player hooked up to a mini monitor installed in the
| dash
| altilunium wrote:
| [dead]
| mltony wrote:
| Blind developer here; I often write tools for myself to perform
| some task that is not well supported by my screenreader. For
| example:
|
| * I wrote an add-on that allows me to read HN comments in a
| structured way. A typical screenreader would present page in a
| linear manner, so you'd have to read all replies in order, which
| is quite tedious in popular posts. My add-on parses the page and
| identifies the level of each comment, and then I can navigate to
| previous/next comment at any level. So I can quickly check top-
| level comments and then read replies only if I'm interested.
|
| * Another add-on makes Jupyter edit boxes to work with my
| screenreader. Jupyter was requiered at my company , so I either
| had to write that add-on or else. The way it works is that it
| sends Control+C Control+V keystrokes to the browser to retrieve
| contents and then presents them to me in an accessible window for
| editing. When I'm done it would Control+A Control+V new content
| back to edit box.
|
| * BlindCompass - iOS app that I wrote for myself to navigate on
| the streets. One of the problems of blind people is that it is
| easy to lose the sense of heading, e.g. where is north vs South.
| So BlindCompass would read my heading and present it as a two-
| pitch sound, that allows me to deduce rough direction. It's also
| easy to figure out the right direction and just maintain it, so
| with BlindCompass I can cross large open spaces easily.
| Msurrow wrote:
| I build a "SaaS" wine app, for tracking wines in my cellar and
| for tasting notes as well.
|
| "SaaS" in quotes since it runs in a small production setup with
| all the bells and whistles (ie. CI/CD pipelines, continuous
| releases, user signup etc.), but I'm the only user :-)
|
| I'm a wine enthusiast, i.e. not a professional but interested
| enough to do a WSET2 in my spare time (I'll do a WSET3 when I
| find time some day). I like to/need to keep track of two things
| as part of my wine hobby: Wines in my cellar, and tasting notes.
|
| Used to keep the wine registry in excel and notes in Evernote,
| however especially the excelsheet lacked features, like easy
| searches from a mobile device, and notes about the wines in my
| cellar (not tasting notes, as I have plenty bottles I need to
| taste but havn't yet, and I still need some notes on those to
| remember where the heck I got them from and why).
|
| Also, WSET2 tasting notes a much quicker to do with the proper
| template, but copy/pasting text in Evernote became too annoying
| (again, phone).
|
| So, I build my own app to have exactly the features and mobile
| friendly GUI I want. I'm the only user on purpose, because then I
| can keep building and changing features to be just like I want
| them.
|
| Yes I know there are some "wine tracking apps" out there, like
| CellarTracker and Vivino, but they dont fit my needs.
| CellarTracker is closest to my needs but way too clumpsy GUI and
| not mobile friendly -- I don't have my laptop with me when I'm in
| the cellar to find a wine for tonight, I have my phone.
|
| Will I every make up the time I spent building it in time saved
| compared to my excel/evernote setup? Nope, not even close. But it
| was a fun side project, and I like fiddling with the hosting/Ops
| part.
| vertigolimbo wrote:
| Off-topic but thank you for mentioning WSET. It's the first
| time I've heard about it. In UK, there's something basic
| offered by bbc: https://www.bbcmaestro.com/courses/jancis-
| robinson/an-unders...
| Msurrow wrote:
| Sure. You can get WSET 1, 2 and 3 for sure in UK
| (https://www.wsetglobal.com/wset-school-london/wset-
| courses/).
|
| Another popular wine education is CMS (Court Of Master
| Sommerliers) https://www.courtofmastersommeliers.org/current-
| course-price...
|
| WSET is supposed to be more focused on the production of
| wine, where CMS is supporsed to have more focus on
| service/serving (for waiters). Its details and I think
| perhaps more of a different in the lower levels.
|
| I can recommend WSET. I had a pretty good knowledge of wine
| before I started, so I did WSET2 first. WSET1 is short and
| pretty basic, but very good for beginners and/or if you just
| want to have a taske before taking one of the higher levels.
| WSET2 is still beginner domain I think, since there is an
| exam but its not a practical exam (i.e. no tasting exam).
| WSET3 gets serious :-)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Here is an idea because you clearly enjoy wine stuff. I can
| check wine reviews online, but as a total wine noob, a) I don't
| want to shell out big bucks b) lot of the recommendations are
| not available at the local chain. What I want is for someone to
| provide recommendations from a given online store; done by a
| real person.
| specproc wrote:
| Not a tech project, but made my first batch of wine this year.
| Was immense fun, and just about drinkable.
| Msurrow wrote:
| We actually also have a hobby wine production. About 200
| plants. Established back in 2010ish. Its very insightful and
| a very interesting perspective to add to "just" drinking and
| tasting wine. I've done 5 vintages now, and there is still
| so. much. to. learn... and thats before the wine even gets
| into the bottle.
|
| What country are you in? We are en Denmark, which is horrible
| for reds.. but red is "real wine" so thats what we are making
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I didn't exactly build this from scratch but it is pretty heavily
| modified: I use an ESP8266 with a relay module to control my
| garage door via Home Assistant. I use a second one mounted on my
| bike as a WiFi presence detector. This way when I turn the bike
| on, the bike module connects to my home WiFi and Home Assistant
| opens my garage door. Once I leave the property and WiFi
| disconnects, the garage door closes a minute later. When I come
| home the same happens: as I approach the garage door opens and
| after I park and shut the bike off the door closes. There are a
| lot of solutions for how to open the garage door from a bike but
| this has been the most elegant that I've tried.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| The most useful thing I built for myself is my workflow. Being
| both on the ASD and ADHD spectrums, I intuitively knew I need
| systems, and started working on them, long before I was diagnosed
| and got treatment.
|
| One of my dearest parts of my system is the knowledge, task, and
| time management part. There's many things to improve, but I'm
| really happy to where I got.
|
| TLDR; custom org/markdown/hyperlists-inspired document syntax
| powered by tree-sitter, go library for accessing the data,
| command line utility with interactive task manager (built in with
| a custom React-like component-based TUI framework), Neovim
| plugins and integrations.
|
| This short video explains more than I can in a short time:
| https://gist.ro/slang.mp4
|
| Extra - Thank you Org mode: I do my work in a terminal emulator,
| so (obviously) my editor is Neovim. Two years ago I allocated a
| few weeks to learn Emacs and to review Org mode, I was hooked on
| so many concepts, and I loved it. Didn't like Emacs through, it's
| just too slow for me, and Elisp felt very meh if not yuck.
| There's quite a few things that I liked so much while testing Org
| mode, and that I tried to port.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| The most interesting tech I've build for myself is boring: a
| writing tool I use every day for journaling:
| https://enso.sonnet.io
|
| With that out of the way here's some more ridiculous stuff:
|
| In 2016, I made a browser based AR party game where you'd fight
| kittens falling from the sky by dancing with vegetables in your
| hands (CMYK was easier to track using the webcam). I have some
| photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/g6Dp8GLDbuuhT1TRA
|
| From a technical PoV it was exciting (running AR, in a browser,
| in pre Pokemon GO, pre WASM times!)
|
| I also made a simple photography lighting tool, replacing
| professional lights with computer/tablet/phone screens
| (facade.photo). I put it in an old wardrobe bought in a thrift
| store on Brick Lane and during my startup launch. Results:
| https://goo.gl/photos/RZ3fCRcScYSGr7aG6
|
| Ah, I also made an AI-powered voice assistant in 2014. The
| tagline was HTML5-powered voice assistant, as AI wasn't really
| _the_ buzzword then, but _HTML5_... oh yeah.
| Hadriel wrote:
| enso is cool!
| eigenhombre wrote:
| Enso looks really nice, as does Sit and your about pages.
| pbrw wrote:
| Enso website looks beautiful, what tools did you use to build
| it?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Next.js for the product page and regular react for the app.
| My personal website was built using eleventy. I enjoy writing
| plain html and css but I try to be pragmatic when things get
| a bit complex.
| robviren wrote:
| Built my own app for tracking my exercises using a phone arm
| band, the gyro, accelerometer, and the camera to create a model
| for rep counting and tempo. I got tired of the mental effort of
| counting reps. This graphs the strongest signal using an fft and
| some custom algo to determine the best signal to use. Works
| pretty well and backs up my own internal count. I promised myself
| I would only build it for me so I would actually build it as
| opposed to getting a mental block by building it for others.
|
| My long term vision was to open it up to others and mine the data
| to determine what the ideal weight, tempo, resting period, and
| exercises were for a particular body type. I'm just a little too
| ADHD to commit to it and keep a day job.
|
| https://swolereport.com/
| jo-m wrote:
| I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small
| computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each
| train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it.
|
| It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/.
|
| Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing
| the images a bit.
| noman-land wrote:
| This is so cool!!
| habi wrote:
| Awesome. Congratulations from a fellow Swiss (and panorama
| photo dabbler).
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| And yet again I forgot it's not the Chinese TLD.
|
| By the way I have a quick expansion for most TLDs and for the
| Swiss .ch "cheese" sounds rather more apt and easier than the
| real one in my head :)
| rnjailamba wrote:
| Curious to know how you manage to concentrate during waking
| hours on work and how you sleep peacefully?
| jo-m wrote:
| Tip: some more interesting ones (including failed ones) show up
| if you filter for shortest.
|
| https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/350
|
| https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/3224
|
| https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/4045
|
| Etc
| sirwitti wrote:
| This is really cool! Thanks for creating and sharing!
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| I think this might be my favorite. Wonderful idea and
| execution!
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is such a cool project! I live right next to a busy road
| and for a long time have wanted to do something like this that
| would count the vehicles passing. I've always been curious how
| many cars pass on a given day and I feel like the hardest part
| now adays would be getting the right camera angle so if cars
| are occupying all 3 lanes they aren't counted incorrectly. From
| there I just need to detect cars as they pass and count them.
|
| It's really cool to see it used like this! The resulting images
| are really neat as well!
| e4e5 wrote:
| There was a post yesterday about counting traffic on a pi,
| you might want to check it out:
| https://nathanrooy.github.io/posts/2019-02-06/raspberry-
| pi-d...
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Thank you for this! It's great!
| fransje26 wrote:
| Really cool. They look like model trains! :-)
| dmd wrote:
| Yeah! I've never seen trains so clean and modern looking in
| my life. They look like they came out of a futuristic toy
| set.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| They're swiss trains, I guess we have enough wealth to make
| sure that our trains are clean. The interior is also almost
| always clean, except early morning on weekends (drunk
| people).
|
| From time to time I see a train with graffiti on it, but
| usually they remove such things very fast.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Wow this is cool as hell!!
| Jleagle wrote:
| Sounds interesting id love to know how you do it. Is the speed
| calculated based on the noise of the wheels going over a track
| join? Then you can work out the length/speed based on the time
| it takes etc. Are the train types/images random or calculated
| some how?
| jo-m wrote:
| There is a parameter which tells the program how many pixels
| there are per meter. From this you can compute the length
| after stitching. Using framerate, you can compute the speed
| in the same way.
| prenoob wrote:
| Taking trainspotting to a new level, congratulations
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Made me think of Kartrak (an early optical barcode-like system
| for tracking rolling stock):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K8UpMNYIPo
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Very cool, how does the stitching work?
| mNovak wrote:
| Wow that's very cool. The resulting super flat images of the
| trains is really interesting -- like taking a photo from
| immense distance
| jokteur wrote:
| Given the type of trains that are passing (it seems no IC/IR),
| along with their precise timing and direction, I'm sure it is
| easy to figure out where exactly you are living.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Especially in Switzerland where the trains actually go on
| time :P But anyway does it really matter? It'll still be hard
| to identify the actual apartment.
|
| Most online webcams are easier to identify
| jo-m wrote:
| Yes.
| tuukkah wrote:
| I wonder if there's open data or an open API for the schedule
| or location information. That way, you could include
| information on which train is which.
| jo-m wrote:
| Yes, the APIs are there, with minute accurate real time data.
| Would just have to do it ;)
| sandos wrote:
| Nice job! I would be really happy if I ever finished my own
| hobby projects this well.
| INTPenis wrote:
| When you say "right under my apartment", where exactly do you
| mean? Because I also have a train line going underground very
| near my apartment but it's not directly under. Could I capture
| such images? And I'm on the 4th floor.
| nXqd wrote:
| this is so cool :D
| blakecaldwell wrote:
| I love this so much. Amazing use of creativity and tech chops.
| A++ would trainspot again.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Some cool tech there too - client side sqlite db over wasm,
| neat! :)
| birracerveza wrote:
| This is amazing
| jollyllama wrote:
| Reminds me of the 90's Lego computer game "Lego Loco"
| megalord wrote:
| This is really impressive. Very nice work
| formerly_proven wrote:
| A hybrid between area and line scan - block scan camera?
| markusw wrote:
| Cool! :D
| jcutrell wrote:
| I live on an airport - Id really like to do this.
| amenghra wrote:
| https://skybot.cam/ (see also
| https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan) and might be of interest
| to you?
| dllu wrote:
| Have you considered getting a line scan camera for sharper and
| higher resolution images? I took some train scans with one:
| https://daniel.lawrence.lu/photos/
|
| Incidentally I also built some tech for it:
| https://github.com/dllu/nectar but I need to update the
| readme...
| mcast wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, those photographs are very clear and
| sharp (especially this one: https://pics.dllu.net/file/dllu-
| pics/boston-pcc.jpg) it seems to tickle my brain.
| cinntaile wrote:
| This reminds me of Wes Anderson movies for some reason.
| bradgessler wrote:
| His style is to shoot his subjects straight-on. Most
| other movies have the camera at an angle.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I remember seeing your photographs on Wikimedia Commons and
| wondering how you did them - now I know! I always assumed
| that you just used a very quick shutter with an f-stop of
| zero :)
| stavros wrote:
| I know he told us how already, but that would have left the
| background sharp, rather than always the same.
| detaro wrote:
| that is very neat, thanks for sharing!
| Hypergraphe wrote:
| So RAD !
| grilledcheez wrote:
| This is so cool!
| imstil3earning wrote:
| wow that is so cool!
| globalise83 wrote:
| No interest in trains, but your website is great - simple,
| visual and effective.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is close to what I've always wanted to build; a camera
| watching the road next to me that records the speed of the
| vehicle traveling by. I should have everything needed from a
| simple camera setup, but I've not bothered actually _doing_ it.
|
| Since you have speed, I should dig into this.
| robodan wrote:
| I wanted that with noise levels. I'm so very tired of hearing
| illegally modified exhausts. It seems like an I2S mic would
| give calibrated levels.
| password4321 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11714207
| hyeomans wrote:
| Same here, I have a Pi 3 but I want to have this outside in
| the balcony, the question that always stops me is how to
| power it and what camera do I meed?
| bombcar wrote:
| My plan was to stick the Pi inside, and power both it and
| the camera with Power over Ethernet (external-rated PoE
| cameras are a dime-a-dozen on Alibaba and friends).
|
| I even got so far as to get it working with Zoneminder to
| dump out the clips that had motion, but didn't get further.
| eiiot wrote:
| This is really sick!
| mertd wrote:
| That's amazing. Very cool.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What's up with the duplicated cars at the top?
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| From what I can see, they're not actually duplicated, I would
| suggest taking a closer look at the windows. But I do agree
| that it's quite hard to see the difference.
|
| The trains look very clean from the outside. I do wonder how
| loud is it, to live so near the tracks.
| mkl wrote:
| The camera is pointing at the car. The train is moving past
| the car. The images of the whole train are made by stitching
| together lots of photos, all containing the bit of the train
| in front of the car as it moves past it.
| spyremeown wrote:
| This is awesome. Really nice!
| ant6n wrote:
| Very neat. What are those power cars (triebkopf)? I thought sbb
| was only using proper locomotives (cabs at both ends) and EMUs
| (kiss, twindexx, ...).
| terran57 wrote:
| Cool project - thanks for sharing!
| pojon wrote:
| A bash-only issue tracker, written on a dare[1] then used for
| some projects. A laptop theft honeypot to pwn the thief[2].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/manpages/issues-legacy [2]:
| https://github.com/manpages/tar-spoon/
| modeless wrote:
| My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front
| gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived
| they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to
| answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was
| and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a
| Twilio app to answer calls from the call box.
|
| I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone.
| Everyone got their own code, and it would text me whenever
| someone used a code so I'd instantly know who was coming. The
| text conversation was my timestamped access log. I also put time
| constraints on some codes so e.g. Doordash couldn't open the gate
| in the middle of the night, or I could set up a temporary access
| code for a party, and I rotated codes too, with text
| notifications if an outdated code was used.
|
| I thought about making a paid app out of it, but it just didn't
| seem worthwhile. I didn't expect that many people would want to
| pay for it. For a while I was excited about a YC startup called
| Doorport that was going to make a hardware device that you'd
| install inside those dumb call boxes and make them smart with all
| sorts of cool features, better than my Twilio hack. But I think
| they pivoted to a much less interesting pure software thing and
| then got acquihired.
| codetheweb wrote:
| I think FreshBuzzer is a similar idea: https://freshbuzzer.com/
| modeless wrote:
| You're right, this looks like almost exactly the product I
| would have made if I decided to turn it into a product. I
| think they started around the same time I did. I wonder how
| much money they're making on it? Could be a nice little
| lifestyle business if they get enough users. I bet their
| Airbnb-focused features would be the real moneymaker, I
| didn't consider that as a potential market.
| bartkappenburg wrote:
| Nice! I built the same thing for a gate at our vacation house
| at a lake. The home-owners have to register their mobile number
| so that if you call a certain number the gate opens based on
| number recognition. Every time new people were at the gate
| (deliveries, guests, renters) they would need to call the
| owner, who had to hang up and call the gate's number.
|
| I use twilio to make outbound calls to that number using my
| registered phonenumber. I put a Django app in front for home
| owners so they can add authorized phone numbers with a
| expiration date.
|
| Whenever someone is a the gate they call a twilio number, my
| django app checks the validity, opens the gate by calling the
| gate's number with my number as ID, plays back some welcome
| message "hello chris, welcome to..." and sends the owner a push
| notification that person X is en route.
|
| Todo: add a feature to redirect an unknown number directly to
| the owner and open the gate after manual verification.
| prox wrote:
| That's actually some very cool hacking together! Love it.
| dgently7 wrote:
| I had a buzzer that was basically a button on the handset of a
| phone which would Open the door, I wasn't allowed to open it up
| to wire directly into it so I slapped together a node red
| script on a rpi with a servo that would push the button to buzz
| open the door anytime I said "open seasame" with Siri via an
| iOS automation thingy. Never needed to carry keys again while
| we lived there.
| jpatters wrote:
| Cool. I did the same thing for my office building except I had
| Twilio post to our work slack with buttons that we could click
| to let them in or not. It was a really fun little afternoon
| project one day.
| Evan-Purkhiser wrote:
| Haha, I also built exactly this!
|
| I had mine integrated with Home Assistant and got notifications
| via a telegram integration.
|
| I also had mine setup so me or my room-mate in our apartment
| telegram group could register new codes, or generate single-use
| codes.
|
| I also considered building it into a paid app, but came to the
| same conclusion :-)
| stickperson wrote:
| How did this work exactly? Twilio would answer the call, listen
| for a number, and "press" 9 if the number was in an allow list?
| modeless wrote:
| That's right. And simultaneously send a text like "FedEx
| opened the gate" or "Doordash failed to open the gate after
| hours" to my and my wife's phones.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Have you gotten any 'failed' people trying to come in
| unexpected?
| modeless wrote:
| I don't think so. The only time expired codes were used
| was legit delivery people using outdated codes. Sometimes
| they would even try multiple old codes. They must have
| ways of saving old codes that worked once.
|
| Thieves didn't bother with codes, they would just climb
| over the gate or tailgate someone else.
| 6510 wrote:
| The product should be a LLM learning from each interaction
| globally. So you walk up to the door and it says Hello Jim, I
| see you work for fedex now. Could you please show me the label
| on the package?
|
| With triggers like: If the cleaner is more than 15 min late 5
| times in a period of 3 months and there are more than 5 resumes
| posted for cleaning positions do not open the door and fire
| them.
| noahtallen wrote:
| ButterflyMX is used a lot in Seattle buildings and does quite a
| bit similar to that: https://butterflymx.com/
| daveidol wrote:
| I used to have this when I lived in Seattle! It's pretty cool
| tech
| fanick wrote:
| My related story: we have door phone system in our apartment
| house and I wanted to get a notification whenever our flat got
| buzzed. I hacked the phone in our flat - attached a circuit
| directly to the wires leading to the coil of the buzzer and
| through arduino to the pc. Then I stitched together some code
| utilizing firebase to send notifications. Worked like a charm
| until google began to require credit cards for the free stuff.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That sounds neat. When you say everyone got their own code, do
| you mean that each person had a separate code for the call box,
| and the call box would call one of many separate Twilio phone
| numbers? Or did the call box always call the same Twilio
| number, and you instructed each person to then input their
| special code via the call box? My apartments have always just
| asked me for a single phone number which they program into the
| call box, so I'm guessing the latter, although it never
| occurred to me that the guest might be able to press more
| buttons after the phone call has been connected.
| modeless wrote:
| You're right, it's the latter. Yeah, you can still use the
| keypad after the call is started. But it's a little clunky.
| The instructions you have to give people are like "first dial
| 542, then wait until you hear the prompt, then enter code
| 867". Which as it turns out is a little too complex for a lot
| of people. Another reason why it wouldn't have been great as
| a paid product.
|
| You could also have a fallback that forwards the call to your
| cell phone after a failed attempt at entering the code. But
| most of the reason I built this was so it would stop calling
| me at random times, so I didn't really want that.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yeah, the call box in general is just not a great system in
| my experience. I often just tell guests and delivery people
| to text or call me when they get there, which works for me
| because my apartment is very close to the lobby. It's just
| easier than hoping they figure out how to use the call box
| and follow my directions to get to my apartment.
| modeless wrote:
| Yeah these call boxes are simply awful. That's why I was
| excited about Doorport, to have something better.
| minton wrote:
| That sounds like a fantastic tool. You didn't happen to open
| source any of your efforts did you? I'm planning to do
| something like this and any head start would be greatly
| appreciated.
| modeless wrote:
| No code actually, I made it all in Twilio Studio which is
| their visual programming "no-code" tool for phone trees.
| Clunky to work with but trivial to set up and had enough
| functionality for this very simple application.
|
| Obviously to make a real app out of it I would have redone it
| in a real programming language and made some frontends for
| web/Android/iOS.
|
| Someone else pointed out https://freshbuzzer.com which looks
| like a real product that does the same thing.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| My mom digitized many many old family videos, and wanted them
| online for sharing with family (including elderly & not-super-
| tech-savvy relatives). She asked me "should I just upload them
| all to a YouTube channel?"
|
| Thankfully it was a phone call so my mom didn't see my aghast
| expression. I prefer that big tech not index this stuff! Better
| to keep "in the family"
|
| Seriously why does big tech deserve this free & super-private
| window into me & my ancestors lives?
|
| So I wrote something[1] where:
|
| * it's fully free & open source
|
| * cloud native
|
| * plays on any device, any bandwidth, even if shitty
|
| * yes my 90+yo Aunt Loretta (w00t to you Aunt Lo!) can use it on
| her phone & computer
|
| * all data can be always encrypted, both source videos and
| derived/optimized assets
|
| * and there's more. please have fun
|
| Basically point it at a source bucket on S3 or B2, and get your
| own private YouTube.
|
| What I've built is _very_ limited in functionality atm, but I
| believe the foundation is solid and plan to extend media support
| to photos and audio.
|
| This can be a nice alternative to Plex/Google Photos/YT/etc.
|
| It's for when you don't care about "building an audience" and in
| fact prefer that big tech can only see encrypted bytes from you.
|
| Try it out and lmk!
|
| [1] https://github.com/cobbzilla/yuebing
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Not saying you shouldn't do this, but by publishing under AGPL
| plus
|
| _If you are an individual person or a not-for-profit
| organization, and your usage of this software is entirely non-
| commercial, you may use this software under the terms of the
| GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, summarized below
| and reprinted in full thereafter._
|
| you have effectively created a _new_ license and it 's not
| completely clear to me what that new license even means
| exactly, except that obviously a company should stay far away
| from it.
|
| With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use
| the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised
| experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.
| Strom wrote:
| AGPL has language to cover such things, e.g.
|
| > _All other non-permissive additional terms are considered
| "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If
| the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a
| notice stating that it is governed by this License along with
| a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that
| term._
|
| So it seems at best there is a need for a middle man who gets
| the AGPL licensed version that can then propagate it further
| under pure AGPL.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me. If one clause says another
| clause can be removed, then doesn't that create a
| contradiction where legally it's unclear which of the two
| clauses "wins" the fight - the one adding additional
| restrictions or the one removing that clause?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think that language is meant for the case where someone
| takes an AGPL programs, slaps another restriction on it,
| and sends it along.
|
| The last person in the chain can disregard the extra
| "conditions".
|
| But this only works if someone distributed it under (only)
| the AGPL in the first. In the specific case with the
| software we are talking about now, that is not the case. It
| was originally distributed under this _almost_ -AGPL.
|
| But yes, the wording inside the AGPL makes it _extra_
| confusing exactly. It reads like those test where the
| instruction is "before you do anything, read all the
| questions".
| andrepd wrote:
| >it's not completely clear to me what that new license even
| means exactly, except that obviously a company should stay
| far away from it
|
| And that is his problem because?
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Use the AGPL. I promise not to sue any individual person or
| non-profit org.
|
| And you're right, for-profit companies should either stay
| away for safety or contact me for terms.
| maxibenner wrote:
| I did a similar thing a while back.
| https://github.com/maxibenner/cardboard
|
| The goal was to have a platform that ingests the commonly
| enormous video files from old tapes, automatically cuts them,
| tags them based on content to make them easily searchable. My
| focus was on discoverability of scenes hidden in those long
| video files. The search bar would also randomly suggest tags to
| search for.
|
| At some point I tried to work with a large video digitization
| provider and the video splitting ended up being too expensive
| to be viable for the proposed business model. Now it just auto
| generates thumbnails and lets you tag videos manually.
|
| The project includes a business dahsboard that allows
| digitization businesses to send videos directly to customer
| accounts (deliveries need to be accepted).
|
| Currently, I only use it for my own videos as well as for my
| MIL.
| adave wrote:
| If it's old pristine video, might be worthwhile for anything
| without identifiable info on YT. Never know who this helps or
| brings backs memories.
| talhah wrote:
| Wow that's amazing, do you plan to support mobile apps as well?
| cobbzilla wrote:
| I'm not considering a native app for this, but the mobile web
| experience should be excellent.
| rhizome31 wrote:
| Hey, sounds like a very cool project.
|
| I'm wondering: have you considered setting up a Peertube
| instance and what were the reasons for not doing it?
|
| Other question about not giving away your private data to big
| tech: Why is S3 better than a private YouTube channel?
| cobbzilla wrote:
| I like S3/B2 because the vendor only ever sees encrypted
| bytes. All decryption/plaintext is on the device. YouTube
| does not get you there. In fact their entire model is
| predicated on watching your every move.
|
| As far as Peertube, I don't know enough about it. If I put a
| massive-bitrate video in some weird format on it, and then
| try playback on a crappy phone, will it work? If I go through
| a short tunnel, will it buffer or degrade quality gracefully?
| I don't want to worry about it.
| rhizome31 wrote:
| > S3/B2 because the vendor only ever sees encrypted bytes
|
| Got it, thanks!
|
| > questions about Peertube
|
| I don't know either. So far my experience with existing
| instances has been rather good but I didn't consciously
| test the use cases you mentioned. I've wanted to publish
| educational videos for a while but the idea of feeding the
| big nasty beast just breaks my heart.
| rvense wrote:
| Have you considered just hosting mp4s in <video> tags on
| a simple web host? I think it'll work a lot better than
| you'd think.
| rhizome31 wrote:
| You're right, thanks for reminding me of the simple,
| straightforward way!
| cobbzilla wrote:
| This uses video.js which wraps <video> and adds a lot
| more goodies.
| wxce wrote:
| nit: The language in the readme is called 'Marathi' instead of
| 'Maranthi'. It's my native language, and not a ton of people
| speak it online. Nice to see it here :)
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Thank you! My mistake, updated. cheers! :)
|
| PS-- I also wanted my docs in any language, but also that
| anyone else could translate their app/docs easily, so I made
| this other thing[1], which is why these docs are available in
| so many languages
|
| [1] https://github.com/cobbzilla/hokeylization /
| https://www.npmjs.com/package/hokeylization-lite
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Huh, interesting. Apparently, Marathi is the 13th largest
| language in the world by population of native speakers, yet
| I've never heard of it. TIL.
|
| Is there anything you know of that's linguistically
| interesting about it besides what I can learn from Wikipedia?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathi_language
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Simpson's quote:
|
| Reverend Lovejoy: No, but He was working in the hearts of
| your friends and neighbors when they came to your aid, be
| they [points to Ned] Christian, [Krusty] Jew, or [Apu]...
| miscellaneous.
|
| Apu: Hindu! There are 700 million of us.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Seriously why does big tech deserve this free & super-private
| window into me & my ancestors lives?
|
| I don't think anyone's claiming it deserves anything?
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| I started building a typing web app to get better at touch
| typing. (Doesn't work on mobile so open on PC if curious)
|
| https://www.typefaster.app/
|
| Still very early stage and many more features (racing, user
| management, etc) coming but it's probably one of the first
| projects I've built that I've actually used
| nmca wrote:
| Nice UI! Is it open source?
| drcode wrote:
| I just moved to the bay area. I made an app that scrapes all bay
| area events from meetup, eventbrite, and a couple of other sites-
| This way you end up with around 100 events a day, way too much to
| read through.
|
| So next I take each event, send it to chatgpt3.5 and ask it to
| rate this event on around 20 parameters. Next, I take the
| latitude/longitude of each event and measure driving distance
| from my house. Then I have a master formula based on my personal
| interests and driving preferences and an app shows me the 10
| events every day most likely to be interesting to me for any day.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is brilliant and could be useful in general. Very "Jeeves"
| like.
| runeb wrote:
| This is such a great idea. A tip if you are not already aware
| (and interested in music) is to check out "The List", a Bay
| Area concert guide which has been maintained since the 90s:
| http://www.foopee.com/punk/the-list/
| nullz3r0 wrote:
| Ahh yes the list, it is shared to whoever doesn't know about
| it. It's the opposite of gatekeeping and a pleasure to see.
| alaskamiller wrote:
| Lived in the bay the whole time, did the same thing. Multiple
| sources, categorization, distances, etc. Chaining GPT for
| rating is a nifty feature add though.
| gregw134 wrote:
| What's your prompt? I've been doing something similar but I've
| found it difficult to get chatgpt to output a consistent data
| format.
| drcode wrote:
| I use the chatgpt35-turbo "system" field for instructions,
| then put the event info into the "user" field
|
| --- PROMPT ---
|
| You are given a meetup event description. For each of the
| following attributes, return the percent likelihood that the
| event involves has that attribute, in CSV format:
|
| Attributes:
|
| - Technology
|
| - Pets
|
| - Exercise
|
| Example:
|
| Technology,0.3
|
| Pets,0.1
|
| Exercise,1.0
| msikora wrote:
| Always give good examples in the prompt, preferably a few
| (2-4). Still not 100% reliable though, especially with models
| below GPT-4.
| atmosx wrote:
| Best real world example of something actually useful for
| ChatGPT I've seen yet.
| andrepd wrote:
| Not to be contrarian but from what I could experience with
| chatgpt I wouldn't want it recommending things to me.
| stavros wrote:
| I built a site to scrape events from my city and show them all
| on one page. It was _amazing_ for finding things to do, until
| Facebook shut down their events API and the site died
| overnight.
| lurker919 wrote:
| Please opensource this - or even a pastebin would work.
| aryamansharda wrote:
| Totally agree, would love to have a local instance running
| efrecon wrote:
| It's nor entirely cool, nor revolutionary, but I use this many
| times a day, so I thought that it could maybe fit in. I've built
| dew (https://github.com/efrecon/dew). It's a glorified way of
| running a docker container as yourself with the current directory
| mapped as itself inside the container. Sometimes you will also
| need some access to the XDG directories.
|
| I got tired of installations that would break others and of
| project requirements that would differ from others in tooling. So
| I use dew to run most of the CLI tools that I need and to build
| development environments that fit the (sub-)project at hand. When
| things go mad or disk space has become short, it is only a matter
| of cleaning the set of docker images to recover.
|
| You don't need dew to do all this, aliases will do in most cases.
| They would all be mostly the same and you would have to remember
| how to solve problems for each tool at hand. So dew groups those
| under a few concepts that you can turn on and off for the
| specific tool/environment to run. It hides all those ugly CLI
| parameters behind configuration variables, and finds the set of
| necessary variables for a given tool/environment under a .env
| file automatically. dew is quick enough. In most cases there is
| little difference between running "dew yourfantastictool"
| compared to running yourfantastictool installed directly on the
| host.
|
| The code has grown with time so I have used dew as an exercise in
| trying to write readable code and organise it, even though it's
| written in good old shell and has long passed the size of what
| should be written in shell...
|
| Things that perhaps are a little cool with dew: - It can rebase a
| barebone image on top of another one, so that you can use the
| tool from the barebone image and perhaps rebase on something that
| has coreutils or similar. This is remembered as a local image for
| next time. - It can inject commands to be run before becoming
| "you" in the shell, so you can install more (as root inside the
| container) before switching to a gentle user. This is remembered
| as a local image for next time. - It can use a local Dockerfile
| for complex scenarios. This can replace the two cases above. -
| You can have access to docker from inside the container, and it
| downloads the latest version of the docker client for you (by
| default: this can be turned off). - It can create files and
| directories, possibly with initial content for you before running
| the container. This is because -v xxx:xxx will always create a
| directory if xxx did not exist, and because some tools require a
| minimal configuration file to run. - It has initial support for
| podman, but I still haven't given this as much love than the rest
| so your mileage may vary...
| RowanH wrote:
| The G-Seat as part of my sim-rig. 9 AC Servos, borderline
| dangerous, beast of a simulator. The G-Seat I decided to do
| better than commercial offerings (had tried "the best" and it was
| pretty average). CNC brake folded aluminium seat with moveable
| flaps controlled by AC Servos - had to 'de tune' as they were
| literally at rib-breaking speed initially. About a year worth of
| development designed and prototype in Fusion 360, through to this
| :
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STnnqonpcAU
|
| And another vid at max rpm on the servos...
|
| https://youtu.be/eMZC0ekEXQ8?t=39
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time!
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| This is awesome. I've wanted to go down this route for a while.
| Every time, I basically give up at the point where I decide I
| want to check out https://opensfx.com and then realize I don't
| have an easy way to get a referral.
|
| I'm currently using a NLR Wheel Stand, and probably don't have
| time to build right now, but if you'd consider shooting me an
| email at chris at cjkinni.com I'd love a chance at actually
| going down the route of building one of these. No worries if
| you'd prefer not to.
|
| Great work on the whole thing!
| difflens wrote:
| I built DiffLens (https://www.difflens.com/) initially just for
| myself. It's a diff tool that uses abstract syntax trees to make
| the diff more review-able. It's free for anyone to use too. I use
| it every day to review my diffs. If anyone works on Typescript,
| Javascript, HTML and/or CSS, do check it out!
| jb1991 wrote:
| I used Arduino to build an automated RDT adapter for grinding
| espresso beans in such a manner that they don't spread all over
| your counter. It was a fun project and learned a lot about the
| chemistry of beans.
| dickfickling wrote:
| I was annoyed by having to reach for a remote or my phone when
| watching stuff on my Apple TV, so I made a MacOS Apple TV
| remote[0] that lives in the menu bar. Saves me literally seconds
| every day.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/dickfickling/honeycrisp
| stasmo wrote:
| I made a wagon with an electric motor to carry my things to the
| park and at music festivals. It has a 1000W brushless DC motor
| and a drive train for a go cart. It's controlled by an ESP32 that
| is attached to a hand throttle on the handle for the wagon. This
| ESP32 also has a temperature sensor attached to the batteries in
| the wagon to make sure they don't overheat. It controls a relay
| that powers another ESP32 that controls the Neopixels I've
| attached to the wagon using LED channels with a milky white
| diffuser.
|
| It was a very fun project and I learned a lot about electricity,
| batteries and the pitfalls of aliexpress.
| maherbeg wrote:
| If you ever get a chance, a blog post about the build,
| software, and pitfalls would be awesome. I'm thinking about
| building something like this as our toddler gets older and we
| start to do longer day outings in a wagon.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| When I lived in SF, I built a webcam with a raspberry pi which
| looked down on the street in front of my apartment and uploaded
| to a website if a parking spot was available. My friends could
| visit the page on the drive up to see me, and check if there was
| a parking spot available before they got to the house ... so they
| didn't have to circle around looking for other spots if there was
| a vacancy right in front.
| shagymoe wrote:
| I built a command line app that will execute a variety of
| different strategies for my crypto holdings. To be clear, I'm not
| a degen trader, it's more about things like DCAing and
| rebalancing.
|
| Eg. "Divide my current USD balance into 5 levels of descending
| orders where the first order is at 5% discount from the current
| price and every level after that is at a 10% discount." Set it
| and forget it or run it again with different parameters if the
| market changes.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| After getting an EV many years ago (not a Tesla) which had a
| truly terrible phone app for checking charge status, starting
| charging and turning on the heater remotely, I reverse engineered
| the API and wrote my own web-based tool to control the car. It
| worked great until 3G was disabled last year.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I wrote an app to do that with my Tesla.
|
| The Tesla app is great, but with one caveat: it won't let you
| turn on climate controls until the car has "woken up". Upon
| opening the app, this usually takes 5-15 seconds, but when I
| first got the car, sometimes took a full minute.
|
| Someone else had already reverse-engineered the Tesla API, and
| I wrote a quick app that would just let me press a button and
| it would wait for the car to wake up and turn on the climate
| controls in the background.
| Martinb14 wrote:
| In highschool a friend and I build a multiplication circuit based
| on an AMV serving as clock frequency driver, pushing binary
| numbers A and B through an addition circuit and a latch producing
| the result A*B.
|
| We freaked out when we were able to increase the frequency from
| 1Hz where we visually could see the calculation proceed via LEDs,
| to thousands of Hz and "instant" calculation.
|
| We had to physically hit the manual begin-switch with great
| force, in order to prevent the switch from not going cleanly from
| 0 to control voltage, when we operated in the KHz clock
| frequencies.
| ozarker wrote:
| Old School Runescape recently released a feature called "group
| ironman" that lets you play the game while only being able to
| trade with or assist others in your small >=5 man group. I made a
| small service that periodically scrapes the game's hiscore data
| and generate reports and metrics about the group's progress. And
| then a Discord bot to interact with the service
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Awhile ago I made an remote infrared sending tool so a raspberry
| pi can control my A/C unit
|
| https://blog.bschwind.com/2016/05/29/sending-infrared-comman...
|
| Since then I made a much slimmer, cheaper, more efficient version
| based on the ESP32 but I haven't written up much about that.
|
| I also created my own keyboard with firmware in Rust
|
| https://github.com/bschwind/key-ripper
|
| I've done a bunch of other small one-off projects too.
| Ingon wrote:
| Some years ago, I was annoyed by 1password not having any support
| for Linux and local vaults, and their vault spec was open, so I
| build a JavaFX app that allows me to read/view my passwords and
| OTP tokens.
|
| https://github.com/ingon/opvaultfx
| ktzar wrote:
| I built a website to track the generation of electricity in Spain
| since I couldn't find a single page from the official provider
| that contains all the information I wanted to look at at a
| glance. https://energy.antizone.site/ It scrapes different pieces
| of data at different intervals.
| grilledcheez wrote:
| Very cool! Would be awesome to have something like this for
| more countries (maybe the entire European network)
| rjmunro wrote:
| For the UK I use: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ It has a
| page for France: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
| xiaodai wrote:
| An automated scrapper for all my bank accounts, 401k accounts,
| and share accounts, and bitcoin values. Then displays it daily
| goolz wrote:
| When I was a bit younger I had a TI-84+ that I adored and learned
| TI-BASIC on. I wanted to create a small little RPG which I
| proceeded to do. My favorite little piece of tech I made was the
| hex-mapper for the map builder. Years later, a careless me
| allowed the memory in that calc to go. RIP.
| stpe wrote:
| I really like reading books, non-fiction, fiction, business,
| everything. But I always tended to have good reading momentum and
| then life/work happened that derailed the reading habit - and I
| forgot about it. Took months to pick up again...
|
| To keep reading top of mind I built a Chrome "newtab" extension
| to show my "Currently Reading" list, and excites me about books
| I've put as "to-read". It has worked wonders on my reading! And
| it is pretty small and polished - no tracking, no credentials,
| just bare-bones.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/currently-reading/...
| specproc wrote:
| That's smart, and there's so many very simple ways I could go
| about implementing that. Nice one, I might give that a go.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Probably boring to most people but I created a tool to nail
| exactly 40 hours a week contracting using the laziest possible
| inputs getting me out as early as possible on Friday:
|
| https://github.com/cynoclast/time
|
| Usage example:
|
| tm 8.5 9.27 8.83 8.87 9:45-1:23 1:33-
|
| 14:11
|
| 54 minutes
|
| Notice you don't have to give it AM/PM? Also don't have to give
| it any flags. It figures out what to calculate based on number of
| arguments alone. And it knows 9:45 to 1:23 is around 4 hours, not
| -8.
|
| And during the week, decimal hours for timesheets:
|
| tm 8:30-12:30 12:40-6:40
|
| 10.0
|
| I used it 5x a week during my contracting days.
| bombcar wrote:
| This reminds me of Ben Franklin's one hand watch:
| https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-meistersinger-benjamin...
| lonesword wrote:
| I wrote tweetscreenr.com to fetch articles from my twitter feed,
| and convert it into an RSS feed. The initial use case was to
| follow AI researchers on twitter and get notified whenever they
| post a link to an arxiv.org paper. Works well for me - I get all
| the news from Twitter, minus all the politicized/opinionated
| crap.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| A service that ran on a Pi in my basement and periodically checks
| Oregon's liquor site (OLCC) for bottles of bourbon I was
| interested in, and which liquor stores got new shipments. It
| would use mailchimp's api to email me when inventories changed.
|
| https://github.com/dclowd9901/olccChecker
|
| It updated itself against the remote repo and ran on a daemon.
| rozenmd wrote:
| I originally built OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) to have
| a convenient way to convince my contracting clients that their
| hosting sucks.
|
| They'd be like "Oh but I pay $5/mo for this wordpress host, it's
| fine?" and I'd send them a report saying their website was
| offline for say 10 hours that week, and to calculate how much
| being offline for 10 hours would cost them.
|
| Eventually a client asked to be setup with their own account, so
| I took the time to go full-SaaS.
| shruggedatlas wrote:
| How frequently does it ping the target site?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Wrote a RoyalRoad scraper to convert any of their series into an
| ebook.
| keyP wrote:
| I realised I have quite a few random scripts I use for myself or
| to improve my usual workflow. Recently decided to start blogging
| again and figured some of them might make interesting reading for
| others. Lately:
|
| Made my monitor an "ambient tv" by reverse engineering the
| bluelooth lights and sending them pixel colours:
| https://www.reaminated.com/reverse-engineer-led-to-convert-m...
|
| I also wanted to use ChatGPT over my own files and documents.
| Whilst my personal system is a bit more complex, created an end-
| to-end tutorial of my learnings to get started with using your
| own docs: https://www.reaminated.com/run-chatgpt-style-questions-
| over-...
| koevet wrote:
| https://github.com/luciano-fiandesio/beanborg
|
| A set of Python scripts to automate the importing of financial
| transactions into Beancount. Been using it consistently for ths
| last 3 years to manage my finances.
| tmilard wrote:
| I built a simple software that generates immersion of artist
| studios. Example (please refresh twice to visit) here:
| https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01
|
| - Why ? As a parisian living in Belleville (poorest area), where
| artistes build things, I used to visit a lot of "artists
| studios". I have always loved this places. "J'aurai voulu etre un
| artiste", in a way. I always thought that no photography or
| 360-photo would feel the Space, the immersive feeling.
| zciwor wrote:
| I'm a credit card point junkie so I always volunteer to pay the
| bill at dinner or drinks. But, if everyone doesn't get roughly
| the same thing, it becomes a massive headache. I got fed up with
| having to manually tally up what everyone ordered and then
| hunting them down individually to get paid back.
|
| Surprisingly, I haven't found a good tool that addresses this, so
| I spun up my own. I didn't want to force my friends to download
| another app just so I can get paid back so I tried to make it
| mostly SMS based.
|
| You text a picture of the receipt to my Twilio phone number. It
| triggers a serverless function that runs AWS Textract to itemize
| the receipt, then stores it in a database. Twilio responds with
| the unique URL for the receipt and I can text that out to my
| friends so they can claim their own damn items.
|
| Win win, I get the points AND I finally get paid back.
| dado3212 wrote:
| I think this exists, iPhone app called Tab?
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Wow, that's a pretty cool idea. Sounds like it has some
| potential for being productized!
| zciwor wrote:
| I am thinking about doing something with it. I put up a
| landing page to gauge interest, but I have no idea how I
| would monetize. Right now it's just burning money on AWS.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Yeah, I can imagine it would be tough to charge for this,
| especially on a recurring basis. If I was splitting a bill,
| and thought I could use this, but then it turns out I'm
| going to have to pay $5 or a monthly subscription or
| something, at that point I'd probably just split the bill
| manually.
|
| If you actually handled the payments, you could introduce a
| small upcharge that way, but even there it might be a hard
| sell, and the amount of bullshit you'd have to deal with to
| be able to scrape a buck or two off each transaction might
| mean the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But still, if you
| could scale it enough, a buck or two per transaction could
| be big money!
| zciwor wrote:
| Yeah, definitely worth looking into. I think Stripe has
| their Connect feature which might facilitate payments
| between people. Could be fun to tinker with. Thanks for
| the feedback!
| [deleted]
| zwieback wrote:
| Chicken coop auto-door opener so I don't have to get up at 4AM in
| the summer. It was just a basic Arduino system but I learned that
| large canning jars make excellent enclosures: waterproof,
| reusable, easily modified and replacable lid.
| l2silver wrote:
| I might use that on my kids...
| xputer wrote:
| Not advisable to jar your kids
| varun_ch wrote:
| A few weeks ago, I built myself a web based IDE and deployment
| solution (like Replit) for quick experiment projects. It's built
| on Docker and designed to be self-hostable - I run it on a pair
| of servers at home.
|
| It's called Dock'n'Roll https://youtu.be/nITIMrND0Z0
| elliottkember wrote:
| I made a Mac app that turns my webcam light on and off with the
| camera. It's buggy, but I use it every day and I love it
| mind1master wrote:
| I can ask siri in the car "Check parking" and it will tell me if
| there are any available spaces in the parking lot near my
| building.
|
| There is also a telegram bot that can show me the latest camera
| image with vacant places highlighted.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| During the lockdown me and my girlfriend to watch movies remotely
| synced, I wrote a service to sync VNC instances together via
| websocket. It worked via the web control panel of VLC and a
| Chrome extension was handling the websocket messages and clicking
| on the buttons. It even added some indicators to show if we both
| connected.
| aschleck wrote:
| I built a cross of React + Wiz (a fantastic frontend framework at
| Google):
| https://github.com/aschleck/trailcatalog/tree/main/js/corgi .
| Totally irresponsible and probably full of bugs, but I was so
| tired of writing business logic in the same place as my view
| logic with React and now I'm free of it!
| soren1 wrote:
| A few years ago I traded cryptocurrency extensively. I eventually
| ended up with a tax nightmare, needing to account for thousands
| of trades across several exchanges. After months of talking with
| my accountant and tax office, I eventually built
| https://github.com/dleber/capitalg
|
| It was still a lot of work aggregating trade histories from
| various exchanges into a standardized schema, but I took some
| comfort in understanding the process. I also avoided the need to
| share exchange API keys and trading data with 3rd party
| accounting tools.
|
| If you discover any bugs, please don't tell the tax authorities.
| michaeltbuss wrote:
| Every night, at 3 AM, my cat will meow and paw at the bedroom
| door like a banshee. I tried everything to get him to stop,
| including the off-the-shelf air sprayers that trigger with
| motion.
|
| Eventually, I decided to build my own. I 3D printed a case and
| trigger for an air sprayer can, created some electronics with an
| ESP32 and RF trigger, and wrote my own "motion detection" logic -
| this time with an ultrasonic sensor, which works much better in
| the dark.
|
| Now, the cat knows that a meow or paw will get him sprayed, and
| my wife and I can finally sleep!
|
| I also built an air filtration system for my 3D printer, a level
| checker for my water softener, and a custom keepsake box that
| only opens with an RFID chip that you can read more about on my
| blog: https://www.mikebuss.com/blog
| cobertos wrote:
| In all my previous houses I just cut a hole in the door. $50s
| from a big box store for the proper door and a jig saw. I think
| they even sell templates you can attach to the door to make
| them more seamless.
|
| But also I'm not trying to keep the cat out so there's that. I
| just like the door closed
| zestyping wrote:
| I solved this by letting the cat open the door from both
| sides.
|
| From one side, the cat can just push open the door. The
| closing force on the door comes from a small weight hanging
| on a string, which goes from the top corner of the door to an
| eye screw on the wall and down to the weight. The weight is
| adjusted to be just barely enough to pull the door closed, so
| the door is easy for the cat to push open. The cat walks
| through and then the door closes very gently and quietly.
|
| From the other side, the cat can pull open the door. I stuck
| a little hook-handle on the bottom corner of the door, and
| the cat learned to paw the handle and pull the door open.
| Because the door closes so slowly and gently, it's easy for
| the cat to get through.
|
| This lets the cat can come and curl up with me whenever he
| wants. It's quieter than a flappy cat door; he can come and
| go without bothering me or waking me up.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > ... meow and paw like a banshee.
|
| Was this in March by any chance?
| dangond wrote:
| We were lucky enough that our cat seems to prefer screaming
| under the door rather than pawing at the door, and stuffing a
| blanket underneath thankfully caused her to simply give up.
|
| She still attacks the door loudly when playing with her toys at
| 5 AM if we forget to confiscate them though...
| ksaj wrote:
| The first time we ever had cats, we put little bells on their
| collars so we knew where they were in the house.
|
| One night is all it took for us to remove those bells. Never
| again.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We put an AirTag on our cat's collar. Works like a charm.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| We need this.
| ajbourg wrote:
| Your blog is amazing, I would love to keep up by adding it to
| my feed reader but I'm not finding any RSS/Atom feeds.
| nydev wrote:
| Very clever. I would love to re-create this, we have the same
| issue with our cat.
| paws wrote:
| I don't know if it qualifies as the "most interesting" but as a
| travel bug I wrote a little airfare scraper that I got plenty of
| value out of.
|
| Basically it's a script that scrapes several places for flight
| deals and "mistake fares" and notifies my phone if it matches
| with my city. No searching like other flight apps, you basically
| just set it up and wait, and various places will pop up. Helps if
| you're in a hub city e.g. NYC.
|
| The phone notification was crucial because such deals sold really
| fast. In case the booking didn't work out I was usually covered
| by the 24 hour cancellation rule [0][1].
|
| I started off running it on my own server but later I learned
| IFTTT handles device notifications without paying the Apple
| Developer tax, so I migrated things there. Used it more when I
| was single but nevertheless it's helped me land some killer deals
| e.g. NYC-Dublin RT for $300, NYC-Paris RT for ~$400.
|
| Thought about making a paid app out of it but the limited seating
| and time-sensitive nature of these deals is tricky.
|
| [0] https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/notice-24hour-
| res...
|
| [1] I believe this rule, which is not so broadly known, was
| imposed on air carriers in response to certain fraudulent online
| marketing practices going on at the time.
| peacefulpond wrote:
| Great idea! Would love to give the script a spin myself..
| e4e5 wrote:
| I know that you don't want when more competition for the
| flights, but that sounds very useful!
| sjg1729 wrote:
| Been traveling a lot this year - this would've saved me a ton
| of money. If you've still got the script lying around, I'd love
| to check it out
| noahtallen wrote:
| Scott's cheap flights (going.com now) has basically implemented
| this in a nice little paid service. I got sub-$400 roundtrip
| direct from Seattle to Dublin. If you can snag even just a deal
| a year, it's well worth the small yearly price!
| maderfarker3 wrote:
| going.com is US only. Sad.
| gberger wrote:
| Jack's Flight Club is the UK equivalent.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| You still got this? I'd love to use it myself.
| johnboiles wrote:
| My wife and I lived on a Sailboat for a few years. The boat had a
| 20 year old SeaTalk bus connected to the sensors (depth, wind
| speed/direction, water speed). I bought a newer radio with an AIS
| receiver. Of course I wanted to hook it all to my computer &
| phone.
|
| So I built some hardware to interface with the SeaTalk network,
| the AIS radio (and a modern GPS)
| https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-hardware
| https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-firmware
|
| And a Python proxy running on a Pi to pass messages back and
| forth across the network. https://github.com/johnboiles/NMEAProxy
|
| And an iOS app that could drive my autopilot
| https://github.com/johnboiles/helm-ios
|
| Since my proxy spoke the NMEA standard, you could also hook up
| with other apps like iSailor and get all the sensor data + gps +
| AIS data. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wartsila-
| isailor/id398456162
|
| To my knowledge, 0 other people have ever used any of this but
| I've always been proud of it :)
| l2silver wrote:
| I'm always impressed by hardware hacks.
| danabrams wrote:
| Not for me but for my dad. He has a giant vinyl collection from
| his teenage years at his country cabin in Vermont.
|
| I hooked a raspberry pi zero up to it about 7-8 years ago, and
| streamed the audio to a custom app on an iPhone, so he could play
| a record and listen to it anywhere in the house or even outside
| while cutting wood.
|
| The hard part was making a nice vector animation of a record
| player that animated based on the state of the playback.
| keyle wrote:
| I create a bunch [1] of [2] stuff [3] pretty much non stop [4]
| and I like rolling my own, in NIH syndrome therapy.
|
| [1] https://noben.org/boomwrist/ [2] https://noben.org/boomdeck/
| [3] https://noben.org/tvmaster/ [4] ... https://noben.org
| thirdreplicator wrote:
| I made a password manager in Rust. It just encrypts and decrypts
| a file from/to ~/passwords.txt <-> ~/passwords.ryp (the encrypted
| form). Because the the file names are fixed it's easy to use.
| Just type:
|
| ryp
|
| If ~/passwords.txt is there, it will be encrypted. If
| ~/passwords.ryp is there, it will be decrypted.
|
| The cool feature is that it checks to make sure that the password
| you typed in the nth time you encrypt it is the same as the 1st
| time. This protects you from inadvertently encrypting it with a
| typo if you check/update your passwords many times.
| ta28042023 wrote:
| Have you heard of `pass`[0] before?
|
| It's not quite as simple as your solution, but otherwise works
| really well.
|
| [0] https://www.passwordstore.org/
| OhNoNotAgain_99 wrote:
| [dead]
| pawptart wrote:
| I built an emulator for HUB75 LED matrix panels.
| https://github.com/ty-porter/RGBMatrixEmulator
|
| One of the side projects I work on is a scoreboard that displays
| MLB scores. It's highly configurable -- you buy the size panel
| you want and a Raspberry Pi, install the software, and you can
| configure it to display games, standings, and news headlines for
| your favorite team or division.
|
| The problem is that the hardware is purchased by the end user, so
| it can come in many different sizes. I think we officially
| support 6 or 7 sizes right now, and each panel can be a chunk of
| change if you get a nice one. If we wanted to test on every
| device that means I need to shell out 50 bucks x 7 sizes, plus
| Raspberry Pi and wiring adapter, so not insignificant for a hobby
| project. Instead, I wrote a drop-in replacement emulator that
| makes it super simple to emulate any size panel across a variety
| of display types.
|
| The most advanced display adapter spins up a minimal webserver
| and serves emulated images over a websocket, meaning you can
| display your panel over the network on pretty much any device
| with a web browser.
|
| I write about it quite a bit, if further interested:
| https://blog.ty-porter.dev/categories.html#emulation-ref
| boricj wrote:
| I've modified Ghidra in order to unlink pieces of an executable
| back into relocatable object files.
|
| To keep things simple, source code files are compiled into object
| files which are linked into an executable. Object files have
| sections (named array of bytes), symbols (either defined as an
| offset within a section or undefined) and relocations (a request
| to patch up an offset within a section with the final address of
| a symbol) while executable files only have sections. The linker
| takes all the object files, lays out the sections in memory,
| fixes up the relocation and writes out an executable file without
| the symbols or relocations.
|
| With Ghidra I can reverse-engineer an executable and recreate
| symbols, data types and references between symbols. Then, with my
| modifications I can recreate relocations with that information
| and, once a range of addresses has been fully processed, I can
| select it and export it as a relocatable ELF object file.
|
| Why? This allows me to extract parts of an executable as object
| files and reuse these by linking them my own source code ; I
| don't need to fully-reverse engineer these extracted parts, I
| just have to basically identify every relocation there was
| originally in that part. I can also divide and conquer my way to
| decompiling an executable by splitting an executable into
| multiple object files and recreate its source code one object
| file at a time, like the Ship of Theseus.
|
| So far it works with what I've tested it with and I've been
| meaning to write a series of articles to explain that process in
| detail, but writing quality technical articles with illustrations
| on a topic this esoteric is very hard. - My
| Ghidra fork: https://github.com/boricj/ghidra/tree/feature/elfrel
| ocatebleobjectexporter - My initial prototype in Jython
| (has a readme): https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-unlinker
|
| Note: this works only with 32-bit MIPS, little endian,
| statically-linked executables. It can be made to work with other
| architectures by writing a relocation synthesizer for it, but so
| far I only care about decompiling PlayStation 1 games.
| j-krieger wrote:
| Amazing. Do you have any intention of opening a merge request
| to get this into Ghidra? Or maybe in the way of a plugin?
| boricj wrote:
| I tried to upstream some of my refactorings/modifications
| needed to support this, but it was rejected by upstream [1].
| I don't blame the Ghidra project for this decision ; my
| modifications are fairly intrusive (modifying the relocation
| table after the initial load, extensive refactoring of the
| ELF support code...) and my workflow is essentially unproved
| in public.
|
| By that I mean I have no documentation, no series of
| technical articles describing this process and no public,
| non-trivial project to demonstrate it in real life. I do have
| a currently private decompilation project that uses this
| successfully [2], but it's not currently public and it's
| nowhere near finished.
|
| Also, I only wrote a relocation synthesizer for statically-
| linked, 32-bit, little endian MIPS ELF. That's a fairly
| obscure platform, I'd expect most people care about
| mainstream instruction sets like x86_64 or ARM64.
|
| If you can suggest a forum where people would be interested
| in this, I can drop a message there and answer more in-depth
| questions if you want. So far I've worked on this all on my
| own and I'm kinda out of the loop from the rest of the
| reverse-engineering community.
|
| [1] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/pull/501
| 0#i...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35739949
| mkj wrote:
| That might make LGPL static linking more legally feasible for a
| lot of programs too!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Absolutely incredible.
| boricj wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| If you want to take a look at the source code, here are some
| pointers: - The relocation synthesizer for
| MIPS: https://github.com/boricj/ghidra/blob/feature/elfreloca
| tebleobjectexporter/Ghidra/Processors/MIPS/src/main/java/ghid
| ra/app/delinker/MipsElfRelocationTableSynthesizer.java
| - The Ghidra analyzer that leverages this synthesizer: https:
| //github.com/boricj/ghidra/blob/feature/elfrelocatebleobjecte
| xporter/Ghidra/Features/Delinker/src/main/java/ghidra/app/ana
| lyzers/RelocationTableSynthesizerAnalyzer.java - The
| classes that implement the ELF object exporter: https://githu
| b.com/boricj/ghidra/tree/feature/elfrelocatebleobjectexporter
| /Ghidra/Features/Base/src/main/java/ghidra/app/util/exporter/
| elf - The Ghidra exporter for ELF object files: https:/
| /github.com/boricj/ghidra/blob/feature/elfrelocatebleobjectex
| porter/Ghidra/Features/Base/src/main/java/ghidra/app/util/exp
| orter/ElfRelocatableObjectExporter.java
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Thank you! I'm fascinated by what must have led you to
| develop this knowledge.
| boricj wrote:
| I got inspired by various decompilation projects of old
| video games and decided to do one myself. I specifically
| chose "Tenchu: Stealth Assassins", a game for the
| PlayStation.
|
| I haven't asked around, but I assumed nobody else out
| there had both the skills for reverse-engineering video
| games in general and motivation to work on this game in
| particular. I started reverse-engineering the game with
| Ghidra and quickly realized that "this game's code is
| kind of held together with glue and duct tape" (quoting a
| speedrunner of this game). It's quite the understatement:
| the code's a complete tangled mess.
|
| I realized that with my current tooling and knowledge
| there was no way I could hope to complete this
| decompilation project by myself. I wanted to divide and
| conquer the problem into smaller, reasonably-sized
| pieces, but I just have one big executable and I can't
| just split it into pieces... or can I?
|
| So I tried to innovate my way out of this mess.
| Ironically, perfecting the unlinking process and making
| it usable in practice has taken a long time, but it was
| intellectually rewarding and progress was tangible, so I
| did not lose motivation along the way.
|
| As for the reverse-engineering of the game itself, my
| biggest achievement so far is managing to unlink the
| archive code from the game into a relocatable object file
| and writing an utility that leverages it to extract files
| from the game data archive. That sounds complicated, but
| with my tooling I just need to identify and annotate
| about 30 functions and global variables used in that part
| of the program to be able to export it, independently of
| the rest of the program. Then it's just a matter of
| writing some C glue code, compiling it to a Linux MIPS
| program and using QEMU user mode emulation to run the
| utility, without ever having rewritten that archive code
| in C or figuring out how it actually works.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > As for the reverse-engineering of the game itself, my
| biggest achievement so far is managing to unlink the
| archive code from the game into a relocatable object file
| and writing an utility that leverages it to extract files
| from the game data archive. That sounds complicated, but
| with my tooling I just need to identify and annotate
| about 30 functions and global variables used in that part
| of the program to be able to export it, independently of
| the rest of the program. Then it's just a matter of
| writing some C glue code, compiling it to a Linux MIPS
| program and using QEMU user mode emulation to run the
| utility, without ever having rewritten that archive code
| in C or figuring out how it actually works.
|
| I figured you'd have to be exceptionally proud of this. I
| don't find this specific, yet extremely useful skill, to
| be common among reverse engineers.
|
| Though you'd wish it was!
| penjelly wrote:
| tool used to download instagram images to a google photo album
| for use with things like chromecast screensaver
| https://github.com/mcpengelly/instagram-saved-to-google-phot...
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is
| turning on the radio and TV and changing channels.
|
| She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and
| earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter
| and created her own private radio station. She tells me what
| songs she likes and I create different playlists that get
| broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of
| radio, and there is nothing in there she doesn't like.
|
| The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours
| (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have
| also started coming in :)
|
| EDIT: I wanted to add that _I_ am the UI ... she doesn 't get to
| choose the playlist. To make my life easier, I just created
| different playlists for different times of the day ...
| calm/spiritual/slower numbers in the early and late hours, peppy
| during the late morning and evening etc.
| lapser wrote:
| > The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her
| neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their
| requests have also started coming in :)
|
| Sounds like you're about to start a Radio station for the
| nation.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Or it'll be enough only for local area. We don't need
| everything to be nation-scale, local-community activities
| need to be promoted more.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Based on how you're asking I assuming that "Radio station for
| the nation" is a quote from a movie or something, but
| searching for it reveals surprisingly little (and is
| surprisingly random - Google / Bing clearly has _no_ idea
| what I'm looking for :) )
|
| Is this a quote / reference to something? If so, could you
| let us all in on what it's referring to?
| burritofanatic wrote:
| All I could think of was the song Radio, Radio. See the
| line about cleaning up the nation.
|
| https://genius.com/Elvis-costello-radio-radio-lyrics
| noman-land wrote:
| Absolutely love this idea. Great work.
| neodypsis wrote:
| Very cool. Do you connect it to Spotify or to an MP3
| collection?
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| From my MP3 collection. I buy the songs or albums she likes
| and broadcast them. For some that are not on sale anywhere, I
| scrape them off youtube, but usually send a note to that
| channel for original sources where I can pay for it.
| neodypsis wrote:
| Cool! I asked because there are many niche playlists on
| Spotify you can find for oldies, for example some very
| specific for the 60s, 50s, 40s, etc. Perhaps it could help
| her discover similar, but new, music.
| MandieD wrote:
| This is inspirational for my gaggle of non-tech, super-senior
| relatives. Thanks so much for sharing.
| phkahler wrote:
| I love how this requires ZERO learning effort on her part, she
| simply has a personalized ratio station rather than whatever
| someone else puts on.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| What transmitter did you use?
| john_shafthair wrote:
| One can go on Amazon and order himself a high powered FM
| transmitter direct from China. Stick an antenna in the attic
| and you'll be heard for miles. If you don't gaf about
| spurious emissions or laws or anything like that you too can
| be Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume. The fines for this
| in the US can be pretty severe but Amazon is happy to sell
| you the rope to hang yourself with free shipping.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| I forget. But just search for "kit FM transmitter". I'd fully
| intended to build a "proper" transmitter, and was keenly
| disappointed that you could just buy a cheap single-chip
| board.
|
| Nowadays you don't even need that. You can turn the RPi
| itself into an FM transmitter. Search "how to FM broadcast on
| raspberry pi"
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| You do still need that. The broadcast from gpio thing is
| very low quality and produces square waves which interfere
| with everything
| hcrean wrote:
| Pico caps and appropriate impedance miss-match can be
| used to round-off square waves.
|
| But yes, if you look at high-speed Pi GPIO with a Rigol
| it looks more like an EKG readout than the thing you
| might see on a logic analyser. Smoothing it enough to
| feed a line-amp is very lossy.
| megous wrote:
| You might want to improve your probing technique, then.
| :)
|
| GPIO's usually looks quite squarey if you don't introduce
| parasitic reactances into the circuit with your test
| setup.
| hcrean wrote:
| Pi for audio frequencies is lovely and square, Pi at
| radio frequencies has distinct rise and fall and "just
| taking a moment to think about it" segments.
|
| A spectrum analyser has probes!?!? This might be where I
| am going wrong... But the bench scope is largely in
| agreement about the distinct phases of a cycle at RF
| freq.
| ale42 wrote:
| > You can turn the RPi itself into an FM transmitter.
|
| Never tried it, but given the way it works, you definitely
| need some output filtering unless you accept to pollute all
| harmonics of your channel (which might be licensed spectrum
| too, and interfere with services you don't want to
| interfere with in the first point)
| emaginniss wrote:
| You should start selling ad time
| umvi wrote:
| Did you have to apply for some kind of permit to do that? Or is
| it low power enough that FCC doesn't care?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| FWIW there are many transmitters similar to what they built
| that enable playing MP3 players, phones and other things on
| old radios [1]. I do not remember what the power limit is but
| no permit is required. They can operate throughout the entire
| FM broadcast spectrum. If they are broadcasting _good_ music
| in an elderly community I doubt anyone will complain.
|
| [1] - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L3WX26S/
| froglets wrote:
| Several homes in my city put up holiday lights that are
| synced to music and transmitted over FM. The signal only
| works if you're parked near the house.
| nXqd wrote:
| wow, I really enjoy the idea that basically, she just uses what
| works for her with better content. Really nice work
| zimpenfish wrote:
| For the true feeling of radio, you might throw some episodes of
| The Big Broadcast on there as well - I believe archive.org has
| some but they're easily findable elsewhere. Donate some money
| to WFUV[1] or buy some of the collections[2] if you just want
| the music.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WFUV
|
| [2]
| https://rivermontrecords.com/search?type=product&q=big+broad...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Like this site: https://oldtime.radio
| mysterydip wrote:
| Thanks for the link! I've enjoyed radio classics on
| satellite radio, so having an on-demand for specific genres
| is a welcome option.
| thelandofrandom wrote:
| [dead]
| martinjacobd wrote:
| This made my day, thank you for sharing. Such a sweet thing to
| do.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| What app do you use to make the playlists? You could use the
| Spotify api for this
| mihaaly wrote:
| : ))
| jay3ss wrote:
| I love it. Not only is this wholesome, it's pretty cool too
| davchana wrote:
| Would love to see a blog about this setup. I, not old, always
| want to dump much of my music & simply want to listen whatever
| is next (& miss it if I don't listen) just like radio.
| ecliptik wrote:
| Have you seen Icecast [1]? You create playlists of local
| music, then play them with something like mpd. Icecast then
| streams them out and clients like VLC, xmms2, and even older
| versions of Winamp can stream it.
|
| I set this up for all my music in shuffle mode for my own
| radio-like always on streaming service via Tailscale.
|
| 1. https://icecast.org/faq/
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I've wanted to try something like this with a Pi or
| something else running Linux. Is mpd a good choice for that
| scenario? Does it support being able to use custom events
| eg a button on the gpio for play/pause?
| nsteel wrote:
| mpd is a great choice, there are lots of things built
| around it. Essentially, you'd have the GPIOs trigger mpc
| commands. mpc talks MPD over the network back to the mpd
| server, so you could have physical controls all around
| the place.
|
| There are lots of examples online of people doing this
| sort of thing. There's a simple example at
| https://github.com/pablodo/mpd_gpio/blob/master/main.py
|
| Even a chapter of a book about it: https://link.springer.
| com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-2406-9_... (I just found
| this, no idea if it's any good).
|
| And also an IR version at https://www.ziemski.net/rcmpd/
| tipsysquid wrote:
| I love this for her and for me. Best gift you can give to a
| music lover
| quaintdev wrote:
| OP seems from India and AFAIK its illegal to transmit on FM
| frequencies without a license. I understand it might be low
| powered but theres a chance of Police coming knocking on the
| door. Whats worse is it might interfere with emergency
| services. There is a reason we have spoctrum licences.
| _thisdot wrote:
| Worth noting that there already exists a product in the
| Indian market by a big music label that addresses this exact
| issue. I've bought my grandfather one of those and he's very
| happy with it!
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| Do you mean the saregama Caravaan? If so, I bought her one
| of those and it just didn't cut the mustard.
|
| The built-in collection either didn't have songs that she
| liked (from the '40s), or they weren't clustered together,
| or were mixed up with other songs.
|
| I could load a flash disk with her playlist to plug into
| that player, but it wouldn't know what to play at what time
| (calm songs in the early and late hours, peppier numbers on
| other days, festival specific numbers on some days). This
| was a big deal. I can even change the playlist from
| elsewhere (a script automatically mirrors the playlist that
| I maintain on a server)
|
| Bluetooth streaming is possible with the device, but not an
| option for my MIL ... that would require her to learn to
| use a cellphone.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Killjoy.
| exitb wrote:
| It is _Hacker News_ after all. And that 's probably like
| jaywalking of RF violations. I'd be more afraid of the
| copyright people.
| acatton wrote:
| Where I live, this is absolutely not the jaywalking of RF
| violations. In Germany, if it is proven that your signal
| was potentially interfering with emergency services, you
| will be liable for any damage to victims in civil courts.
| And if somebody dies in your area because the emergency
| services couldn't get there on time, you will be criminally
| charged for "negligent manslaughter."
|
| I wouldn't play at all with non-approved RF frequencies
| personally.
| detaro wrote:
| In Germany (like afaik all the EU), you can also freely
| buy and use small low-power FM transmitters for exactly
| the use case of sending your own music to radios...
| mometsi wrote:
| What would happen if you delayed an ambulance responding
| to an emergency by jaywalking in front of it? Could you
| be charged if someone died as a result?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| If a low power FM transmitter on commercial frequencies
| can interfere with your emergency services, you may have
| bigger problems. IIRC they have their own specific
| frequencies.
| 6510 wrote:
| like the Indians said, you want to buy the sky too?
| Glemotooo wrote:
| "RF violations"
|
| In germany its also legal to use plenty of bands in the
| RF Spectrcum with up to 750Watts (and potential more).
|
| We are also allowed to do CB Funk in Channels 1-40
| without anything and up to 80/85 (forgot details) when
| you register with Germany.
|
| So your statement reads more like you are not allowed to
| do anything in germany. Its hard to believe to disturb
| stable systems just because someone is doing a little bit
| of FM on some known frequencies.
| moooo99 wrote:
| It literally took a single google search to find out that
| you're wrong.
|
| FM transmitting for private use is completely legal for
| UKW frequencies between 87.5 and 105 MHz and transmission
| powers lower than 50nW [1]. You can buy perfectly FM
| transmitters for your car, etch
|
| [1] (German) https://www.autozeitung.de/fm-transmitter-
| bluetooth-nachrues...
| hasseldahoff wrote:
| [flagged]
| sigg3 wrote:
| No need to be rude.
|
| As someone who's worked in telecom for a number of years,
| the fines for broadcasting I've seen issued to
| individuals are insane. Not just radio but wireless
| amplification too. Different European country though.
|
| Always check the legislation in the country of operation.
| Emergency frequencies are held sacred by the powers that
| be.
| hasseldahoff wrote:
| [dead]
| Mistletoe wrote:
| If we ever have a world apocalypse and I'm alone, I know I
| can at least conjure one companion by suggesting I would use
| spectrum without a license and a ham enthusiast will appear.
| implements wrote:
| <Dusts off Ham Licence> Anyone can use amateur frequencies
| in a genuine "no other communication options available"
| emergency, if I remember the regulations correctly.
|
| Edit: "SS 97.403 Safety of life and protection of property.
| No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur
| station of any means of radio communication at its disposal
| to provide essential communication needs in connection with
| the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection
| of property when normal communication systems are not
| available."
| getwiththeprog wrote:
| Post a reference to the legislation or its not real
| cptaj wrote:
| Its not that limited. Check out fm transmitters on amazon.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fm+transmitter&ref=nb_sb_noss
|
| This is what he means, not some bigger pirate radio situation
| gilbetron wrote:
| Illegal in India maybe. In the US: "In the United States,
| Part 15 of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission rules
| specifies that no license is needed if range of the
| transmitter does not exceed 200 feet (61 meters), although
| the Part 15 rules specify that the field strength should not
| exceed 250 uV/m (48db) at 3 meters"
|
| I haven't found the exact law in India, but looks like maybe
| it's legal for personal usage of FM provided power of
| transmitter is under 500 mW?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, technically it is illegal. But I've seen all kinds of
| gizmos that would inject a signal into the FM band to allow
| the use of car stereos that didn't have an 'aux' input. At
| those power levels the FCC isn't going to be bothered unless
| someone lodges a complaint, and even then they'll have a hard
| time finding the source unless they're practically standing
| on top of it. OP may want to turn down the radiated power
| until it _just_ works for his MIL but no longer for the
| neighbors.
| mdip wrote:
| > Yes, *technically* it is illegal.
|
| Oh how many phrases start "Yes, _technically_ " in my life.
|
| The law is an interesting beast. I know nothing about the
| law in India as it relates to FM band transmitters but I
| _suspect_ that the law predates the common availability of
| adapters that one might use in ones car to add an input to
| a stereo that lacks such a _highly technical circular hole
| for such purposes_ [0]. Once these devices gained wide
| adoption due to both their utility and -- more generally --
| the fact that operating one is _usually_ so benign that
| they can be difficult to _discover_ let alone actually
| cause enough interference to warrant them to be seized.
|
| The _intention_ of the law was to prevent someone from
| operating a pirate radio station /give exclusivity to a
| single license-holder for that frequency. Since these
| devices don't violate the spirit of the law, the governing
| body finds it easier to carve out an informal exemption
| rather than explicitly write one in. It can also be tricky
| to correct a law that has a very _valid_ reason for
| existing but may have cases where total enforcement isn 't
| realistic[1].
|
| The law may not have caught up to the reality on the ground
| and the legislatures answer to it is "enforce it when the
| interference is enough that someone notices." One might
| imagine a world where something akin to TV Detector-like
| Vans[2] drape the country-side in a dragnet to catch all of
| those pirate FM-input-devices but that usually only happens
| if there's a substantial amount of tax revenue to be gained
| ... to pay for the vans.
|
| [0] I had one of these in the 90s (in the US, where it's
| not illegal if designed correctly) that connected my
| Discman to my ridiculously sad factory radio which lacked
| both external input and even a cassette deck.
|
| [1] I do very little with regard to radio communication (if
| that isn't obvious) but I'd imagine most lawmakers do even
| less, so now you have to bring in experts to figure out
| "what's an acceptable amount of interference in this
| specific use case" and "how should a device like this be
| restricted." Not that government isn't famous for wildly
| wasting money or anything but I'd imagine the thinking is
| that it's not worth the effort to correct.
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
| mindcrime wrote:
| _[0] I had one of these in the 90s (in the US, where it
| 's not illegal if designed correctly) that connected my
| Discman to my ridiculously sad factory radio which lacked
| both external input and even a cassette deck._
|
| Heh. I drive a 2002 Chevy Suburban (don't laugh, I have a
| strong aversion to spending money on new vehicles) and it
| lacks an AUX input, so to this day I use one of those
| low-power FM transmitter adapters to pipe my phone's
| audio output to the vehicle stereo. They are amazingly
| handy little gadgets.
| jonatron wrote:
| When I had a cassette deck in my car, I added an AUX
| input by soldering a cable to a chip on the PCB, and
| running it out through the cassette slot.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| That's a product they sell. It looks like an audio
| cassette with an aux cord coming out of it. I used one
| for years in my old grand Marquis.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That just wires the speaker output of the device to a set
| of coils sitting right in front of the tape playback
| head. GP did an end run around that by wiring straight
| into the trace in between the head pre-amp and the main
| amp.
| jeswin wrote:
| But quaintdev is right in that Indian Police for some
| reason takes this somewhat seriously. For highway patrol, I
| suspect it's boredom and this gives them something to
| chase. I remember in the late 90s when I was in college,
| the police showed up a couple of times when students were
| transmitting from one of the hostels. They'd let it go, but
| they did show up.
| jacquesm wrote:
| At what levels of power was this?
|
| I suspect the OPs transmitter is hard to detect even at
| close (< 100 meters > 30 meters) range. Anything more
| powerful and you would definitely attract attention.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Technically, it's perfectly legal under FCC regulations.
|
| https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/low-power-radio-general-
| info...
|
| Looks like India doesn't permit it, but is looking at doing
| so (at least, for some purposes):
|
| https://trai.gov.in/notifications/press-release/trai-
| release...
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| I know. It is illegal in most parts of the world. I'm taking
| over a commercial FM channel that my MIL won't listen to, and
| the transmitter has about a 20m radius.
|
| If the police come, I'll use the Constanza "Was that wrong?"
| defence.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RvNS7JfcMM
| jacquesm wrote:
| I hope they don't know how to use Google and if they do
| that that is a pseudonym you're posting under here or you
| might be in bigger trouble than you started with ;)
|
| Anyway, cool to see you hack this, maybe try to tweak the
| power levels a bit so the neighbors don't have a reason to
| talk about it.
| ktzar wrote:
| The FCC allows personal FM transmitters to operate with a
| maximum power output of 250 microvolts per meter at a
| distance of 3 meters. Other countries are more
| permissive, so this is not a problem. As long as you
| don't interfere with anyone and emit in a band that's not
| used in the area, it's perfectly fine.
| vonseel wrote:
| I was curious what kind of range that might have, so I
| put what you said into chatgpt and asked what the range
| of a typical car or home stereo would be, and it gave me
| this (not sure if it's correct). FWIW, much less than 20
| miles, haha.
|
| -- The maximum power output of a personal FM transmitter
| allowed by the FCC is 250 microvolts per meter at a
| distance of 3 meters. The range of the transmitter
| depends on various factors such as terrain, obstructions,
| and interference.
|
| Assuming ideal conditions, such as no obstructions or
| interference, the range of the transmitter can be
| calculated using the inverse square law. This law states
| that the strength of a signal decreases with the square
| of the distance from the source.
|
| At a distance of 3 meters, the signal strength would be
| 250 microvolts per meter. At a distance of 6 meters, the
| signal strength would be 62.5 microvolts per meter
| (250/4). At a distance of 9 meters, the signal strength
| would be 27.8 microvolts per meter (250/9).
|
| Typical car and household stereos have a sensitivity of
| about 2 microvolts per meter. Using this sensitivity
| value, we can calculate the range of the transmitter for
| these devices.
|
| For a car stereo, the transmitter would have a range of
| about 26 meters (square root of 250/2). For a household
| stereo, the transmitter would have a range of about 63
| meters (square root of 250/0.5).
|
| However, in reality, the actual range of the transmitter
| may be shorter due to various factors such as
| interference and obstructions.
| Nition wrote:
| > FWIW, much less than 20 miles
|
| For the record I'm sure OP meant his has a range of 20
| metres
| casmaxima wrote:
| sbcl: (* (sqrt (/ 250 2)) 3) => 33.54 meters, the factor
| that amplifies distance is the square root of the factor
| of signal strength.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Makes sense. I've seen Bluetooth fm dongles for cars to
| this effect. The dongle connects to your phone on
| Bluetooth and the old car can listen to your Spotify via
| the radio.
| Cypher wrote:
| I'll tell them it was me to protect Spartacus.
| 300bps wrote:
| I've had much better luck with 100% honesty. Just say you
| set up a 20m transmitter to improve the life of a 93 year
| old woman.
|
| I bought a house in my very early 20s. Roommates of mine
| finished the third floor with no permits. Went to sell the
| house ten years later and the location it was in required a
| U&O inspection. My realtor told me to lie, apply for a
| permit and pretend I just did the work.
|
| Instead I called the local building inspector and said,
| "Hello my name is xxx and I'm calling to confess." He
| cracked up laughing, came to the house immediately to look
| at everything and told me I was fine.
| mdip wrote:
| ... I've always been _amazed_ how often "Was that wrong?"
| works.
|
| I guess I shouldn't be. Even letting them know you were
| fully aware you were breaking the law, most people would
| see its intended purpose -- to bring a little peace and
| comfort to a very old woman -- and have their own
| compassion kick in.
|
| YMMV but I'm guessing you'd hear something along the lines
| of "Oh,... well,... _(shuffles feet)_ ... just turn it off,
| then ". Many of us have elderly people in our lives we wish
| we could provide some comfort to and most of us know we're
| headed there (if we're lucky to live that long). You know,
| assuming your _20m radius FM transmitter_ didn 't, say,
| cause some cataclysmic event/knock emergency services
| offline for several city blocks, etc.
|
| Put another way, while some police actually _will_ pull you
| over and write you a ticket for going a couple of miles
| (km) per hour over the speed limit, most won 't waste the
| brain power/physical energy/thermal paper to bother
| enforcing it.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| Well put. Exactly my thoughts. And given my MIL's
| attitude towards any visitor, the cops will be plied with
| food and chai till they burst. They will forget what they
| came for :)
| eastern wrote:
| Yeah no one will bother with such a low-powered device. I
| used an in-car bluetooth-to-FM tranmitter bought from
| Amazon India for years. They've been sold openly since
| forever. Like this one: https://www.amazon.in/Portronics-
| AUTO-10-Bluetooth-Car/dp/B0...
| rozab wrote:
| I love these things, it's so simple and it's often a
| better UX than any car bluetooth provides. You also used
| to be able to buy aux adapters that went in your cassette
| deck!
|
| edit: Halfords still stocks these!
| https://www.halfords.com/technology/mobile-phone-
| accessories...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, I must have pulled up along side you the other
| day.
|
| Just kidding, I'm in the U.S. But more than a few times I
| have suddenly got Mexican musical content on my radio in
| the car when passing close to another car.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I have a spare rpi lying around. I know what i want to do with
| it now...
| sandreas wrote:
| Cool.
|
| For the others: You don't even need a transmitter to do some
| experiments, you can use just one IO Pin for this:
|
| https://nerdiy.de/en/raspberrypi-send-fm-signals-by-gpio-pin...
|
| Furthermore, you can use something like https://volumio.com/en/
| build an RFID Box
| https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/#products-to-build-t...
| (my daughter used this when she was 2 years old)
| runjake wrote:
| Any clue how powerful the "one IO pin" approach is compared
| to a dedicated FM transmitter?
| svnt wrote:
| A standard 3.3V GPIO can typically push something like 30
| to 60 mW. You won't get all of that as transmitted signal
| -- it will depend on how well your random antenna wire
| matches the impedance of the gpio and the frequency. I'm
| really not sure the audio quality is going to be anything
| more than just intelligible, but I'd guess you'd get at
| least 10 mW or so of useful power, which means it should
| generally work within a small house.
| sandreas wrote:
| No, I'm using this in my car just for a very short range (<
| 200mm)
| dicknuckle wrote:
| I am absolutely LOVING Volumio. It's running in a VM in my
| garage computer that does various other things. At the time,
| Volumio didn't have a clean way to do this so I just hacked
| away until it booted and played music.
|
| A little USB sound card is passed through to the VM and it's
| been rock solid for about 2 years now. I use it exclusively
| as a Spotify chromecast type thing that cost me about $3.50
| in parts.
| myself248 wrote:
| You should know this is heinously irresponsible and very
| illegal unless you apply proper filtering. Bashing the GPIO
| pin adds a ton of harmonics that fall outside the broadcast
| band, up into aircraft and military and who-knows-what other
| frequencies.
|
| The README goes over this, but if people keep blindly
| ignoring it, expect regulators to figure out a way to make
| our lives a lot less fun.
| nsteel wrote:
| Phoniebox is a great project, based on mpd and Mopidy.
| Hopefully Spotify playback will be fully supported again
| soon.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| _Earth Angel, will you be mine..._
|
| How about a speech synthesis DJ, "that was Foo McBar from
| 19XX"?
| wnolens wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I aspire to such elegant projects.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I love this, thx for sharing :)
| dejobaan wrote:
| About yen years ago, I built a site that scraped Steam and spat
| out the ~100 most recently-released games in a skimmable format:
| http://www.whatsonsteam.com
|
| There's a lot of weirdness that launches each day, but also lots
| of interesting-looking stuff.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My current favorite: I often go camping deep in the backwoods
| with friends, far from any sort of cell service. So I built a
| LoRa radio system that allows us to text each other, physically
| locate each other, etc. when we go off and do our own things. The
| system consists of small radio units that are carried, and a
| larger (but still backpackable) base unit that gets set up in
| camp.
|
| They run as a mesh network, so you don't have to be in range of
| the base unit for it to work.
|
| Regular radios don't work well for this use case because the
| terrain is very mountainous.
|
| Currently looking into making one that can be attached to a dog
| collar to allow for geolocating the animal.
| lenova wrote:
| This is very cool, and something I could see myself setting up
| for my friends while camping as well. Are you able to share
| more details about your setup? Thanks!
| JohnFen wrote:
| Sure. The radios are inexpensive ESP32 LoRa dev boards (with
| good antennae and 3D printed enclosures), and the software is
| a modified version of Meshtastic. This is the article that
| inspired me -- I think that will lead you to more detail
| about what I did than I can give here.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/lora-mesh-network-with-
| off-t...
|
| These perform better than the Baofeng radios we used before,
| but the terrain is still a limiting factor.
| dtertman wrote:
| I hate the weather where I live (Chicagoland), so I spent a week
| a couple years ago downloading weather data from WUnderground and
| geo data from a bunch of places and turning it into a reverse
| weather index - instead of searching by place, you'd search by
| weather.
|
| I found the best weather for me was in Antofagasta, Chile, but I
| never did anything with this knowledge :)
|
| Unfortunately it was all built on an OpenShift gear on the free
| tier, so it's dead now.
| vinc wrote:
| Lots of things over the last decade or two. I can count almost
| one hundred repos on GitHub, but most of them are not very
| popular with other people, my projects seem to only scratch my
| own itches..
|
| I have my own lunisolar calendar and decimal time (with centidays
| and dimidays) so I produced a lot of code for that on various
| devices. I also wrote two chess engines and a hobby operating
| system.
|
| And countless web apps, like one to read the daily/monthly top of
| HN and Reddit, another to host my pictures (on a cool domain
| hack), one to manage the batch jobs on my chess engine cluster in
| a rack at home that helps keeping the house warm in winter, and
| lately my own frontend to Bing API because I was growing
| dissatisfied with DuckDuckGo.
| generalizations wrote:
| I like thinking out loud, but don't like having to listen to
| voice memos. So I created a syncthing folder that is synced
| between my phones and my home server, and created an iphone
| shortcut that records voice memos and saves them into that folder
| (and then opens the iphone syncthing app so that it'll do the
| sync). I have a cronjob on the server that looks for new audio
| files in that syncthing folder and transcribes them with whisper,
| formats them into a nice looking pdf, and sends them to the
| printer. So now I can be anywhere, record a voice memo, and come
| home to find it sitting in my printer.
| mthoms wrote:
| This is very practical, I like it. I can't stand listening to
| my own voice memos.
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| This started out as a password mangager. It evolved into a graph
| database _coff_ after reading Linked - How Everything is
| Connected to Everything Else
|
| https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Interact/History.aspx
|
| Still under development...
| martinrue wrote:
| I made a text-only social network for the Gemini network and it
| recently surpassed 1k users: https://martinrue.com/station
| yboris wrote:
| _Simplest File Renamer_ - https://www.yboris.dev/renamer &
| https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer
|
| I wanted to be able to quickly rename files with my text editor
| (using keyboard commands), so this lets me do it. Plus I share
| the app online for free.
|
| _Video Hub App_ - https://videohubapp.com/ &
| https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
|
| I started it just for myself, but it ended up so good I spent
| several more years improving it as people kept buying it (up to
| almost 5,000 purchases since I started).
|
| Also wrote a couple of dev tools for myself (sharing via NPM too)
| - https://www.yboris.dev/
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| I built a wifi controlled led strip controller with an ESP8266. I
| had it connected to an Android sleep tracking app (sleep as
| android), so that at some point I had the lights in my room go
| from 0 to 2500 lumens smoothly (following a log curve so that
| it's perceptually linear) over 5min or so in the morning at the
| optimal detected time for my sleep cycle. It was pretty awesome.
| I scrapped the entire thing since I last changed appartement
| though...
| dpbig wrote:
| I used to spend a ton of time on reddit but, lately, I've been
| struggling to find content I enjoy there. So, I built a little
| RSS aggregator. It's hosted at https://www.trybsync.com/
| SirMaster wrote:
| Eh, at the moment a universal remote control app for my home
| theater. I expanded it somewhat for many other devices than I
| need, for friends and people on the AVSForums who requested
| things.
|
| https://github.com/nicko88/HTWebRemote
|
| It's not all that impressive per say, but a number of people seem
| to really like it.
|
| Also an app to add a "wind" effect to a home theater as well.
|
| https://github.com/nicko88/HTFanControl
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Nice setup! I was about to start ordering parts to create some
| hacky IR sensor for mine, that it before I read about HDMI-CEC.
| bitcodavid wrote:
| This hearkens back to the analog days, but I can't drive without
| music. My last car had a crappy stereo. I happened to have a
| project box lying around so I built a 12-watt, 4-channel
| amplifier. The best part is that I also had these beautiful old
| backlit analog VU meters lying around. I only had two, but it
| made the thing look totally awesome.
| stevelacy wrote:
| RGB room lights controlled via Arduino with a companion mobile
| app for changing colors/modes. Used zeroconf for finding the
| device on the network.
| l2silver wrote:
| So you're the party apartment!
| rft wrote:
| I hooked up my old (~25y) stereo to an RPi via AUX in. The RPi
| has MPD and a pulseaudio sink to play audio. And it can be
| controlled via Home Assistant.
|
| But the feature I like most is that it turns on/off the stereo
| via an infrared LED. It detects sound and silence on the pulse
| output and sends the proper IR command. A small thing, but it
| still makes me happy whenever it does its work in the background.
| epaga wrote:
| I made an AR-based app for myself that tracks my head in 3D space
| and then pipes the position and angle data to my PC which uses an
| open source app called OpenTrack to emulate the "TrackIR"
| protocol to then 3D-control the camera in sim games (like flight
| sims) with slight movements of my head.
|
| I then posted a little video of it to /r/flightsim
| (https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/id7vmy/head_trac...)
| and it turned out to be something others wanted, too, so then I
| polished it and released it as a full app (SmoothTrack). It's
| been the most successful side project I've ever done.
| impostervt wrote:
| A door sensor, for when my kid was sleep walking. There are
| various door sensors out there on the market, but they all set
| off a siren. I just wanted something that would alert my phone
| and wake me up, in case she did it in the middle of the night.
| Your not supposed to wake up a sleep walker, and I sure as hell
| didn't want a siren going off in the middle of the night.
|
| Kinda sorta worked ok...just in time for her to stop sleep
| walking.
| andoma wrote:
| > Kinda sorta worked ok...just in time for her to stop sleep
| walking.
|
| Heh, Sounds just like every project I set out to do :)
| Ambix wrote:
| LLaMA.go - open-source framework for LLM inference on regular
| CPUs [0]
|
| It took me about a month of full-time, hard, day and night coding
| (including weekends) to finally build a solid piece which can
| handle some crazy CPU workloads of tensor math.
|
| [0] https://github.com/gotzmann/llama.go
| busyant wrote:
| I made a "laser-beam-break" camera trigger for my Nikon D750,
| which I use to capture images of hummingbirds at my feeder.
|
| Instead of paying $125 for this ...
| (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1337050-REG/pluto_tri...)
|
| I decided to build one using an Arduino. I probably spent _more_
| than $125 on the project, but I ended up buying a lot of hobbyist
| electronics parts, soldering gun, etc.
|
| I learned a bit about what Arduino can do, learned some baby
| electronics.
|
| And I have some nice pics of hummingbirds.
|
| https://flickr.com/photos/184781347@N05/52648636091/in/datep...
|
| https://flickr.com/photos/184781347@N05/52325370300/in/datep...
| specproc wrote:
| Not nearly as cool, but related. I've been using yolo to pull
| bird frames from a GoPro left running by the bird feeder.
| freeplay wrote:
| The knowledge and experience you gain from those types of
| projects could pay for itself several times over in the future.
|
| Reminds me of when I was getting into woodworking and my wife
| wanted a new coffee table.
|
| Why would we go buy coffee table when I could build it in a
| month and have it cost 3 times as much?
| neon_me wrote:
| My ex used to be pissed when I spent whole day coding and dont
| wrote her a single message...
|
| It was way back before gpt and twilio, so I bent one IRC bot and
| wrote collection of warm messages that was send via SMS on a
| pseudorandom timeframe. We broke up when she finds out ... Luckly
| for both of us I guess.
| rft wrote:
| This reminded me of this internet folklore:
| https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/249-now-thats-what-i-call-a-...
|
| There is also a recreation of the scripts at
| https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts
| firechickenbird wrote:
| An app that helps me with shopping at my main supermarket.
|
| I usually go always to the same supermarket twice a week. I was
| frustrated that every time I changed something in my shopping
| list I had to mentally recompute the optimal path to pick up
| everything.
|
| Now with my app I am able to build the graph of the entire
| supermarket (each node represents a rack with shopping items) and
| then given my shopping list it computes the optimal path from the
| entrance to the exit. It's a version of the classical travelling
| salesman problem
| GuusH wrote:
| Interesting! How did you ingest all the nodes/racks into your
| system? Did you shave the yak?
| firechickenbird wrote:
| My graph is a partial representation of the supermarket and
| does not contain all the goods. It has just the stuff that
| I've bought at least once and manually positioned into the
| nodes. Sometimes the supermarket decides to relocate groups
| of goods and I have to update my graph again, but it does not
| happen too often (they do it probably once or twice a year)
| jdemaeyer wrote:
| I used to love discovering new music through Spotify's Song Radio
| feature. But somewhere along the way, they started personalizing
| it so much that every radio is now basically an echo chamber of
| the same songs I already know, most of which I have even already
| added to my Liked Songs.
|
| I built myself a small service to "disable" (work around)
| Spotify's hyperpersonalization by giving me the Song Radio as an
| anonymous user would see it. It's available at
| https://spoqify.com/ (with the name chosen that way so that I
| only need to replace a single letter in the URL of a Song Radio
| Playlist and it'll forward me to an unpersonalized version of
| it).
| dom96 wrote:
| Really awesome. Took me a while to figure out how to get a Song
| Radio playlist though :)
| pcblues wrote:
| I made an iPhone VR app to control a lego mindstorms robot by
| lashing an old Windows 8 phone onto it.
|
| https://pcblues.com/assets/videos/vrlegorobot.mp4
| mariusvaporware wrote:
| A software developer and football (soccer) fan who lives in an
| antipodean time zone, I enjoy watching games on demand the
| morning after they occur. Apart from watching the games of the
| team I support, I like to watch one or two of the most
| entertaining games in any given week, but score spoilers
| absolutely ruin the experience for me.
|
| So, I created https://laterball.com: a web app the
| algorithmically determines the best games of the past 7 days
| without score spoilers, to let me (and you) know which games are
| worth spending time watching. There was also an associated
| twitter bot at https://twitter.com/laterball which occasionally
| tweets when there's been a high-quality game until the recent
| Twitter API changes.
|
| Technical stuff: the back end is a Ktor server hosted on a linode
| instance which pulls statistics data from an API to determine the
| ratings. Factors used to determine ratings include goals (number,
| timing, swings in score, comebacks), xG, wins or draws against
| the odds, cards, and a few others.
| remify wrote:
| This is very nice, It would be great to add other leagues and
| cups.
| martinohansen wrote:
| That's amazing, I've been wanting something like that for UFC
| for a while, I might just steal the idea!
| paulette449 wrote:
| I wish Apple did something like this with their MLS
| subscription. I watch quite a lot of sport on delay. All of the
| games in the Apple MLS Season Pass are available to watch after
| the game ends, but the screenshot for every game shows the
| final score!? Why would I want to watch 90mins of a random
| soccer game to which I already know the result? I won't be
| renewing.
| runeb wrote:
| Very nice project, thank you! As a european transplanted to the
| U.S I feel this challenge with score spoilers as well.
| Streaming services that do not offer hiding scores, or who even
| insist on leading with scores in their UI are now brands I
| actively avoid. Such a small simple UX detail leading to
| absolute shunning of a whole media company.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| I made a small 4 digit LED display that syncs to my work calendar
| and counts down the hours/minutes or minutes/seconds to my next
| meeting, depending on how close it is to starting.
|
| Currently working on moving the ICS calendar parsing part from a
| python script down to the microcontroller itself, then I can
| release.
| toast0 wrote:
| What's your target language for the microcontroller? I built a
| 'smart alarm clock' with what sounds like a bigger screen, that
| fetches iCalendar files and shows the next appointment/beeps at
| the appointed time.
|
| I'm running on an esp32, with platform.io, and esp-sdk +
| Arduino. Overall project: https://github.com/russor/ClockThing
|
| iCal library: https://github.com/russor/uICAL (if I had know
| how much work I'd need to do to make this library work for
| me... I might have left it with my hacky solution of processing
| on my own server in perl in a cron... But I had too many
| messups with that)
|
| FWIW, Google Calendar recently stopped including real Timezone
| information in the calendar urls for newly created calendars. I
| ended up doing something gross to manage that (got a dump of
| all the tzurl 'outlook' calendar files, and load that before
| loading the user calendar; it's sketchy, but it works)
| jareklupinski wrote:
| haha I've had uICAL in a tab open for a week now,
| anticipating the plunge. ty for the experience :) guess i'll
| just hack the parser myself...
|
| I'm also on esp32, and have been wanting to write more using
| the native esp-idf tooling. I'm comfortable with Arduino but
| now that I'm getting into things like sleep modes and low-
| level IO, my code is becoming a patchwork of Arduino pinMode
| and ESP-IDF gpio_hold_dis functions...
| toast0 wrote:
| > ty for the experience :) guess i'll just hack the parser
| myself...
|
| Well, if you use my branch, I think I cleaned up
| everything, I think. Reccurance rules are pretty weird
| anyway.
|
| I definitely recommend using platform.io though, if nothing
| else, it's easier to pull in forked libraries with.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| ah I didnt realize you linked your fork! ty again :)
| cehrlich wrote:
| When language learners learn vocab, there are two main processes:
| 1. Use a premade list of the top x words. Pro: they are
| guaranteed to be common words. Con: Once you make it past 2000 or
| so, they might not show up depending on what sort of niche things
| you read/watch/talk about 2. Look up random words as you come
| across them, and learn those. Pro: These are words you really
| saw. Con: You don't know how common that word is, maybe this is
| the only time in your life that you'll see it
|
| I made a web app that lets you note down words that you come
| across and might want to learn, and then generates a learning
| order of those words based on a variety of frequency lists, as
| well as linking offsite for sample sentences etc. It allowed me
| to pass the JLPT N1 with just 6k known words (people usually need
| 8-10k)
|
| vocab.c-ehrlich.dev
| captainkrtek wrote:
| This is great! Would be curious to adapt this for other
| languages, as I'm currently using some flash cards of top N
| type frequency.
| RedGreenBlack wrote:
| A webbapp that helps me remember names by showing them in a graph
| network. Super simple, use it constantly
|
| A webapp for sharing files/text between two devices no matter the
| platform. Use this all the time. No more sending emails, Facebook
| message, dropbox link to yourself.
| l2silver wrote:
| Uh, what kind of graph network? That sounds pretty interesting.
| anjanb wrote:
| @RedGreenBlack : could you share more please ?
| scsteps wrote:
| I created a little mind dumping text app that I use on the daily.
| Originally it was intended as a throwaway little app but turned
| out to be my most used app that I've created.
|
| I am currently working on a todo list that stores all info in the
| browser only.
| arielweisberg wrote:
| Maybe not interesting, but a slideshow application that is much
| faster and more memory efficient than anything I could find.
|
| Image viewers I tried all beachballed constantly, were slow to
| respond if they even did, had many bugs, and required many
| interactions and pixel hunting to interact with.
|
| It emphasizes instant response even when working with 10s if
| thousands of very large photos, and a UI that eliminates or
| reduces required interactions, and integrates with finder
| smartly.
|
| It defaults to opening folders or images fullscreen and round
| robins windows across displays. The UI is a 3x3 button grid
| overlay that auto hides, the window name is the the last three
| parts of the file path. There is gesture support, but I don't use
| it because focus is a pain to deal with.
|
| JPEG decoding is memory intensive so there is a shared rendering
| process so the parallelism can be managed and memory uses isn't
| duplicated.
|
| A shared cache process contains bitmaps of images scaled to
| screen size that are stored on disk. This kind of assumes you are
| on a fast flash drive like an MBP where flash is basically as
| fast as memory.
|
| The cache is a 100 element LRU in front of Caffeine (W-Tiny LFU)
| and all the cache state is persistent including Caffeine so it
| can remember the LRU and adaptive cache state across restarts.
|
| Prefetching scales the previous and next five images in parallel
| so you can click forward/next and it is instant every time.
|
| When you turn shuffle off it plays forward from the image you
| were on. You can click a button and it will loop all files on a
| directory.
|
| You can open multiple files or directories from finder and it
| will play all nested files in order.
|
| The order is a natural order that parses numbers so if the
| numbers aren't padded you still get the correct order.
|
| Ended up using JavaFX which works surprisingly well. Fast JPEG
| decoding, working HiDPI, window resizing and movement renders
| very nicely.
| HornyDude wrote:
| Throwaway time!
|
| I built a custom smart motorized masturbator.
|
| It borrows from 3D printer design, and has a NEMA 17 stepper
| motor driving a 2GT belt loop around a short length of 2020
| extrusion to slide a carriage along a linear rail. The carriage
| has attachment points that I've put clamps on, that close around
| a fleshlight-style sheath. There's a brace at the business end
| that you put around the base of the penis and it keeps everything
| aligned.
|
| All the parts are custom-designed and 3d printed.
|
| It has an outboard control box that contains: -
| an ESP32-based microcontroller with a small OLED screen. -
| a clickable rotary encoder that is the single input control
| - a TMC2209 stepper driver - 12v power input and a buck
| converter to feed the esp32 - 12v output ports for 2
| additional vibrators and an an H-bridge module to control them
|
| The simple UI allows full control over the motion:
| - stroke duration - stroke amplitude - offset from
| the 0 position - motion path (just sinusoidal vs triangle
| wave so far)
|
| The controls also allow control over the secondary vibrators for
| intensity, rhythm, and duty cycle.
|
| It's been evolving for a couple years now and it works
| brilliantly!
| kilroy123 wrote:
| You can't leave us hanging like that. No pictures of this
| thing?
| trollied wrote:
| Does it have Apple Health integration?
| parasti wrote:
| Finding bugs must be unpleasant.
| stavros wrote:
| Nah, there are no bugs if you wash it after every use.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Gross >.<
|
| Hilarious, but gross
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Just to toss one out there...
|
| You need a fitness tracker and some machine learning to really
| get your freak on.
|
| Sorry, too tired to come up with a good robot innuendo.
| shsbdncudx wrote:
| They do say you should scratch your own itch
| swampthinker wrote:
| I cannot believe that username was available.
| kodah wrote:
| I built a cloud for my family to use.
|
| It leverages containers and Docker Compose, mainly for it's
| tooling that makes it easy to deploy. I made a tool that
| correctly selects the right node based on the directory I'm in
| using Docker Profiles. The networking is both internal and
| external; I share some APIs externally, like to share photos or
| to run video game servers, while other services are entirely
| privileged. It, for the most part, implements mTLS, and has both
| public and private DNS. I have a single ingress node in my cloud
| provider that is connected to my home servers via Tailscale. It's
| been instrumental in building out things at my house and making
| my life easier and cheaper.
| Saigonautica wrote:
| Most useful thing?
|
| Honestly, a lamp that uses a 1W red LED behind a big diffuser. It
| uses PWM in the MHz range for dimming (so definitely no flicker),
| and big physical controls. My wife and I both get migraines and
| being able to set very dim red light seems to be better than
| sitting in complete darkness. I have insufficient data to tell if
| this is a real effect, unique to us, or placebo.
|
| Code is in AVR assembly, because that's easiest for me. Sometimes
| I feel silly that after all these years working with technology,
| this is the most useful thing I've managed to build for myself.
| Hey, it's not nothing though :)
| dang wrote:
| All: This thread has several pages of fabulous comments - to get
| at them, you need to click 'more' at the bottom of each page, or
| like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=3
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232&p=4
|
| One of these years (maybe this year!) we won't need to paginate
| anymore and scrolling will be blissful again. In the meantime,
| sorry for the annoyance if you knew this; I just wanted to make
| sure everyone realizes how large and good this thread is.
| tpkahlon wrote:
| I have always been fascinated by live TV broadcasts from around
| the world. I created a website for it locally and have now
| released the code as open source. Please feel free to check it
| out on GitHub at github.com/tpkahlon/jackal.
| quEsal wrote:
| Telegram bot that uses gpt3.5 to summarise news and comments from
| HN. https://t.me/hacker_news_tldr
|
| Costs around $1/day to maintain, but me and a few of my tech
| friends use it everyday.
|
| An example of this post summary:
|
| Personal tech projects showcased by developers include ad-
| blocking tools, stock data downloading, AI foot generation, usage
| monitoring systems, simulation of universes based on theories,
| market data downloading and heart rate monitoring.
| z500 wrote:
| It's probably not as cool as some of the other projects in here,
| but I've been working on a sound change applier, which is a
| hobbyist tool for applying sound change rules to a lexicon. You
| could use this to generate pronunciations for a language with
| particularly regular spelling, but these tools are mainly used
| for evolving constructed languages.
|
| The way it works is it generates an NFA for a rule. You can
| define sets of sounds, some of which can be multiple characters
| long, and also define distinctive features, which allows you to
| define how sounds change by adding or removing them, but also
| allows you to match groups of sounds based on combinations of
| distinctive features. It builds up these ad-hoc sets of sounds
| and produces a prefix tree, which it uses as a template to build
| the NFA. Finally, the NFA is converted to a DFA for performance.
| It takes a while (the console app is much faster than the browser
| demo), but the rules run many, many times, so they need to be
| fast. It's essentially a special purpose regex engine. I'm
| working on bug fixes and some enhancements for now, but it
| basically works.
|
| Demo: https://marriola.github.io/transmute-demo
| ludee0 wrote:
| After years of trying I've finally made something that my
| girlfriend would use without me nagging her to try. A small
| sveltekit app that registers our expenses and tracks who owns
| who, basically splitwise with way less features, but way more
| control over my data. I'm really happy every time I see her note
| down the expense into the app.
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| Pretty simple but saved me a lot of time: using Twilio, Google
| maps API, and PythonAnywhere I would send myself a text if my
| normal route to work would take >n minutes.
| ftfish wrote:
| One super niche project I made recently lets you search through
| dialogue in public domain films:
|
| https://public-domain-film-quote-search.stefanbohacek.dev
|
| I made it so that I can quickly find vocal samples to use in
| music production.
| carlinmack wrote:
| You may already have a list of public domain movies, but I
| wrote a query to find the ones on Wikimedia Commons [1] :)
| WikiFlix [2] is a nicer interface for browsing them
|
| [1] - https://w.wiki/6dxC
|
| [2] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Spinster/WikiFlix
| ftfish wrote:
| Thank you, I'll check these out!
| neverartful wrote:
| A number of years ago I decided that I had enough of iTunes and
| that I needed to handle my digital music collection myself.
|
| Blog post about it: https://swampbits.bearblog.dev/first-cloud-
| music-library/ Original python implementation:
| https://github.com/pauldardeau/cloud-jukebox Go
| implementation: https://github.com/pauldardeau/go-cloud-jukebox
| C# implementation:
| https://github.com/pauldardeau/CSharpCloudJukebox Oxygene
| on Mac implementation:
| https://github.com/pauldardeau/MacOxygeneCloudJukebox
| Oxygene on Windows implementation:
| https://github.com/pauldardeau/WinOxygeneCloudJukebox C++
| implementation: https://github.com/pauldardeau/cpp-cloud-jukebox
|
| P.S. I'm looking to find my next job, so if you think I might be
| a good fit for an opening you know about I'd appreciate hearing
| about it!
| anotheryou wrote:
| Midi controller that snaps on to my trumpet. Made from a tiny
| drone remote control with a replaced "brain" and new housing.
| https://i.imgur.com/oYFOBNv.jpeg
|
| And an app that records audio retroactively. Wanted to have
| recorded the last 2 minutes? just tell it "-2m". It has a ring
| buffer that buffers the last 2h, but also forgets all the time.
| (at least that was the plan, but audio streams were so much more
| difficult so I just dumped a full day of audio and timestamps and
| cut it later. That makes it much more "eavesdropping" again
| though which I wanted to avoid with the auto delete though....)
| osigurdson wrote:
| I built an ice cream pail drum machine interface as a kid using
| cheap piezoelectric speakers (in reverse to generate a signal).
| This was amplified and brought into a micro-controller to
| generate a MIDI signal for the drum machine. It actually worked
| pretty well.
| cygnion wrote:
| Happy Friday! I have built a document-reading app to help me
| curate, visualize, and recall my knowledge as I read and annotate
| research papers - https://www.KnowledgeGarden.io
|
| The app also extracts data from documents, such as urls,
| keywords, and references, and generates a downloadable pdf report
| with annotations and extracted data.
| newmac wrote:
| Our house has a commercial style HVAC system. The controllers for
| everything (relays) are very simple. The run on a protocol called
| BACNet that is unauthenticated and pretty straightforward.
|
| I was able to read in all the data points and then use the
| weather forecast and a few other data points to make changes to
| my HVAC system. The comfort different has been very drastic. Our
| house doesn't overheat on hot days and doesn't get cold fast when
| the temperature drops. (I am in the Northeast where there are big
| swings).
| simonsarris wrote:
| I built carefulwords.com simply because I wanted to type a word
| into the address bar and get a large list of synonyms and some
| historical quotes using the word quickly. For example:
|
| https://carefulwords.com/solitude
|
| https://carefulwords.com/think
|
| etc. Also unlike thesaurus.com, the search bar actually focuses
| so you can just start typing!
|
| It's not perfect, I need to do a lot of editing, but nonetheless
| I use it almost every time I write, now.
|
| The site is a little over 30,000 static HTML pages built with a
| number of TypeScript scripts that compile some sources for
| synonyms, parts of speech, and the quotes.
| greenpeas wrote:
| This is really cool! Could you please add a keyboard shortcut
| for focusing the input field? (perhaps a forward slash '/' like
| on Youtube or Github)
| simonsarris wrote:
| Sure thing, I'll add that tonight.
| davak wrote:
| Added as a Kagi bang! Love it.
| dombili wrote:
| This is awesome! I'll definitely use it.
|
| It'd be a one time stop for me if it supported definitions
| (similar to Collins Dictionary) but beggars can't be choosers.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I don't particularly care about synonyms (when I consulted a
| thesaurus too much my writing became too flowery) but the
| historical quotes feature was just great! I can imagine
| downloading the full text of several of my favorite authors and
| index the words from that corpus.
| greenpeas wrote:
| Sometimes I know that a precise word for what I want to say
| exists, and I'll know it when I see it, but I can't quite
| remember it in the moment. In those cases I search thesaurus
| for synonyms to related words; or maybe ask ChatGPT these
| days.
| gmac wrote:
| Slightly similarly, I made a searchable word list to help with
| doing or compiling puzzles: https://jawj.github.io/wordtools/
| (the 'anagrams' link does nothing yet).
| feiss wrote:
| this is lovely!! neat, clean and useful. I'm gonna use it,
| thanks for making it!
| AnonC wrote:
| This is wonderful, and fast too (because it's static I guess)!
| Thanks for building it. I'll be checking it when I need some
| inspirational quotes surrounding a word.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Not really sophisticated but I wrote a ~200 line Python script to
| trawl a few data sources like USPTO and Reddit and aggregate that
| info into an e-mail for me to review daily. It was extremely
| helpful in getting me up to speed in a new job that I lacked the
| background for.
| glapworth wrote:
| We recently remodelled our kitchen and dining area, and I wanted
| some art piece on the wall but couldn't decide what. For months
| the wall was a little bare and we were having a lot of dinner
| guests. I realised our WiFi password was too complicated to keep
| reading out to family and friends so I built a QR code in Lego
| that automatically connects you to our guest WiFi. It looks good,
| and it's Lego so it was a fun project with the kids. It took
| about 4 hours to build. The only problem was having enough 1x1
| tiles to put on a 37x37 matrix.
| ra wrote:
| Today I learned you can generate a QR that connects to WiFi.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://www.qr-code-generator.com/solutions/wifi-qr-code/ can
| build one, this is cool.
| dylanowen wrote:
| Does this work for iOS yet? Last time I was trying out wifi qr
| codes only android handled them correctly.
| glapworth wrote:
| Yes, it works for both Android and iOS.
| dylanowen wrote:
| Sweet! Now to make some qr art. My last iteration was an
| NFC sticker behind a painting but people have a hard time
| with that one.
| edelans wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this, sounds like a cool activity to do with
| kids (and I didn't expect to find one on this thread!), will
| definitely steal that.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| SSO proxy I use for all my self-hosted needs. I have 1 user in an
| LDAP database and I can use it even for services with no
| authentication at all. I even implemented real-time QR code
| login, magic link and web login over SSH.
| mxstbr wrote:
| I built a TypeScript-based DSL for Karabiner Elements that allows
| me to work with hyperkey sublayers, thus enabling me to have
| keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything I do across my
| entire Mac: https://github.com/mxstbr/karabiner
|
| Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4b_uQX3Vu0
| skwosh wrote:
| I make my own digital synthesis algorithms using (relatively,
| w.r.t. the field) esoteric mathematics. [1]
|
| At some point (e.g. once I obtain patents) I hope to
| commercialize the processes involved as software/hardware
| instruments, but for now it's solely for my own practice. [2]
|
| [1] https://soundcloud.com/thetanull/1to1-220409-03 [2]
| https://soundcloud.com/goomtrex/condenser-12-54
| rsstr wrote:
| This is intriguing. If you can elaborate more, are you
| synthesizing something closer to waveshapes found in
| traditional synths or more towards totally novel sounds?
| skwosh wrote:
| The project started a few years ago adapting generating
| functions to Complex waveshaping, with the waveforms
| correspond to certain constructions in optics, celestial
| dynamics, etc.
|
| This has since been extended with an algebraic/modular
| approach to building more complex textures and rhythms. So
| the aim is to create totally novel sounds, but the
| traditional waveforms tend to pop-up from time to time!
| darkest_ruby wrote:
| I built this app for my self and based on my own needs and
| requirements
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.darkruby...
|
| It's got hidden developer mode, where even more interesting stuff
| available
| headline wrote:
| I suppose this counts: Although not that interesting, I have one
| of those AC units in my apartment that sits on the floor with an
| outlet tube terminating at a window to pipe out hot air. The
| internal reservoir for this unit is quite small so I hacked
| together a float valve that triggers a pump to offload the
| condensation water to a larger bin, that way I don't have to
| empty the reservoir as often.
|
| Pretty simple, but saves lots of time and I don't have to worry
| about the air conditioner turning off in the middle of the night
| due to it's internal reservoir becoming full.
| john_shafthair wrote:
| Why not just have it drain into an ordinary condensate pump
| which is built for this purpose? Those roll around ACs usually
| have a spigot to attach a hose you can run into a drain.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > I have one of those AC units in my apartment that sits on the
| floor with an outlet tube terminating at a window to pipe out
| hot air
|
| You might want to add an intake tube, to cool the compressor
| more efficiently: https://imgur.com/gallery/kA4Z0uV
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Curious why not pump it out of the window? It's only going to
| be a few dribbles every few hours.
| l2silver wrote:
| It's the little things in life.
| aetch wrote:
| Older 1999-2007 model year Ford vehicles don't come with an aux
| input audio option and they have a cd changer under the seat
| instead. I made an Arduino shield that emulates the CD changer
| and injects my iPhone's audio pretending to be a CD. The shield
| also handles intercepting the car headunit's playback commands
| when you press the physical radio buttons on your car so it does
| a second emulation of a earphone clicker and passes headunit
| playback commands back to control the phone over the aux cable.
|
| In short I can control my phone's audio playback using my retro
| radio headunit using only a wired connection and no Bluetooth.
|
| My schematic and source code are available at
| https://github.com/ansonl/FordACP-AUX
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This is awesome! How did you figure out the signalling protocol
| between the head unit and the CD changer?
| gymbeaux wrote:
| 2007?! They were putting CD players in cars in 2007?! Are you
| in the US?
| critsysdev wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's surprisingly early or late
|
| I live in the US and had a 1991 Acura Legend with a six disc
| CD changer in the trunk (it was ahead of its time in a few
| ways) and have recently had a 2014 Honda Accord with a single
| CD player in the center infotainment area
| mthoms wrote:
| My 2010 Audi (bought used) has a 5 disc changer _and_ an iPod
| connector. Very futuristic.
| blcArmadillo wrote:
| Ford's first iteration of their Sync infotainment system came
| out in 2007. What were they supposed to use before that?
| michael_j_x wrote:
| a sub-ms trading platform written in Rust to try and do arbitrage
| across multiple FX brokers.
| l2silver wrote:
| How's this one going?
| michael_j_x wrote:
| worked for about a week on very specific brokers. Then they
| started slipping my trades. Slippage became a big issue. I
| still can't fathom why such a thing is legal
| Slartie wrote:
| I have glued BLE beacons onto my trash cans in the backyard and
| written a Python program for a Raspberry Pi that uses its
| Bluetooth interface to detect the beacons and keep track of
| whether they are present or not. It also downloads the trash
| collection calendar from the local utility provider responsible
| for collecting them and produces an overview over all four types
| of trash cans with info on their whereabouts (in the backyard or
| next to the street, based on whether the beacons are visible or
| not) and number of days until they are collected. If collection
| is imminent (tomorrow) and the location is still "the backyard",
| a big flashing warning is shown, requesting whoever reads it to
| move the trash can to the street so it can be collected.
|
| The Python program produces a regularly updated XML document,
| which references some XSLT so that when it's loaded in a browser
| it'll render a nice HTML page with styling and images and stuff.
| The Raspberry Pi serves that over an HTTP server in the local
| WiFi, and in the kitchen there's an old Amazon Fire 7 tablet
| stuck to the wall where a Kiosk browser keeps that page on
| fullscreen display and regularly updated. The tablet also has all
| sleep modes deactivated so it is on all the time.
|
| This way we never forget to move out the trash for collection,
| which we did regularly before I had this solution in place (built
| it about 5 or 6 years ago). It's horrible in a family of four if
| the trash is overflowing just because you forgot to move the
| trash cans to the street so they can be picked up.
|
| 2 years ago the solution (called "Internet of Trash") was
| extended by a little Bluetooth label printer located next to the
| tablet in the kitchen and some UI on the web page allowing to
| quickly print sticky labels with two lines of text, usually used
| to label boxes with food leftovers and pre-cooked ingredients
| (such as sauces for example) with what's in the box and the date
| when it was cooked. The UI has easy quick-choice buttons for the
| common food items we usually have and the last few days for the
| second line, but also allows free-form entry. It relays all input
| via the Raspberry Pi which sends it over Bluetooth to the
| printer. The labels help us immensely to keep track of leftovers
| stored in the fridge or the freezer - not just to know the exact
| type of food in the boxes, but also to determine when stuff has
| to be thrown away or which to use first when multiple boxes
| contain the same food ingredient.
| dan-g wrote:
| This is great-- do you have a writeup anywhere?
| sowbug wrote:
| For those of us thinking of putting beacons on everything, have
| you found a cheap open device that you like? Tile and Chipolo
| are too expensive for certain near-frivolous use cases.
| claudeomusic wrote:
| I made a silly twilio app for my daughter's 1st birthday party
| where guests had a set of photos in front of them and they had to
| guess the correct age ordering and could validate their guess to
| win a prize using the temporary number I had setup.
| turshija wrote:
| About 10 years ago when Droplr deprecated their free packages
| (and went to paid only) I've made my own free alternative -
| https://pics.rs followed with its own screenshot app for Windows
| (C#) and later Mac (Electron) and still use it daily... I needed
| a screenshot tool which allows me to select a part of the screen,
| uploads it and immediately copies URL to clipboard. Now I'm
| finding myself using it without app by doing CMD + CTRL + SHIFT +
| 4 which copies image directly in clipboard and then opening
| pics.rs and pressing CMD + V (paste event triggers upload if it
| contains image in clipboard)
|
| I haven't touched the UI since then, its ugly but it works, I've
| tried allocating time to make more modern version and even
| started refactoring it a few times with a few friends in our
| spare time, but unfortunately finding time next to full-time jobs
| and family is much harder than it was 10+ years ago :)
|
| I've never advertised it anywhere except shared with friends and
| used it on some forums in the past, but it slowly grew to 10k
| registered members and almost 200k uploaded pictures. At this
| scale (~100GB of data) its very cheap to keep it online since its
| using very small amount of resources on dedicated servers where I
| host some other important apps with regular off-site backups, but
| if it ever spikes and becomes problematic financially it will at
| least give me more motivation to make something more serious out
| of it or just slam ads onto it and call it a day (worst case
| scenario, not a fan of it).
| omeysalvi wrote:
| I'm using ChatGPT to build a note taking app just for myself.
| Haven't completed it yet but plan to open source it once it is
| done.
| nunodonato wrote:
| what does AI add to a note taking app?
| omeysalvi wrote:
| No, I'm a game developer. The app I'm making is a web app
| that I don't have much experience with. I'm using ChatGPT as
| a tool to cut down coding time and it is working great so
| far. I should have worded my comment better.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I re-created a stock ticker machine. I saw an article about them
| on here and thought "oh that would be cool to have one, lets try
| and buy one" I realised that they cost $4k+.
|
| So I made my own. https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-
| ticker-machin...
|
| Its not strictly electro mechanical like the original, that was
| too far out of my mechanical design skills.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| This is super cool. Love it.
| schemescape wrote:
| md2blog: creates a tiny (a few kilobytes per page, with no
| JavaScript) blog from Markdown files, with two features that I
| couldn't find elsewhere:
|
| * Links between Markdown files "just work" (both when viewing the
| Markdown source on GitHub and in the final HTML version of the
| site), including anchors
|
| * Posts are automatically tagged based on directory structure
| (e.g. all files in "posts/linux" are tagged with "linux")
|
| Bonus: my entire site hot-rebuilds on my 12 year-old netbook in
| under a second (with a few tweaks that I should probably publish
| a new build for).
|
| https://jaredkrinke.github.io/md2blog/
| [deleted]
| jamietanna wrote:
| Something I've recently worked on is building an SQLite database
| of all the dependencies my organisation uses, which makes it
| possible to write our own queries and reports. The tool is all
| Open Source (https://dmd.tanna.dev) and has a CLI as well as the
| SQLite data.
|
| Ive used it to look for software that's out of date (via
| https://endoflife.date), to find vulnerablilities (via
| https://osv.dev) and get license information (via
| https://deps.dev)
|
| It's been hugely useful for us understanding use of internal and
| external dependencies, and I wish I'd built it earlier in my
| career so I could've had it for other companies I've worked at!
| gsala wrote:
| Sounds really cool. We're looking into building something
| similar, but hoping to use Renovate to do the dependency
| analisys for us.
| jamietanna wrote:
| Nice, this does actually use Renovate as the primary
| datasource would love to chat more to see if this setup would
| work for your needs?
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I used to listen to lots of mp3s on my computer in the nineties,
| so I built a USB IR receiver that could interpret signals from a
| remote control and use it to control winamp.
|
| I made a tool that tracks the current and historical prices of
| all sailboats in the world to look for possible good deals.
|
| I made a website that let me track my student loan payoff (since
| I had 30+ different loans) that showed the total payoff as a big
| red thermometer. I also would track the dates of payments and
| used that to estimate the total payoff date
|
| I made and open sourced an attendance tracking site for a local
| school that allows students to come and go throughout the day,
| but needs to ensure they at least showed up and returned before
| school let out.
|
| I made a tool that would determine the most efficient way to
| build damage per second on each hero in a moba. It used linear
| optimization to calculate which items to build and in what order
| to get the highest DPS.
| switch007 wrote:
| > since I had 30+ different loans
|
| That's fascinating! How do did you get over 30 different loans?
| Is this any kind of normal where you're from?
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I moved to the US for college, and the only way to pay the
| predatorily high tuition was to take out student loans. Those
| were taken out incrementally each semester. I was eligible
| for several different kinds of loans at varying rates and
| amounts, so each semester I'd optimize, resulting in several
| loans a semester.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most people don't realize that is how it is done, because
| they consolidate (or never switch provider) after
| graduation.
| thedanbob wrote:
| I wrote my own firmware for ESP-8266 IoT devices to connect them
| to Home Assistant. There are many like it, but this one is mine:
| https://github.com/thedanbob/mqtt_light
| https://github.com/thedanbob/mqtt_garage_door
| https://github.com/thedanbob/mqtt_power_cycle
| mxuribe wrote:
| I built a pretty simple command line application (glorified
| python script) years ago that sends messages into a specified
| matrix room, and intended for use as a basic server notification
| system. Only recently posted to github (because a friend asked me
| to share); see: https://github.com/mxuribe/howler
|
| Like other sys admins and devs, I had used email notifications
| for years to notify me whenever *stuff happens* on a server (like
| a job ran/completed, some storage device is low, etc.). But when
| matrix came out several years ago, i really liked the concept,
| became a bit of a matrix fanboy, and built a little script to
| leverage - nowadays, all of - my server notifications. Again,
| pretty basic/not sophisticated, but it scratches my itches.
| ghbarton wrote:
| I got fed up of trying to access servers I was whitelisted to but
| my IP had changed so I wrote a script that runs on startup and
| lets me copy my IP if I want. ghbarton.com/blog
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up
| local video content to a schedule I create.
|
| The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or
| so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the
| schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves
| on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin
| around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an evening
| movie, some late-night content, then the Indian head and "We Will
| Resume Broadcasting Tomorrow Morning...."
|
| It fills dead airtime by choosing randomly among (literally)
| thousands of YouTube short clips I have on the drive -- or
| showing a title card indicating when the next show begins.
|
| Partly it's a fantasy -- to have my own "channel" with my own
| scheduled content -- my fantasy station.
|
| Partly it serves to put on content I would otherwise not be
| inclined to pull up, double click and watch. It adds the
| serendipitous element to TV watching that I miss before
| streaming. The movie "Charly" (1968) just came on last night and
| I am sure I have not seen it since I was a teenager -- had to
| stop what I was doing and watch a few scenes I recall vividly.
|
| Today's lineup here: https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/
|
| (Since the schedule is in JSON format, it was easy enough to make
| a web front end to display today's schedule.)
| giantrobot wrote:
| I did this same sort of thing. My impetus was that I have tons
| of shows and movies to watch but I 1) don't necessarily want to
| binge every episode back to back and 2) my wide selection leads
| to choice paralysis. I mostly want some background noise rather
| than something I'm super engaged in.
|
| I wrote a script to catalog all my shows/movies then another
| that reads a schedule and generates a daily playlist. My
| schedule has daily episodes of some shows and then weekly
| showings of others. I even put some network block bumpers
| between some shows and "upcoming schedule" clips.
|
| The output of the scheduling script is just an m3u playlist. A
| cron job loads the day's playlist at midnight and it plays
| continuously during the day. There's no controls to pause or
| anything, if I miss something I miss it (by design). All the
| video content is stored on a 5TB drive plugged into the
| machine.
|
| To complete the old school analog nature of the project I
| picked up a low power Hlly VHF video transmitter. I've got a
| small CRT TV in my office that I use during the day and I can
| pick up the signal on the TV in the living room. The project
| started on an RPi with VLC but it struggled on some videos I'd
| ripped from Bluray so I replaced it with a little fanless AMD
| box with an HDMI-RCA adapter. It sits in the garage and I can
| pick up the signal anywhere in the house.
|
| The best part is apart from the setup it's proven to be pretty
| reliable. My next step is to make a schedule output like what
| you linked and maybe a web based UI to let me "change
| channels". For right now it does what I want with no real fuss
| and I always have something on that I like.
| Fatboyrunning wrote:
| What a great idea! Are you inclined to make a guide? If so, my
| old-school wife and myself would be grateful.
|
| Otherwise, I will enjoy the fun of figuring it out for myself
| some day.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'll open-source it when I get the embarrassing bugs worked
| out.
| joh6nn wrote:
| I encourage you not to be embarrassed and to simply
| opensource it. To err is human; anyone giving you grief
| because of bugs doesn't deserve the effort you've put in.
| And opening it now could actually bring assistance in
| getting those bugs fixed, while simultaneously benefitting
| everyone who wants to do something similar but isn't sure
| where to start
| giantrobot wrote:
| I won't speak for anyone else but sometimes "bugs" in
| more about process than code. I have a similar project as
| the GP and am not currently interested in open sourcing
| the project because there's a lot of bespoke elements and
| manual setup process. I don't want to have to make a
| README describing all the process steps that make my code
| actually useful.
|
| For me, on my hardware, on my network, I've got a process
| that works. It's a non-zero amount of effort to
| generalize the description of that process.
| afavour wrote:
| For those interested in doing something similar there's a Plex
| add-on for making custom TV channels:
|
| https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv
|
| Personally I want _almost_ this. I want to rotate the TV shows
| my kids watch in the morning but I don 't want to start part
| way through a show (the one part of the old analogue experience
| that I don't miss at all). Difficult to square that circle.
| mattmanser wrote:
| HDMI seems to be two way, my ps5 turns on automatically when
| I turn my TV on.
|
| So you should be able to do something with that.
| brendev wrote:
| The protocol you're looking for is HDMI-CEC! Not a ton of
| good documentation out there, but hopefully this helps send
| you down a good path.
| afavour wrote:
| Oh, it's definitely possible. Software like dizquetv it
| must know when a new connection is made. But to add such a
| feature would require a lot of familiarization with their
| codebase and I don't currently have the time.
|
| One day...
| 300bps wrote:
| Your comment led me to learn about Plex Plugins even though
| I've been using Plex for literally a decade!
|
| Unfortunately they're removing support for all Plugins over
| time and have already eliminated ones that play content.
|
| https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/online-media-
| sou...
| myself248 wrote:
| All this is missing is an RF modulator and a very-low-power
| transmitter, just enough to reach throughout the house...
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Very cool. This is exactly what I miss about old time TV; being
| able to catch a show by chance. I find it interesting that most
| of the time there's so much choice that I can't get the energy
| to pick one and stick with it. For a while there, I had 4
| streaming services and never watched any of them. I just wasted
| my money.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Ha! The Final Sacrifice is on tonight. That's one of the very
| best MST3K episodes.
|
| I would _love_ to do something like this for my kids. They 're
| constantly begging to watch Youtube, which I limit pretty
| heavily. Something like this could allow me to stick some pre-
| approved videos into a queue, and maybe even make an allowance
| for a half-hour of some of the ... dumber stuff that they like
| at a certain time of the day. I could also slip in some
| Kurzgesagt, Mark Rober, content that they may not otherwise be
| that interested in to surreptitiously educate them ;)
| brianzelip wrote:
| That's great! Like the idea of bringing serendipitous timing
| back. I see 'Sounder' is coming up, I recently got that
| soundtrack on vinyl!
| adroitboss wrote:
| This reminds me of the channels gamers get in Ready Player One.
| The main character used his channel to broadcast his favorite
| T.V. shows that other people could tune in and watch. This is a
| really cool!
| jjice wrote:
| I've wanted to do this for quite some time! Do you serve it
| over you local network or is the Pi directly connected to the
| television?
| stavros wrote:
| I did the same thing with my Chromecast, I made it play a
| random episode from my library, one after the other, so there
| was always something I liked on.
| acapybara wrote:
| Engineer Sneed Art?
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Look who is out of the loop on Sneed Art
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Engineers Need Art
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| Engineers Need Art ^^
| _dain_ wrote:
| Formerly Chuck Art
| pwpw wrote:
| I have been thinking about doing exactly this for Saturday
| morning cartoons to stream anime to my PVM once I can figure
| out how to stream 480i from a modern device to RGB.
|
| Would consider sharing how you set it up? I'd love to do
| something similar!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I wrote the app in Python for the Raspberry Pi. For video
| playback I am using the (now deprecated) omx player.
|
| I tried using VLC instead for video playback (I think the
| more accepted way to play video from Python now) but when VLC
| completes showing a video there is a visible flash that I
| cannot figure out how to get rid of.
|
| I should point out though that it doesn't "stream" -- you'll
| have to find some other solution for that. The Pi is a
| dedicated "player" hooked to a dedicated TV that is always
| on, always showing what the Pi has to offer up.
| giantrobot wrote:
| You might look at mpv instead of VLC. I had the same
| visible flash problem with VLC and mplayer but not with
| mpv. The other benefit of mpv I just (as in two days ago)
| found was I can use a loudness normalization audio filter
| to keep some shows from having blaring audio.
|
| On my system I'm running mpv on top of OpenBox with compton
| for the compositor. It's been much smoother all around than
| VLC or mplayer on the same hardware (an AMD mini PC now
| replacing an RPi I had been using).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thank you! I will do that.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| A jazz generator, pre-machine learning. It had instruments and
| each instrument had Markov Chains to control pitch and note
| duration. I then used a bunch of helpers and functions to write
| markov chains that sounded cool. I used it to play bass and jam
| with me. This was 2009.
|
| The implementation was in netlogo I don't remember why. It was
| really fun
| karulont wrote:
| I had phone that could run J2ME but did not have Internet.
|
| I reverse engineered a flash application that showed a map and
| provided address search. I scraped the map tiles and address to
| location database. Reimplemented the viewer application as a Java
| applet and preloaded the tiles and address database to a microSD
| card connected to the phone. So essentially I built my own
| offline maps for my not internet connected phone.
|
| Address search required prefix tree because IO was too slow to
| use binary search on the phone.
|
| Anyway this was done just before I went to a new city to attend
| university and it was really helpful to find out where I am and
| where to go. There was no navigation, but it showed the map, gps
| location and the location where I needed to get to.
|
| So that was my personal project that really had great utility for
| me.
| arbuge wrote:
| I built this about 4 years ago... I have about half a dozen of
| them around the house right now showing stock quotes, weather,
| etc. and updating every 5 minutes.
|
| https://foundrytechnologies.com/relay.php
|
| One of them has been outside the front door showing messages to
| visitors and exposed to the Texas elements for all that time now
| - still going strong. About 2 years ago I replaced the plastic
| case, which was looking a bit warped.
|
| Sold a few too - though not enough to scale things up. Hardware
| is hard.
| bayofpigs wrote:
| [dead]
| meta-meta wrote:
| I built a VR environment for making and thinking about music,
| intuitively playing with alternate tuning systems, building
| instruments in space and livestreaming.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/v4uHqdTr-bs?feature=share&t=426...
|
| There are a few simple but powerful building blocks. One main
| feature is an egg shaped "note" which can be placed, resized,
| retuned and cloned on the fly. It's played by physics
| interactions with a "mallet" or sports balls, anything with a
| collider.
|
| One of the instruments is a sine wave organ which has drawbars to
| control the amplitude of overtones. Unlike a classic organ, these
| overtones can be independently retuned and assigned envelopes to
| produce a range of timbres. Pitch is consistently mapped to a
| spiral - an isomorphism of pitch space.
|
| It has a theremin which provides visual and tactile feedback and
| a voice with vocal formants controllable with a thumbstick.
|
| It has a physics based sequencer of sorts which consists of
| "mallets" on a wheel which spins at a desired ratio of whatever
| BPM is set in a DAW. These wheels can be cloned and multiple
| mallets arranged around the circle using the Euclidean rhythm
| algorithm.
|
| Since low latency audio in Unity is tricky, the VR app is really
| just a controller for synthesizers running in Max/MSP and IEM
| spatial audio VSTs running in REAPER. One day I'd like to package
| some portion of it into a mobile VR app for things like remote
| jamming or music lessons where models of the theoretic ideas are
| right there in front of us to tinker with. For now, it's just for
| me.
| imcoconut wrote:
| it's pretty simple but on various consulting jobs I've had to
| build SQL databases sometimes with lot's of tables with lot's of
| columns. Sometimes we switch from on prem to cloud, or vice versa
| or switch from postgres to sql server, etc. I have this toolkit
| that automates a lot of the tedious stuff. it allows me to take
| pandas dataframes and do the following:
|
| - auto detect and convert column types
|
| - save as a parquet file in a folder
|
| - then autogenerate a sqlalchemy table/metadata file in python
| for all tables with sensible defaults for column types (e.g. 2x
| the longest string in a column for varchar)
|
| - build the db and all tables
|
| - load data from the files into the tables
|
| this makes it really easy to bootstrap the entire db from a
| folder of parquet files for testing with sqlite and then makes it
| easy to move to prod on postgres/sqlserver etc. Before I go to
| prod i still have to add constraints and keys and indexes but
| that doesn't take too long. and for dev/testing the data's not
| too big so performance doesn't really suffer from lack of
| keys/constraints then we can use something like alembic on the
| big sqlalchemy tables definition file to do db migrations.
|
| it's kind of like this: https://github.com/agronholm/sqlacodegen
| but solving an inverse problem.
|
| basically it bootstraps the db and schemas and gets me like 95%
| of the way there. my quality of life is better with it.
| cc101 wrote:
| I wrote an app for reviewing and highlighting websites and most
| computer documents. I can drag the highlights into a built-in
| outliner and organize and comment them there. I can drag relevant
| highlights into a built-in report outliner where I can write the
| corresponding section of the final report. I knew I wanted it. I
| thought others would too. I was wrong on that. Sigh! I guess I
| built it just for myself after all.
| l2silver wrote:
| I have definitely tried to build something similar after all.
| People are so particular with these things.
| gmac wrote:
| My daughter enjoyed playing Othello at a friend's house, so I
| made this we can use on an iPad:
| https://jawj.github.io/fliptiles/
| shanebellone wrote:
| I believe tech has passed down inefficient solutions that
| represented the best solution given the hardware constraints of
| the time. For this reason, I began rebuilding my web stack.
|
| _Deployed applications:_
|
| Analytics, Object Database, and WAF.
|
| _Deploying shortly:_
|
| WSGI app and templating system.
| rhubarbcustard wrote:
| I, like probably most other people, tend to start a habit and
| then it quickly fades away, not necessarily due to lack of
| wanting. I find that I might want to start, for example,
| strecthing my hamstrings regularly, I do them for some days/weeks
| and then I forget some days, then forget some more, and then
| after a while I realise I haven't done any for months.
|
| So I wrote a webapp that I usually myself constantly now, it's
| very basic. I enter a habit I want to keep up and then visit the
| site everyday and click the "done" button when its done. It also
| has a calendar so I can see how often I've been doing it because
| not every habit is to be done every day.
|
| I started this for exercising but i'm not using it for very
| basic/stupid things. One example is cleaning my glasses. I would
| never remember to clean them and I'd occasionally realise I'm
| viewing the world through a layer of grime. I now click "done"
| every day and the world looks crystal clear.
|
| I guess it's just gamified habits a little bit and its working
| really well for me. There's a ton of habit trackers out that but
| I never found anything simple and quick to use.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| A 3D luring audio visual experience that's using a simple 2d
| canvas, in the browser.
|
| https://vanilla-lattice.mtassoumt.uk/
|
| Totally deprived of any use, but very satisfying.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I built a "dipping bird" boiler reset (metaphorically). Our old
| boiler had a fault where it would lock out every few months until
| manually reset. So, I wired a normally closed relay to it and a
| 10 line Arduino sketch to open the relay 1 minute out of every
| 120.
|
| That ran for about 7 years; when I was researching replacing the
| boiler with air-to-water heat pump, I had to prove the house
| could be heated with lower temp water, so I changed to an
| ESP8266, added a platinum temperature sensor, a webserver, data
| logging, and ran a bunch of experiments with lower supply temps
| to see how the house would react.
|
| https://imgur.io/a/VM7nD74 (that chart is entirely SVG, the whole
| content screenshotted was generated on the ESP)
| davidfstr wrote:
| I created a smart spreadsheet app for tracking any books, movies,
| or TV series I'm interested in watching which can automatically
| run web searches for sources to stream/rent/buy any item on the
| list (ex: Netflix, Amazon Prime, my local library, my local
| bookstore).
|
| This way I can focus on _what_ I want to watch and not worry
| about _how_ I will watch it.
| lbrockxyz wrote:
| My family is super into games, and as the resident programmer,
| they often ask me to build things related to them. Favorite two
| to build were
|
| - an Unolingo solver that we used to figure out if there could
| ever by more than one solution to the puzzle (there can be!)
|
| - a "killer" solitaire simulator that determined the optimal
| number of players for a max win rate. IDK if this is even a real
| game, but my family plays multi-player competitive solitaire with
| up to 8 people at a time. IIRC the optimal number for win rates
| is like 5-6(?) according to my simulation
| l2silver wrote:
| Is that like dutch blitz?
| Austizzle wrote:
| I grew up playing a multiplayer competitive solitaire with my
| family called Nerts. Sounds like a similar game:
| https://bicyclecards.com/how-to-play/nerts
| peter_retief wrote:
| I put together some operational amplifiers as filters to measure
| skin voltage and infrared absorption then used machine learning
| to learn to identify me and to measure blood pressure, pulse rate
| and oxygen saturation.
|
| I was close to predicting/estimating blood sugar when I lost
| momentum and also had a few errors making up PCBs.
| bouk wrote:
| I keep all my projects and other repos that I clone under `~/src`
| e.g. `~/src/github.com/rails/rails` for the rails project. I then
| have the following fish function to navigate to a project:
| function c set -l directory (fd -d 5 --prune -a -H -t d
| -g '.git' ~/src ~/b -x dirname {} | fzf
| --tiebreak=length,begin,end) if test -n "$directory"
| and test -d $directory cd $directory end
| end
|
| I just type 'c' and then 'rails' and I'm in the rails project. I
| really like diving into code and this makes it much faster.
|
| I also have this one to clone or cd a project from github like
| `gc rails/rails` function gc --argument repo
| set -l dir $HOME/src/github.com/$repo if not test -d $dir
| if test -d $HOME/go/src/github.com/$repo set dir
| $HOME/go/src/github.com/$repo else mkdir -p
| $dir if not git clone "git@github.com:$repo.git" $dir
| set -l git_status $status rmdir $dir 2>/dev/null
| return $git_status end end end
| cd $dir end
|
| And this function: function list_after_cd --on-
| variable PWD ls end
|
| Runs ls every time I change directory, which you basically always
| want anyways
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Reminds me of z / zoxide / fasd, I use zoxide personally
| aftergibson wrote:
| Latest vaguely interesting projects I've done, I repurposed an
| old Nook to be an e-ink family dashboard, showing weather, tidal
| times and our family calendar.
| Lutzb wrote:
| Not really interesting per se, but useful when dealing with large
| recursive and sparse archives:
|
| A python script that recursively searches through zipped files
| within zip files (within zip files...) to find files by name and
| content. The goal was not to unzip the recursive structure to the
| file system, since the unzipped files contained hundreds
| gigabytes of sparse data each. Instead it works directly on the
| file stream and keeps the memory requirements constant.
| mxmlnkn wrote:
| This is basically the same reason why I started with ratarmount
| (https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount) but the focus was more
| on runtime performance and random access and as the name
| suggests it started out with access to recursive tar archives.
| The current version should also work for your use case with
| recursive zips. Recursive loading must be enabled with
| `--recursive`. It can also be used as a Python library without
| FUSE.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| I haven't built it yet, but there's a homeless person that yells
| every night from 2am to 4am at the top of their lungs across the
| street. Profanities and everything.
|
| I've been looking into directional speakers so i can kindly ask
| the person to quiet down without waking the neighbors up. The
| person in question about 200ft away
| dtgriscom wrote:
| ... perhaps a phased array of speakers?
| dusted wrote:
| The most interesting tech I made for myself is rather mundane,
| but it's one I use every day, it's the FinalKey password manager.
| sowbug wrote:
| An automatic fish feeder. I was going on a long trip with my
| family and needed to feed my fish while we were gone. I
| remembered I had a servo from an old project. I drilled some
| holes in a round plastic container, glued it to the servo shaft,
| hung it off the tank with some wire, and wrote a small Arduino
| sketch to jiggle the container every 24 hours. It worked better
| than I thought it would; the fish survived, and in fact seemed so
| happy that I don't feed them by hand anymore.
|
| I've since built a couple more for my other tanks, and I rewrote
| the firmware for ESP8266/ESPHome. Now my family can ask Alexa to
| feed the fish, because of course the world needs that.
| zulban wrote:
| I don't like mobile games, mostly because of IAP and ads. There's
| also an oversaturation of chess apps, but none where an AI can
| play your own variants, so I made www.chesscraft.ca
|
| For years now it's the only mobile game I play, just about. The
| game took off a bit, but the core is still for me.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| I needed to build a Wordpress site for user docs for a company
| last year. Couldn't find a good solution :(
|
| I created a React based version of Wordpress for developers.
|
| I turned it into an open source framework so that other people
| can use my work and build on top of it. It comes baked with
| Next.js, Tailwind, and a bunch more.
|
| It's currently a work in progress, but I've been receiving great
| feedback from the dev community.
|
| https://www.elegantframework.com/
|
| https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli
| hectormalot wrote:
| A recipe manager for our family that strips all the SEO text out
| using the OpenAI API. I built this after someone in our family
| got diagnosed gluten intolerant and we had to make changes to our
| usual recipes.
|
| Normal recipe sites tend to be full of irrelevant (SEO optimized)
| text, ads and tracking, and I wanted something to just get the
| recipe in a clean form.
|
| It's a basic web application (mostly in Go) to manage recipes.
| New recipes are imported from an URL, after which it extracts the
| plain text from the site and uses GPT to get a markdown formatted
| recipe and list of ingredients.
|
| This would've been much harder pre-GPT, but now was trivial to
| implement.
| xnickb wrote:
| That already exists as a browser extension afaik. Not sure
| about gluten part though
| hectormalot wrote:
| Oh for sure. I think Paprika (?) does a decent job. To be
| fair, it started as a learning project for myself.
|
| As a minor detail I also translate everything to the same
| language as part of the transformation. Just a bit of prompt
| experimentation.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| > This would've been much harder pre-GPT, but now was trivial
| to implement.
|
| I wonder how close looking for a group of lines that start with
| a number, then taking all the text following that group of
| lines would get you. I bet that would get you pretty close to
| the desired effect most of the time.
|
| I also wonder if more standard NLP methods might work here,
| rather than using the full power of an LLM. Instructions are
| grammatically constructed as commands, so if you start with
| doing what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, then parse
| each sentence following the group of lines starting with
| numbers, you should be able to determine which ones are
| commands. If a paragraph contains no commands, it's obviously
| not directions.
|
| Just some random thoughts. I do see what you mean, though:
| definitely _not_ trivial sans assistance from an LLM.
| iaaan wrote:
| The mobile app Paprika does this and works great, in case
| anyone wants to use something like this.
| macrael wrote:
| I love Paprika, one of my favorite apps I use. It even syncs
| a grocery list between my phone and my Mac.
| IanCal wrote:
| Paprika is excellent, it's also something you pay for and
| just get the app - no subscription.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| On the downside, you'll need to purchase each version
| separately. I bought it on Apple and then moved to Windows.
| I'm considering buying it again but I'm curious how well
| Obsidian would work for it considering it's free and has
| the rest of my life.
| weberer wrote:
| I like to play Factorio, but too often lose track of time while
| playing. There's no clock in the game's UI, and no way to access
| the system's time through the mod API. So I made a script that
| runs as a process on the host machine that every minute, sends
| commands to the game's process to build a clock in the center of
| the map out of concrete. Its pretty cool because you can also
| clearly see the time from the mini map.
|
| https://gitlab.com/smew/factorio-clock
| NamTaf wrote:
| This has big Anno-series "You've been playing for [x] hours!"
| notification energy. I love it. Both of those game series are
| incredible time sinks.
| deskamess wrote:
| > sends commands to the game's process
|
| You can do that? Is there an API?
| weberer wrote:
| I was using factorio-init to start the process. That script
| makes it easy to send commands to the in-game console.
|
| https://github.com/Bisa/factorio-init
|
| https://wiki.factorio.com/Console
| bees_buzz wrote:
| Devs ruining your fun I'm afraid
| https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/s7i4xu/1151_added...
| chasd00 wrote:
| I have a liquid bi-prop rocket engine on the table next to me
| that is almost ready for a static fire and then a launch later
| this year likely at FAR or Spaceport America.
|
| It has improved pretty much all my skills. Fabrication, embedded
| software/controls, system integration, operations processes,
| research and learning and so on. So far it's been my most
| challenging personal hobby project.
| belthesar wrote:
| I've got a couple things, they're pretty simple, but they've
| improved my life significantly for as simple as they are.
|
| One is an interface for a MIDI controller I use to be able to
| control the Soundcraft UI16 mixer I use for my desk setup. I'm a
| bit of an audio nerd, having done pro-am music production, and
| having a love for broadcasting, and what started as a simple
| setup to get good quality sound at low latency has now become an
| audio chain with a teleconferencing audio processor, a headless
| digital mixer, and several microphones to do acoustic echo
| cancellation and noise cancellation so I can use an open
| microphone without headphones.
|
| My mixer, being headless, has no physical controls. From my DJ
| days, I had a MIDIFighter 3D controller not being used, and a
| Raspberry Pi without a dedicated task. I was able to write a
| small bash script to read note information from the controller
| and send web requests to a Bitfocus Companion server to act as
| API intermediary between my mixer and the controller. Now, I have
| physical controls for hardware muting my microphone, and the
| various computers at my desk. It's effectively a big Elgato
| Streamdeck for what I use it for, but to be able to upcycle the
| hardware has been quite nice.
|
| I also was working from home with some long hours, and I wanted
| to try and improve my sleep schedule. I already use redshifting
| software (usually what's built into the OS these days, although I
| used to be a longtime F.lux user), and that's been great, but I
| also wanted to control monitor brightness by time of day. Giving
| my eyeballs less light blasted into them has helped me regulate
| my sleep better. I wrote a small python daemon that can run on
| Mac or Linux, integrate with native DCC tooling to send control
| commands to my displays, and gradually adjust the brightness of
| my monitors based on the time of day. This has also been
| eternally useful when, being an ops guy, I'm called in during the
| middle of the night, sit down at my desk to address an outage,
| and my eyeballs are bombarded with significantly less light,
| making the pain of adjusting much less difficult to address, and
| also making falling back asleep after the incident is resolved
| much easier.
| redog wrote:
| >several microphones to do acoustic echo cancellation and noise
| cancellation so I can use an open microphone without
| headphones.
|
| I'd love to read more about the work on this!
|
| Can I get away with just 2 other microphones? Is it in python?
| belthesar wrote:
| This admittedly isn't software. I'm leaning on the shoulders
| of giants in the professional teleconferencing space for
| this. I'm using a beastly old Biamp Nexia VC audio processor
| for this. The nice thing is that these are very end-of-life
| products that don't require a license to operate, so you can
| pick one up on eBay for $50-100.
|
| The Nexia provides Acoustic Echo Cancelling, which is
| fundamentally the same stuff that VoIP apps like Zoom, Teams,
| Discord, etc. use to detect feedback and squelch it, except
| instead of ducking my microphone, it does waveform
| cancellation to strip it out, to pretty great effect. To take
| advantage of this, I send the audio output from my computers
| (I have my desktop or my laptop, which are attached to the
| same USB audio interface, and a Mac Mini that I use for
| secondary tasks, media watching, and a CI/CD worker target)
| as well as a contact microphone attached to the wall
| adjoining a bathroom. Audio from those sources are then
| removed from my microphone feed before it goes back into my
| audio interface for whichever primary computer I'm using as
| my teleconferencing device.
| emberfiend wrote:
| I also made a time-of-day brightness adjuster! I had a much
| cruder solution, just an autohotkey script that drags sliders
| around in nvidia control panel, but it's such a relief on the
| eyes. I hope it gets baked into OSes (or monitor hardware?) at
| some point, matching monitor luminosity to what the sun is
| doing seems pretty obvious.
| seurimas wrote:
| MUDs are a great breeding ground for bespoke programs. I've made
| my own system of triggers and aliases in Rust, which interfaces
| with Mudlet (very popular MUD client) through JSON over stdio.
| Being written in Rust, it has enabled a publicly usable web tool
| (http://seurimas.github.io/topper/explainer/?/topper/explaine...)
| , but the majority of the code is just for me.
| internetter wrote:
| The site you linked isn't loading for me. It's just a black
| page with a favicon
| seurimas wrote:
| I had the wrong path for the demo file. It ought to work now.
| sylware wrote:
| Not yet built, but in my TODO list: A mango pi mq-pro, a custom
| written 100% risc-v 64bits assembly firmware, plate-mounted
| cherry switches (probably silent red, or black), lovely PBT key
| caps, laser cutted aluminium plates, diodes, a bit of electric
| wiring and:
|
| https://external-preview.redd.it/AxGrpEpxqpATGsX7MwsoSRrD2ie...
| grilledcheez wrote:
| I made a pomodoro timer display using a WiFi-connected ESP32
| board with a small OLED display. I put it outside the guest
| bedroom/home office door during lockdown so my family members
| could see how long until I could be disturbed.
|
| It talked to my laptop using MQTT and of course it was triggered
| from emacs using org-pomodoro.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| I hated scrolling ikea.com for new products, way too cluttered
| and all over the place. Found their hidden api and created a RSS
| feed from the new products.
| moontear wrote:
| Automatic warning system if I sit too long
|
| I added a pressure sensor to my desk chair (just like the ones
| built into car seats) and soldered that to a Zigbee door sensor.
| I now know sitting/not sitting. I then set up push notifications
| to my watch and desktop if I sit more than one hour to get up and
| take a walk. Furthermore I connected it to my hight adjustable
| desk that if it is in up-position and I sit down, it
| automatically lowers itself to the perfect sitting position. I
| had to disable the ,,if I get up, move the desk up" function
| because it was just too much movement on the desk end.
|
| I don't wanna miss the too-long-sitting warning anymore and it is
| really useful.
| riidom wrote:
| SO it kinda sends a push notification to your butt then? :)
| ano88888 wrote:
| This is really cool. Apple watch solves this problem though.
| flyingpuffin wrote:
| I built this simple website https://unexploredhq.com to find
| interesting (less known) places to travel with my SO and family.
| Instead of searching for new places by name, one can search for
| new places in a region with simple attributes.
|
| I have built the database by scraping some data online, and have
| a database of 60,000+ locations. The attributes are built with
| some basic ML and text processing, nothing fancy. But this is
| sufficient for me to do this search: find places in Europe where
| I can do surfing and hiking with a temperature of less than 25
| degrees.
| gadgetoid wrote:
| It didn't really stay personal, but I built a very basic
| Raspberry Pi Pinout website hosted on a Raspberry Pi [1] back in
| 2013. The intent was to collect the pinouts for some boards I was
| tinkering with at the time. It got wildly out of hand since [2]
| [3], but I think the original site meets the spirit of this
| question.
|
| 1.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130505194305/Pi.Gadgetoid.com/...
| 2. https://pinout.xyz 3. https://pico.pinout.xyz
| george_sp wrote:
| Created a query builder for microsoft's KQL for making my life
| easier for a client project. Turned out that this company still
| uses this library after 5 years :).
|
| Probably the best feeling ever in work.
| beoberha wrote:
| What are your thoughts on KQL? I'm biased, but I love it.
| Kusto/ADE as a whole is an amazing platform - it's a shame how
| poorly it has been marketed outside of Microsoft
| Zanfa wrote:
| A Bluetooth dongle for my standing desk that lets me control it
| from my Mac. I kept bumping the wired remote with my chair when
| it was mounted under the table and since it had a fat Cat5 cable,
| it was too ugly to have on the table.
|
| So I hooked the remote up to an oscilloscope, figured out the
| signals it uses and used a nRF52 dev kit plus a small custom PCB
| shield to be able to control it over BLE. A small toolbar utility
| for the Mac and it's more convenient than it's ever been.
| rft wrote:
| Reminds me of a prank I pulled with a mate on a colleague. They
| recently got standing desks and of course a bit of fun ensued
| with them. Over one weekend we build a remote control for it
| based on an ESP32, of course fully MQTT compatible. We hid it
| as best as we could and it was not visible unless you crawled
| under the desk. Fun was had, because you could just program the
| behavior via a small python script and override the physical
| buttons. It also was briefly hooked up to my Home Assistant for
| voice control.
|
| We used nothing as fancy as an oscilloscope, bought a new RJ11
| cable, cut it in half and interposed the connection from the
| remote to the controller. We also used relays, just for the
| nice clicking sound :)
| Zanfa wrote:
| My plan was to get my setup super fancy to also display the
| current height and memory functions from within the Mac
| utility, so it had to read the full protocol that the remote
| used. Up/down alone was supposed to be the proof of concept,
| but once I got it working, it was good enough that I didn't
| really care about the rest.
| Aulig wrote:
| To be fair, I'm trying to turn it into a public product since I
| think the use-case isn't very niche.
|
| I've recently started building https://responsebrain.com where I
| can add all my blog articles and automatically let ChatGPT
| generate responses to questions about my other product
| https://webtoapp.design
|
| It's a pretty basic setup with a knowledge base you can feed
| anything you want (your blog articles, help center etc.). That
| gets put into a vector database and then I pass the related
| knowledge pieces to GPT along with the question.
|
| I know there's lots of similar products out there, but none of
| them seem to allow manual editing of your knowledge base and they
| all seem to be focused on creating chatbots. I've adjusted the
| prompts to work best for e-mails.
| cool_fire wrote:
| [dead]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I make a lot of tech for myself for learning, none of which being
| novel, so maybe this doesn't exactly fit.
|
| I made a raycasting engine to learn more about it and I'm in
| love. It's the most clever thing ever. I can't believe I have a
| 3D effect without using a single trig function. The math is so
| simple you could run it on a 286. Raycasting feels like a magical
| hack. It has no business being so ridiculously simple for what
| you get!
|
| I'm taking it a step further and integrating a real-time map
| editor so you can modify a map as you play.
|
| I'm not sure where to go beyond that, but I'm having a ton of
| fun.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| I've been wanting to play around with raycasting as well - I
| found myself with a sudden interest in so-called boomer
| shooters and would love to make my own (just for learning and
| messing around).
|
| Any resources that you particularly liked when learning, or is
| the stuff I will find when Googling "raycasting engines" all
| good enough?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I used this one: https://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html
| (note this is just chapter 1 of 4 related chapters)
|
| It's decent. In some cases it's a bit clumsy when they try to
| explain mathematics in natural language, but we can't always
| have pretty Latex-rendered math functions and graphics. =)
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Uhh, I'm building a virtual pet ant farm combined with journaling
| / breathing exercises. Ants get fed when I submit data. It pushes
| me to keep on top of my mental health each day in the same way
| getting a dog pushes someone to go for daily walks.
|
| It's kind of weird, but it's fun to make and serves a decent
| purpose.
| ToJans wrote:
| I got tired of editing videos, so I wrote a tiny web app that
| allows me to record uniform ready-to-publish videos for my SaaS
| in real-time, so creating & publishing a 5-min video only takes
| me about 15 minutes.
|
| The videos look like this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rdeir2-bVA
|
| Creating a video is simple:
|
| - think about the subject (usually during the week)
|
| - 5 min: copy an existing video script and edit it to match the
| current subject
|
| - 5 min: record the video with OBS capturing the web output
|
| - 5 min: publish it on FB/LI/youtube/...
|
| It uses a simple scripting language with actions that I can
| trigger by pressing a button. The script has custom commands that
| allow you to mount HTML/overlay the webcam video/show the webcam
| video as a thumbnail/play music/... And you can compose commands
| into other commands.
|
| Here's an example script I used for the video mentioned in the
| beginning: const script:Record<string,string[]>
| = { Intro: [ `/name empty screen with
| overlays /remove * /volume 0`,
| `/name empty screen without overlays /remove *
| /volume 0 /append div.hide-overlay`,
| `/subs How to quickly qualify leads for premium
| outdoor structures without a configurator `,
| `/intro  # Quickly
| qualify leads ## for premium outdoor structures
| ### without a configurator /caption Tom Janssens / Owner
| /wait 3s /remove * /subs
| https://virtualsaleslab.com marketeers of premium outdoor
| structures activate & qualify leads via online 3D
| configurators In this video explain you
| a simple and easy way to qualify a lead without
| using a configurator` ], Main:
| [`/remove * /append img#bg.fullscreen[src="prices.png"]
| /select #bg /animate fade-in 3s both `,
| ], Outro: [ `/site
| https://**OBFUSCATED**/r/vsl/vsl/en/designer/index/ts-alu`,
| `/remove * /caption Tom Janssens / Owner /wait 5s
| /cfg https://**OBFUSCATED**/r/vsl/vsl/nl/designer/index/solar-de
| `, `/remove * /outro  # https://virtualsaleslab.com
| ### tom@virtualsaleslab.com`] }; export
| default script;
|
| Update: Obfuscated some urls in the example script, as they are
| pointing to my test environment ;)
| fzeindl wrote:
| I had a servo motor attached to a raspberry pi which turned a
| small gear that connected to a plastic gear m on the analogue
| temperature control of my gas heater.
|
| Then I had it switch to various temperatures while heating and
| also had a geofence for my phone implemented that turned on the
| heating when I entered a 500m radius. Even had a calibration
| script for the servo motor.
| nsm wrote:
| I have a hacky combination of Playwright browser automation plus
| Tesseract OCR that splits a Verizon group plan among members by
| posting individual totals to Splitwise. Simple at first glance,
| but there are always small changes due to people traveling
| overseas or changing devices.
| niccl wrote:
| Not sure if this counts:
|
| A lighting desk for my hobby of lighting live music. For reasons
| I like doing live control along with the music (known as
| busking). Existing things are either limited and can't control
| moving lights, or don't have the flexibility to busk the way I
| want. so, having worked a long time ago for a crowd that built
| what were at the time the best lighting desks in the world, I
| built my own
|
| It has 36 motorised faders and a bunch of other boards with
| buttons, that each ave their own AtTiny to run the function, they
| talk to a BeagleBone Black which runs the main code loop and uses
| its on board realtime processors to generate DMX, and a raspberry
| Pi to run the GUI for configuration.
|
| Worked a treat most of the time, and I've done hundreds of shows
| with it, with crowds of up to 400 people, Sadly, I made a dumb
| decision on the protocol for the fader and button boards to talk
| to the BeagleBone and every now and then it causes a kernel panic
| on the Beaglebone, which means at best you lose control of the
| lights and at worst it goes dark on stage.
|
| I started a redesign using a more sensible protocol but got hit
| by a double whammy of Covid killing the live music scene for a
| couple of years, plus the all the supply chain issues, so it's on
| hold now.
| loansindi wrote:
| If you're ever interested in publishing anything about this to
| aid others in recreating it, I'm sure there'd be ample interest
| (for better or worse). Professional controllers are hilariously
| expensive for many hobbyists and the options for DIY control
| surfaces tend to be limited (especially with motorized faders).
|
| I'd certainly be interested in reading about how it works, even
| without anything approaching build documentation.
| rafamvc wrote:
| I'm interested in this as well. Would love to collaborate.
| jesprenj wrote:
| This is very interesting! I am a bit new to the hobby (I worked
| in a relatively small venue for 200 people a couple of times).
| Till now I used only QLC+ and keyboard+mouse control, which
| gets really boring and hard to use very soon.
|
| Now I'm starting with designing a small controller on a
| protoboard with an ESP8266 -- 12 faders, 34 buttons, 4
| encoders, 26 RGB LEDs. By sending raw 802.11 frames I may be
| able to get this thing to work wirelessly.
|
| I'm interested in your design, would you be willing to uplaod
| some pictures?
| tleb_ wrote:
| Cool stuff. I've got the same hobby / part-time job (mostly on
| GrandMA consoles). I have done two-three experiments on custom
| software to emit DMX which I used for something like four
| events. For the physical interface I'm relying on MIDI
| controllers; I first want a software stack I can trust before
| going into hardware design.
|
| Would love to discuss the topic some more! I don't often meet
| people with that same interest in lighting that want to build
| their own tools.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| I'll share a project I've been working on that has greatly
| improved my meal planning. I created a tool to tell me what and
| how much to eat from a list of ingredients.
|
| Unlike most existing apps that only track what you eat, my app
| helps you figure out how much to eat to hit your target macros.
| Initially, I had created some Python scripts that worked well,
| but I found them inconvenient to use as I needed to be near a
| computer, edit the script and manually add ingredients to a
| dictionary. To make it more user-friendly/faster, I re-wrote it
| as a web app in Rust for the backend and integrated a free food
| database.
|
| Now, I can quickly and easily add a list of ingredients I have at
| home from my phone and hit calculate.
|
| Currently, I'm the only user, and the tool is designed entirely
| for my needs. However, I think it could be useful for others
| looking to plan their meals and eat healthier, which is why I
| host publically. If I were to build it for general public use, I
| would need to relax the constraints to allow flexibility on how
| close it can match your targets. I would also want to add more
| food sources, maybe the USDA database, but since I'm not in the
| US, a lot of the foods won't be relevant to me. Maybe if I get
| the time i'll work on it but for now it works perfectly for me.
|
| You can check it out at https://www.macrosolver.com/. Let me know
| what you think!
| mazzystar wrote:
| My AirPods Pro often fail to connect properly, appearing
| connected but music still plays on cellphone.
|
| As an introvert, I don't like to bother people. When I'm in a
| quiet coffee shop or library, I turn down my phone volume, select
| a white noise track in Apple Music, and put my ear near the
| bottom of the phone.
|
| So, I created the simplest app of my life: open the app, and it
| plays the sound of waves. If your phone is in silent mode, it
| won't play anything when the connection fails, even if the volume
| is high.
|
| I posted it on the web, and many people didn't understand its
| purpose, thinking it was just another white noise app. It
| received very few downloads. However, it's the only app I made
| that I use every day.
| easeout wrote:
| I built a tool for measuring iOS app animation performance that
| makes dropped frames audible as clicks.
|
| https://github.com/kconner/KMCGeigerCounter
| 2fast4you wrote:
| Right now I'm working on a heads up display using a pair of AR
| glasses and a pinephone. At the moment you just get the time and
| a battery level in the corner of your vision, but the interesting
| thing is the platform. Every hud app is just a Wayland client,
| and the apps get positioned absolutely on the screen by the
| compositor
| RoyalSloth wrote:
| I built a Markdown like text format for writing technical
| reports. I was fed up with Word and I wanted a plain text
| language that supports tables, footnotes, auto validated
| references to any part of the document, syntax highlighting of
| code blocks, comments, math equations, table of contents, etc...
| Unfortunately, existing solutions are all slow or written with
| some bizarre toolchains that are a pain to set up.
|
| I wrote it from scratch in Go with very few dependencies, so I
| can compile it to a single binary that should work on all
| platforms. It outputs .html or .tex which is then compiled to a
| PDF via Xelatex. Since Latex is pain to deal with, I wanted to
| generate pdf directly, but life got in a way so... it's not
| exactly a finished project, but at least I enjoy using it.
| chaxor wrote:
| You should take a look at the markdown TUI glow (or some of the
| other projects on charmbracelet) and see if there's anything
| you can contribute from your work. It's all in Go as well iirc.
| idaweather wrote:
| I wrote http://idaweather.com to get a better understanding of
| the local weather where I have a hobby farm.
|
| It's mostly a toy but it has given me great insight into local
| weather patterns.
| l2silver wrote:
| Very cool. Was this to learn about websites and sql, or you
| just wanted to extremely accessibly data analysis?
| idaweather wrote:
| I created it for the accessible data analytics. It's nice to
| be able to answer certain questions about the local weather.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| Malware scanner for anything uploaded to web servers. Was pretty
| cool at the time learning and identifying things in the wild then
| creating custom rulesets.
| l2silver wrote:
| I take it this was a while ago then?
| rymurr wrote:
| A search engine. It indexes all of my personal notes as well as
| my entire browsing history. Previously visited pages and notes
| get blended w/ google results. Makes a big difference when trying
| to find blogs, docs, notes on things Ive worked on previously or
| make random connections between notes and current questions. Of
| course it now needs a bottoms up rewrite in the age of vector dbs
| and GPT.
| giuliogabrieli wrote:
| I built myself a phototrap using a Raspberry Pi and a spare
| webcam. It was a proof of concept to demonstrate a function of a
| python package I developed for aesthetic analysis of images, that
| was presented at an international conference. The camera detects
| movements, and send an image to my via Telegram. I am now using
| it to take pictures of stray cats moving outside my house.
| jeffwilder wrote:
| I hated when Google killed iGoogle because I used it daily. So i
| took my data export and built one for myself. Even had the themes
| part mostly working. I used it for a few years but a lot of the
| RSS feeds stopped working as the web seemingly moved on from
| offering those. Not the most interesting tech but something I
| built just for me.
| zbtaylor1 wrote:
| I built a working version of the Christmas lights from Stranger
| Things (that Joyce used to talk to Will in the upside down) for a
| friend's Halloween party. It used an arduino board, a string of
| addressable LEDs, and a little web interface that guests could
| use to send messages to the lights.
|
| It was so much fun to build and a hit at the party. I wish I had
| the opportunity to build more things like it :)
|
| https://github.com/zbtaylor/stranger-things-lights
| zzlk wrote:
| In 2020 I wanted to look up some classic StarCraft 1 maps that I
| used to play but there wasn't a good database around that I could
| easily search through. So I made https://scmscx.com to serve that
| purpose.
| typhonic wrote:
| We have pet chickens that we close up every night. I built a door
| to let us open and close the chicken run from a web page. The
| door slides horizontally and is driven by a cheap electric drill
| motor with an all thread rod, which acts as a worm gear, and is
| controlled by a rpi.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Open source please?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| [dead]
| tim-fan wrote:
| I made a robot location tracking system specifically for use on
| the carpet at my office.
|
| The carpet was an arrangement of 4 particular colors tiled in
| squares, so I manually made a carpet map (a few hours in excel!),
| wrote a carpet color classifier to run from under-robot camera
| data, then integrated with a particle filter for location
| tracking. Write up is here:
|
| https://github.com/tim-fan/carpet_localisation/wiki/Carpet-L...
|
| I wrote it only ever expecting usage in this particular office,
| but if anyone has a similar carpet and a robot that needs
| localizing, please reach out!
| motohagiography wrote:
| Re-implemnted a version of the old unix `who`, `last`, and
| `finger` command line tools that works across most of the whole
| infra of the company I work for. Planning to add more APIs for it
| for different systems to aggregate up into it. (AD, EDRs, Splunk,
| etc.)
|
| I was a sysadmin for a dialup ISPs with a shell server in the mid
| 90's and people today have no idea how good we had it back then.
| An entire userbase accessible from a single shell prompt and a
| few commands instead of todays gamified web UXs with 3D graphics.
| Security was terrible back then, but the UX was calm, so I re-
| built that experience over everything.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Not all that interesting but I recently built a server for 2FA.
|
| It mainly consists of a simple CLI utility that generates TOTP
| codes using an AES encrypted lookup table of secrets.
|
| I piggybacked access to this off an unrelated web site and it is
| now readily available from any device if you can provide the
| decrypt and lookup key and know the URL.
| l2silver wrote:
| That's pretty nifty. Security first.
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| I built https://pinggy.io for myself initially. But after some
| years I thought others might also find it useful.
|
| It gives me "instant" public URLs to localhost without any
| downloads/configs. I use to to quickly send files, share and
| check frontend on my mobile device.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Driving simulator in unreal engine. Can do ADAS and now has a
| real HUD which is warped and quasi raytraced.
| creature_x wrote:
| I built a Chess training app called
| SpicyChess(https://spicychess.com) that leverages spaced
| repetition and strict time constraint to increase your pattern
| recognition ability for tactical motifs. SpicyChess also allows
| you to "bookmark" a puzzle for review later on.
|
| It's not the most interesting tech I built but it's the most
| recent one and checks the features wish-list I've had when using
| other tactics training apps.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Built some systems, simulations, universes, automata or whatever
| you'd like to call them.
|
| https://github.com/churchofthought/HexagonalComplexAutomata
|
| https://github.com/churchofthought/ScatterLife
|
| Was working on a new one based off of Gerard Hooft's beable
| theory, a superdeterminism of sorts.
|
| But then WebGL 2.0 Beta got replaced by WebGPU. So it doesn't run
| anymore: https://github.com/churchofthought/Grautamaton
|
| But here is a video of it used for a non-abelian sandpile system,
| when Google Chrome Beta could run it:
|
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/NE1XU1tcdKS4ySLa9
|
| and the resultant "cooled" equilibrium universe:
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/dn5jpUW9y3JMrxJi6
| alex-moon wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "for myself".
|
| For practicality: I wrote a flashcard app to use on the tube to
| help me learn French. I wanted a couple of things specifically: -
| it should be super simple to use on a mobile device - it should
| be trivial to add a new flashcard on the fly - it should
| prioritise flashcards I've got wrong more than I've got right -
| it should work offline, pushing back to the server once there's a
| connection again Code: https://github.com/alex-moon/clin
|
| For fun: I wrote an app that tied a bunch of machine vision ML
| repos together to generate "explorable dream worlds" in the form
| of short HD videos. I wanted a simple, fun interface that would
| let me specify a schema/config for the next video, then hit "go"
| and watch it generate over the course of however many hours,
| including previewing what we had so far. Code:
| https://github.com/alex-moon/vc
| jwmoz wrote:
| Most of mine was just automation or analysis-download mp3 rips
| from a streaming site, scrape parse and analyse jobs so I could
| see the market prices (span off a web app made a few hundred quid
| but killed it), a trading system and crypto analysis tool, most
| recently scraping and analysing housing market data.
| jwr wrote:
| Oh, I think I have a good one. I had an HP-25 calculator as old
| as myself, and couldn't use it. The original battery pack
| contained two sealed NiCd cells, which obviously failed many
| years ago. Most people replaced their NiCd cells with new ones,
| then with NiMh cells, or even alkaline AA batteries. This was
| always problematic: newer batteries were slightly larger and
| never fit well. Also, the power consumption of a calculator with
| an LED display was significant, so frequent battery replacements
| were needed. And the original HP charger was risky and could
| easily destroy the calculator.
|
| So I designed and built a wirelessly (Qi) charged battery pack
| for it.
|
| https://partsbox.com/blog/wireless-charging-for-a-hp-25-calc...
|
| After a year of use, it's totally over-engineered and has so much
| energy and so little idle power consumption, that I have to
| remind myself to charge sometimes, the thing lasts for months.
|
| I'm the only user. There are many people who wanted to buy one,
| but the step from a hobby design to small-scale production is a
| big one and it simply doesn't make business sense. Especially
| with Li-Po batteries being difficult to ship and potentially a
| hazard. I guess maybe if I found a manufacturer that would be
| willing to take the design and manufacture it on demand, taking
| over all of the shipping/support issues...
| prosaic-hacker wrote:
| My HP-29C could use something like that. I have it on the shelf
| beside me I use AA batteries and the seem to have both a good
| shelf life but I do now about life span because I don't use it
| much but when I do it still works.
| l2silver wrote:
| The HP-25 was a hand-held programmable scientific/engineering
| calculator made by Hewlett-Packard between early January 1975
| and 1978.
|
| Wirelessly charged battery pack. Whhhhhatttttt
| d136o wrote:
| Love this.
|
| Semi relatedly, the reason I chose my current smart watch is
| that it can go weeks without charging, I simply don't worry
| about it. Yes it has a limited number of colors and I can't
| browse the web on it or w.e. but that's a feature.
|
| Maybe I'll seek out a phone with similar battery use profile...
| green-salt wrote:
| I love this. I used to have a bunch of things that would
| benefit from a project like this.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There probably are some contract manufacturers that'll handle
| all that, but they'll need a decent sized minimum order.
|
| I doubt anyone would front the money to produce 100k of them
| (to recover the cost of molds) unless you literally give them
| the design fro free.
|
| Maybe there are smaller companies using 3D printers willing to
| take on a 1k sized order?
| madjam002 wrote:
| I was running the lightshow for a medium sized nightclub and
| ended up building a custom React renderer that would
| declaratively control all of the lighting fixtures on the dance
| floor, strobes and smoke machines included. The entire show was
| controlled with various MIDI controllers (similar to Launchpads)
| which also had their button grid programmed using React.
|
| It was suddenly very intuitive to build user interfaces on a
| button grid MIDI controller using standard React design patterns,
| not to mention the actual light shows being implemented as React
| components.
| gimili wrote:
| For 6 years I had a long distance relationship between Peru and
| Germany.
|
| When you are in different timezones it can actually be nice to
| fall asleep with the other person "close" to you; so we kept
| Skype running while one of us went to bed and the other person
| was working on the PC.
|
| Unfortunately the internet connection would regularly drop,
| ending the Skype call. Now you did not want to wake the other
| person by calling them.
|
| So I wrote a small script that would allow you to send a secret
| word in the chat and invoke the other persons' Skype to call you
| instead automatically.
|
| Kept our relationship healthy. Now we've been married for nearly
| 10 years and are happily living together :)
| noman-land wrote:
| Great story. I love this thread.
| l2silver wrote:
| That's really sweet. I think I remember a scene from the TV
| show Normal People where something similar happens.
| chrbr wrote:
| When I was house-hunting I ended up writing a console app for my
| wife and I to do a few things:
|
| - Pulled down applicable YNAB savings envelope balances and
| future income calculations from a Google Sheets spreadsheet
| (which included stock prices for determining RSU payouts) to know
| how much cash we'd have for down payments at any time in the next
| 12 months
|
| - Allowed us to either give a house price and have it output when
| we could afford it, or give a month and tell us how much we could
| afford if we bought on that month
|
| - Do budgetary analysis of what the monthly payment would be,
| given fluctuating mortgage rates and estimated insurance from
| scraping Zillow/Redfin
|
| - Calculated transit times to my office and my wife's office
| using Google Maps
|
| - Allowed for swappable "scenarios" for all the above to show
| what would happen if we wanted to sell our current place first
| and then buy, buy and then sell, or buy-renovate-sell, so we
| could evaluate all options. We ended up going the buy-renovate-
| sell path in reality, and it was a huge stress relief to have
| hard numbers showing us the money was going to be fine.
|
| - Output several months of cash reserves for each scenario after
| all transactions were done, so we could know if we would cut too
| much into savings
|
| - Output a yes/no decision based on all of the above to keep us
| grounded and help prevent over-reaching for a house we couldn't
| afford - basically enforcing rules on ourselves
| verelo wrote:
| Any chance you could share this? I made something similar for
| an investment decision once and i just discovered the realtor i
| worked with uses it all the time with his clients. I feel like
| others might like what you're doing.
|
| I just put pause on a project because i couldn't figure out a
| revenue model: mappedby.com
| dan-g wrote:
| Maybe not the interesting, but the most recent-- I was annoyed
| that Bloomberg's email newsletters didn't have an associated RSS
| feed, so I wrote a script that uses JMAP to take the most recent
| emails from them from my inbox and publish to an rss file. A
| docker container hosts that running on a cron job, and nginx to
| serve.
|
| I run it on my NAS so my RSS reader can find it as long as I'm on
| VPN. Now I only need to visit NetNewsWire for all my news!
| tunnuz wrote:
| I don't know if it's interesting, but here it is.
|
| The local branch of the company I work for has recently included
| a food allowance of 8 eur/day as a perk. I don't like / have
| opportunities to eat out most days, so I have built a little
| utility that fetches via a REST API the offers at the deli /
| grocery store on the way to my kid's nursery, and solves a
| knapsack problem to generate the most optimal shopping basket
| (i.e., closest to but not exceeding 8 euros). I extracted the API
| from the deli's website, as it seems to be something custom. Of
| course, I might not care about some of the items that the utility
| includes in the most optimal basket. To mitigate this, the
| utility iteratively refines the basket by asking me if there is
| something I want to remove, and then replaces it with the next
| most optimal items to fill up the remaining budget.
| Cyphase wrote:
| What's this deli / grocery store that has a REST API?
| tunnuz wrote:
| Like a local joint. They have a few stores around the
| country. It's a small country, the API powers their website
| so you can see what is on offer in your local branch.
| myzreal2 wrote:
| Was a long time ago, but I used to play this game called DayZ,
| which back then was just a mod for ArmA2. I played on a private
| server hosted by a friend.
|
| Back then the game was very easy to cheat in because even though
| the map was huge, the client kept all of the objects in memory
| along with their positions all the time - and it was very
| important in the game to stay hidden from other players and to
| hide your stashes of objects for later use. All of these was
| available in memory for grabs and there was no anticheat.
|
| So there were people who wrote cheats that just grabbed the
| positions of those hidden stashes and bee-lined through all of
| them, robbing them.
|
| The server logged the position of static objects (like stashes)
| on startup and logged the position of every player every few
| minutes. So I wrote a very simple application that parses that
| log and puts all of that information (position of stashes and
| players) on a human-readable map. The admin could then select a
| player and track his journey. It was very easy to spot people
| running in straight lines from stash to stash, it was obvious
| they were cheating and should be banned.
|
| After that I added some heuristics that detected these behaviours
| automatically and gave hints to admin on who to check. There were
| more abuses possible in the game later on that I also detected.
|
| For example, there was a "dupe bug" which allowed a player to
| duplicate a backpack full of useful items and give it to their
| friend. It involved two players staying in the same spot,
| dropping the backpack on the ground, trying to open it up by two
| people at the same time, one of them disconnecting, etc. The
| backpack was duped due to lag on the database on server side.
|
| I modded the server files to log the information that a backpack
| was dropped or picked up (along with a list of items inside it in
| order they were arranged). Then I modified my log parser to look
| for two players being near each other, dropping and picking up
| the backpack, disconnecting and reconnecting constantly and
| detecting two backpacks with exactly the same list of items in
| the same order they were arranged it (which was very unprobable
| to happen out of itself) - detecting this gave a hint to the
| admin to check these people out as possible dupers.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| It's not personally useful but I wanted to see if I could design
| and build a navigation controller designed for a satellite with
| different configurations. I started with a sandbox simulator that
| emulated all the hardware sensors down to the noise (according to
| their data sheets) and a microcontroller emulator that ran real
| code compiled for a microcontroller I chose for the task
| (STM32G431).
|
| I tested different control schemes and thrust firing plans, added
| support for different types of thrusters, errors in sensor
| readings, atmospheric drag depending on altitude, weird anomalies
| in the earth's magnetic field, simulated bit flip events and
| hardware lockups (I left the internal watchdog out of the
| hardware lockups which is probably not realistic).
|
| In an effort to stress test my simulator I ended up writing a
| genetic algorithm solver for thruster, magneto-torquer, and
| reaction wheel placement on arbitrary craft bodies with different
| mission plans and let it solve it.
|
| I ended up designing a physical circuit board matching the
| simulator, flashing the board with the same code that was running
| in the simulator and it worked! I roughly made an approximate
| cube sat (10cm^3) (had a mechanical engineer friend design me a
| frame and manufacture it for me) with some small cold gas
| thrusters out of pressurized CO2 cartridges, controlled by
| solenoids, and placed by my genetic algorithm.
|
| I dropped it off a cliff that was ~600ft high (best I could do
| for a "zero gravity" environment that was away from people). It
| was able to completely arrest its angular rotation before
| slamming into the ground which is better than I was expecting.
| science400 wrote:
| That is awesome! I've had an inkling of an idea similar to that
| for years, but definitely not so well thought through.
|
| Is there any place you have more info on this? I'm especially
| interested in the genetic algorithm.
| kilon wrote:
| Built a live coding library for python that allows me to reload
| code I edited while it was executing. It has repl and debugger
| support and it can be run even for embedded python. It's pretty
| granular so it can reload modules or even individual objects.
| Unlike the existing module reload python function it can change
| object references to the updated code and delete old objects and
| their references from memory. This way in the next call only the
| latest code is executed. I built something similar for C code
| too.
| schemescape wrote:
| I was just looking for something like this. Have you shared
| either of these publicly?
| kilon wrote:
| Here you go https://pypi.org/project/pylivecoding/
| blensor wrote:
| Does it count if you've built something for yourself that is now
| becoming an actual business?
|
| If yes, then I started building a hand tracking based VR workout
| app back in 2019 using GodotEngine to get myself a bit of extra
| motivation to exercise at home.
|
| In the meantime it's become an official app but I am still using
| it for myself very intensively ( unfortunately no longer using
| Godot )
|
| https://app.xrworkout.io
| blakewatson wrote:
| I have a bunch of these. They are my favorite things to make.
| I've been making things like this for a long time but I only
| recently started to appreciate them after discovering this
| article. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
|
| - I have a disability and require daily personal care so I made a
| system for recruiting and hiring caregivers.
| (https://blakewatson.com/journal/a-home-cooked-app-for-hiring...)
|
| - I need to track those caregivers' hours so I can make sure
| timesheets are accurate, and I wanted to do it with minimal
| effort. So I created a plain text syntax readable by a web app I
| created that takes that syntax and outputs exactly what should go
| on the timesheets.
|
| - Sometimes the government agency that runs the program doesn't
| send me enough timesheets, so I created a "forgery" of their
| timesheets in CSS where all of the values are interchangeable via
| JavaScript. Now I can print any timesheet for any one of my
| caregivers for any time period on demand.
|
| - I made my own web-based bookmarking tool to replace my Pinboard
| account. It automatically sends every bookmark to the Wayback
| Machine. (I wrote about that one and a couple of others
| https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-joys-of-home-cooked-apps...)
|
| - Sadly I'm no longer able to use this one because of decreasing
| strength, but I once created a custom mobile-based keyboard for
| typing on my Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pre6EQGIuKY
|
| - I wanted to be able to share my plain text notes so I made a
| CLI for selectively publishing notes to the web.
|
| Really most everything I make outside of my day job is for
| me/family initially, but a lot of it I end up publishing. For
| example my main side project is A Fine Start
| (https://afinestart.me/). It actually started as an assistive
| technology just for me--typing is difficult so I wanted a new tab
| page with just clickable text links. I used it for a while myself
| before eventually turning it into a browser extension and service
| for other people.
| davchana wrote:
| Would love to see the timesheet and its syntax and stuff:)
| kla-s wrote:
| Hey, godspeed to you and your health issues.
|
| Concerning the video/custom mobile-based keyboard: If
| interested you could look at how kde-connect implements the
| remote pointer control you mention at the end of the video.
| kde-connect is also available for macOS, though not fully
| supported (per https://github.com/KDE/kdeconnect-kde) and the
| last macOS builds seem to fail (https://binary-
| factory.kde.org/view/MacOS/job/kdeconnect-kde...). But i can
| attest that it works great on Ubuntu via GSConnect with
| Android.
| kaybi wrote:
| I built a sprinkler system that has 14 zones. Using raspberry pi
| and relays. It has a web interface and can run on schedule or
| manually. Worked out to be better than a kickstarter I backed,
| lono, that turned out to be dud and the company went under.
|
| I plan to open source it. have to clean up the code. Built with
| python flask, GPIO and a small custom PCB that interfaces pi with
| the off the shelf relay boards.
|
| Todo - flutter app - 3D printable enclosure to package the entire
| set. - basic logo etc.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I have langchain hooked up to a SMS number with some of the
| tools. I want to extend it to voice and pictures but, I have used
| it also to replace googling or Wikipedia for a bit.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| https://hyperscript.org
|
| I wanted to have a scripting language that was inspired by xTalk
| for some light front end work alongside htmx. Didn't expect it to
| go anywhere.
| l2silver wrote:
| Well that's what you get for building something no one
| wanted...
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| story of my life
| texuf wrote:
| I built a website that you can bring up in multiple browser
| windows, or on multiple adjacent monitors attached to independent
| computers. Each browser displays a unique QR code. A user can
| navigate to a second webpage, activate their camera, and point
| their camera at the QR codes. Each QR code will switch to a
| unique AR code, then the user can project a single continuous
| image across all the monitors. It mostly works but I'm missing
| some 3d math to make the image line up perfect when the angles
| are weird.
| tuxie_ wrote:
| After pushing to a branch, gitlab sends you back a URL where you
| can create the merge request (MR). This broke my flow because I
| do all my development using command line tools.
|
| So I created this tool that opens an MR off the branch I'm on. It
| opens up my favorite editor and asks me for a title and a
| description in the same way that git does for commits. It splits
| it in first line for title and the rest for the body.
|
| It's very simple but I'm very happy with it. Now I extended it to
| list the open MRs, show the tickets in the current sprint, etc...
|
| Nobody else in my company uses it tbh, but I don't care because
| it solves _my_ problem and I love it.
| jacknews wrote:
| +1 for Merge Request
| shib71 wrote:
| I wanted a Markdown notes app that I could access over the
| internet, and stored files in a files-on-s3 structure that would
| makes sense if I accessed it directly and would be stupidly
| simple to backup/restore.
|
| Ended up with an Amplify app that had basic login, file upload
| with image thumnbnails, indexing of frontmatter, some query
| macros to list pages matching specific criteria, autocomplete for
| frontmatter and macros, and ability to make specific pages public
| if I want to. Apart from login, it only uses direct S3 calls, so
| I'm effectively only paying for S3 storage costs.
| Marcel-Jan wrote:
| I created a cycling statistics dashboard on a Raspberry Pi with a
| Pimoroni Inky Impressions e-ink display.
|
| It's on my desk. And every hour it refreshes my cycling stats,
| reminding me that a) Wow! I build a cool thing that actually
| works and b) I did ride a lot on my racing bike, didn't I? / It's
| about time to go outside and ride some more.
| https://github.com/Marcel-Jan/StravaInky
|
| I've written a couple of blogposts on how I build it:
| https://marcel-jan.eu/datablog/2022/12/12/strava-dashboard-o...
| unnouinceput wrote:
| It started as a necessity project and evolved over time. You see
| my daughter started to wanted to have her independence around 5th
| grade (11 years old) and didn't liked me or her mother to go to
| school or get her home from school. So she needed a key to enter
| the apartment. Problem was that she lacked the necessary strength
| to actually unlock the door - door lock had a certain key
| position and until you hit that position it required quite a
| strength to do that. So every day she came from school she was
| ringing at the door. Whoever (me most of the time) was at home,
| had to go to the door and open it for her.
|
| So that's how I started this project. Get the door to be
| unlocked. Bought a new lock, with electromagnetic locker in it,
| hooked up a Raspberry Pi to command a switch for 0.5 seconds and
| then wrote a server application for RPi that does the command.
| Wrote another Android app, that connects to RPi, sends the
| user/pwd via WiFi, the server verifies if all is OK and then
| unlocks the door.
|
| Then started expand the tech. Get new users to be added by an
| Admin user (so roles were implemented). Used as DB SQLite in RPi.
| Wrote my own protocol on top of crypto libraries so communication
| is secured with a 4096 RSA key over WiFi. Then one day a little
| accident happened - my daughter had problems with her stomach and
| the door could not open fast enough for her to go to toilet, so a
| little soiled pants came out of that event :). That prompted me
| to start expanding even more and invest in a little LoRa PCB
| attached to RPi so the communication now can happen from distance
| instead of just few meters from the door.
|
| Then I wanted to expand the usefulness of RPi. So when we go to
| vacation a little pump is pumping a predefined liters of water on
| our flower pots. And to make sure those do not actually get too
| little or too much I hooked also a number of webcams on RPi to
| watch them. And since I was at this step and I wanted to flex my
| muscle in computer vision so another camera is on our front door
| and automatically will try to recognize people going through its
| field of vision. This last step is still refined. So this is
| where I am with this project. Still in development, pretty sure
| I'll have more ideas in the future I'll attach to that RPi.
| bombcar wrote:
| I absolutely love that the problem was the door lock, and the
| first thing you did was replace the door lock, but still
| continued to tech it up and beyond.
|
| Next is an automatic door opener so you can detect her walking
| up and actually physically open the door, too.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Two years ago I decided to built my own web browser, with the
| underlying idea to use the internet more efficiently (and to
| force cache everything).
|
| Took a while to find the architecture, but it's still an
| unfinished ambitious project. You can probably spend forever
| working on HTML and CSS fixes alone...
|
| [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth
| database64128 wrote:
| I wrote a silly Telegram bot for my group chats:
| https://github.com/database64128/CubicBot
|
| It's mostly just some useless commands that say stupid things,
| and stats collection for earning "achievements" and displaying
| leaderboards.
|
| The bot was written in C# and seriously over-engineered to be
| completely modular. Every command and stats collector can be
| turned on or off in config. A running instance with all features
| turned on is available as https://t.me/Cubic0Bot.
| kubota wrote:
| I have a tractor. Mice like to chew electrical wiring because the
| wire casings are made of soybeans, so the tractor dealer
| recommended setting several traps by my tractor. I couldn't stand
| killing a mouse so I used "humane" catch and release traps, the
| problem was a mouse died because I forgot to check the trap. So I
| put a reed switch and an esp-32 on a catch and release mouse trap
| that when tripped, sent an mqtt message to aws iot, that
| triggered a lambda function that sent me an email notifying me I
| had a mouse to let out of its trap.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I once gave my wife soy-based nailpolish remover, because it
| smelled merely horrible rather than like instant brain damage.
| I wonder whether, while they're at it, it wouldn't be worth it
| for the manufacturers of soy-based wire to coat it with
| something like that.
| okaleniuk wrote:
| My father was an amateur historian. He used to work with a lot of
| pictures often of poor quality. I guess his worst was a photo of
| a road sign printed in a book sometime in the 70s, and then
| recently not even scanned but taken from a book page with a
| phone. So I made a tool for him that allows to undo unwanted
| bending and also helps with the dirt:
| https://github.com/akalenuk/unpager
| vintermann wrote:
| Not something terribly impressive or useful, but I wrote an
| image-scrambling (anything-scrambling, really) program which is
| quite unique.
|
| I was fascinated by the story of David A. Scott, who was obsessed
| with "bijective compression". It means compression programs where
| all files are valid archives, and moreover no two archives
| decompress to the same file. So no magic number file signatures,
| no checksums, no redundancy whatsoever. Scott felt that
| compression algorithms that didn't have this property were
| _wasteful_ , and of course, in a narrow technical sense he was
| right. There are of course a number of practical reasons why we
| tolerate a little redundancy.
|
| But he wouldn't let practicality stop him. He made bijective
| versions of many common compression algorithms. He made a
| bijective Huffman encoder (one where you'll never get "unexpected
| end of file"), a bijective arithmetic encoder, and even a
| bijective LZ variant. But most impressive of all, he made a
| bijective BWT version.
|
| The Burrows-Wheeler transform is fascinating on its own, and it's
| _almost_ bijective. It sorts letters in a text by their context,
| so that letters with similar context appear close to each other.
| In a strange vaguely DFT-like way, it switches long-distance and
| short-distance patterns around. The result is, in a typical text,
| long runs of the same letter, which can be easily compressed.
|
| But the traditional BWT technically works only up to rotation.
| You get a rotation of the original string back when reversing it,
| but you don't know if it's the right rotation. You need to store
| a tiny piece of extra information, either the index of the
| rotation, or a single sentinel character known to be the last (or
| first) letter in the original string. Getting rid of that last
| piece of information seemed impossible, but Scott figured out a
| way to do it!
|
| The result is that we have a truly bijective version of the BWT
| transform. Now I'm no mathematician, but surely that is
| beautiful? It's a true permutation now, that still does the weird
| low-order higher-order swapping thing, that you could surely
| analyse with many algebraic approaches that wouldn't work for the
| original.
|
| Anyway, what I did was implement this transformation on the lines
| or pixels of an image. So you get an effect similar to the "pixel
| sort" effect that glitch artists were into for a while, but it's
| reversible. I guess it's not really useful for anything other
| than making glitch art, but it's at least a program that does
| something pretty unique, and which only a very specific kind of
| weirdo would have the skills and inclination to write (namely
| me).
| jacknews wrote:
| I agree the BWT is genius.
|
| "Glitch art"
|
| It sounds like the real art is the algorithm and code. Would
| love to see it.
| vintermann wrote:
| A very basic implementation of the algorithm I have here:
|
| https://gist.github.com/HaraldKorneliussen/2bf20ca4f4f28c1aa.
| ..
|
| I implemented a slightly more efficient version of it that
| uses a prefix doubling strategy to do the string sorting
| step, as well as some glue code to make it work on lines and
| pixels, but that code is too messy to share for now.
| fstrazzante wrote:
| I built https://maphoto.app/ . Is a simple tool that allows you
| to add a mini-map on your picture. I used python and expressjs.
| stardenburden wrote:
| Love this, but is it just me or can it not read the location
| data embedded in images?
| benlamm wrote:
| Turn a YouTube channel into a personal podcast feed.
| https://gist.github.com/thebenlamm/9d862a3e6c9f481ab9d8a8afe...
|
| More detailed instructions in the script but the general idea is:
| 1. When a channel publishes a new video IFTT puts a text file
| with youtube link in Dropbox 2. Script downloads audio from
| youtube 3. Justcast.com free tier to turn a Dropbox folder into a
| podcast feed
| hyferg wrote:
| Hey, I'm building something related and would love to get your
| feedback on it. I can reply with my contact details if you're
| interested.
| t43562 wrote:
| It's sad to have to look so far back but:
|
| I installed linux for the first time in 1992 on my parents DOS
| machine. I had another partition for it. It was Slackware with
| kernel 1.2.13 I think. All off 5.25 inch floppy disks.
|
| Setup wasn't so simple then and I was a UNIX Noob so I managed to
| set the swap partition to the DOS hard drive and overwrote the
| first 4MB or so.
|
| The FAT filesystem's root directory and many others were blanked
| but not all files were lost. Norton tools and CHKDSK managed to
| get a lot of files back but many of the wordperfect documents
| were in the form "FILE0001.CHK" and no way to know what was in
| each one other than very laboriously opening all of them and
| trying to work it out from the contents.
|
| Very fortunately I had an old backup but the problem was to know,
| out of all the recovered files, which were covered by the backup
| and which were new since the backup. If I could ignore the files
| that I could restore from the backup then I only had to load and
| rename the ones that were new.
|
| CHKDSK couldn't recover the file size since that was in the
| destroyed directories. So you couldn't guess if some backed up
| file matched a restored one just by looking at size.
|
| In the end I wrote some perl+shell to get the md5 of the first
| kilobyte or two of all the backup files and all the recovered
| files. I used this to match files and get a list of all the
| recovered files with no corresponding match in the backup. These
| had to be new files and since there were far less of these I
| could manually load up each one into Wordperfect, see what it was
| and give it a sensible name.
|
| This program (don't have it anymore) saved my bacon and served
| no-one else but me. It took me from despair to triumph and that's
| why I like it so much.
| aj7 wrote:
| The king.
|
| http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/
| dzink wrote:
| - I built DreamList.com originally because I was working on
| another startup and as a founder I didn't want my Baby Registry
| showing up on search engines or my address showing up to random
| people who looked up my name. All the other services were using
| customer names as free SEO and every list was indexed by default
| with your address available. I built it safe and private for my
| own family and over time it went from side hustle to main hustle,
| especially as demand for privacy-respecting social and family
| software keeps going up.
|
| - A family member in an elected position needed to write a
| schedule for 22 healthcare professionals that take shifts every
| month and I wrote a tool for them that allows them to make sure
| everyone gets sufficient time off and nobody takes too much of
| the weekend load. They were elected again and to a higher
| leadership role partly because of the scheduling tool.
|
| - Regularly writing new stock trading, modeling, and timing
| software to improve my earnings from trading.
|
| - Wrote my own tool to scrape bios, cluster and find investors in
| different niche areas and need to rewrite it for recruiting
| people with niche expertise.
|
| - Created a social network for collaboration between nerds like
| me in different disciplines at top universities while I was at
| grad school and shut it down after it got flooded with recruiter
| spammers. Always thinking of ways to relaunch that.
| patcon wrote:
| I co-organized a weekly hacknight meetup of 40-70 people.
|
| I wrote a script to make Anki spaced repetition flash card decks
| with avatars and names pulled from the meetup API. I would use
| GitHub Actions to run the script a few hours before the event,
| then drop the importable deck into a Google Drive folder. I'd
| review the deck before the meetup, and then at the event, I'd not
| stress about names. I'd pretend to introduce myself to new people
| like I didn't already know their names, but I'd be able to make
| them feel very welcome when I remembered, or introduced them to
| others.
|
| Why do this arguably creepy thing? Because I am really forgetful
| with names, and when I forget, I become reluctant to approach
| people, which comes across as less friendly than I prefer to be.
| But I believe using people's names is REALLY important to
| community organizing. When I know names, I am really great at
| using them a lot, helping others learn them, generously making
| introductions, and helping people to feel a sense of belonging.
|
| It was the best community organizer hack I ever came up with,
| until meetup locked down their API and broke it...!
|
| https://github.com/CivicTechTO/anki-meetup-memorizer
| Lio wrote:
| That sounds like it would have indeed been a nice way to run a
| group. I like that you pretended not to know their names when
| first introduced.
|
| I remember going to an arduino hack group once. When I went to
| introduce myself to the organiser he cut me off mid-sentence
| with a flat "I know who you are Lio" and a unblinking stare.
|
| Now, in tech circle we often have people that are a bit "rough"
| when it comes to human interaction so I make allowances.
|
| I think what he meant was I recognise you from Twitter or
| something. As far as I know we get along fine and I've had
| absolutely no issues with him before or after.
|
| All the same, it freaked me the fuck out at the time. :D
| mkeeter wrote:
| The college president at my alma mater memorized the names
| and faces of every incoming freshman in my class (~200
| people).
|
| Unfortunately, I didn't know who _she_ was, so my first
| encounter was having a seemingly random stranger stop me on
| the sidewalk and ominously declare:
|
| "You didn't have a beard in your picture, _Matthew_. "
| lorenzk wrote:
| Anki (and Mochi) are great for names of neighbours, other kids'
| parents at daycare, and people you don't meet often. My wife
| just remembers any name she's heeard once. I can cheat.
| l2silver wrote:
| Yes Anki. I've also written my own code to convert markdown and
| yaml files into anki cards. So amazing.
| samstave wrote:
| >> _When I know names, I am really great at using them a lot_
|
| I once broke up with a girlfriend, PatCon, because, PatCon, she
| would use my name PatCon multiple times in a sentence, PatCon
| and after a while it was annoying enough to where I had to
| break up with her, PatCon.
| steedsofwar wrote:
| Not as exciting as some here, but helped me at times where i
| couldn't be at my desk however still be 'available'.
|
| I developed a 'transport' for Mulesoft, that would allow XMPP
| based communication, and relay that to my phone either by sms or
| email, and vice versa. At the time the communication were Jabber
| based and almost everything was through that, so this worked out
| quite nicely.
| nkantar wrote:
| I've got a few that I think are interesting enough to share.
|
| When I was getting divorced a few years ago, I had to wait out
| the mandatory six month waiting period (aka "cooling off"
| period). Since I had the actual date the divorce would be
| finalized, I wrote a script and scheduled it to send me a
| countdown every morning at 4am. For a few months upon waking up I
| was greeted by an SMS with the ever decreasing number. I called
| it my freedom counter and loved watching people I told about it
| go from curious to mildly uncomfortable to amused.
|
| Years later I repurposed the idea and made a wedding day
| countdown. This one started counting up after the big day, for
| continuous joy.
|
| At some point I started building a ridiculously tiny SaaS service
| around it (and even registered domains undorthe.wedding and
| dothe.wedding), but never got around to finishing and launching
| it.
|
| ---
|
| I've been tracking my weight daily since 2019. I used to just add
| an entry to an Airtable base, but the free plan has a per-base
| entry limit I've long surpassed.
|
| I didn't want to pay $10/mo just for that one thing, so I built a
| solution which let me send an SMS with the daily weight to a
| Twilio number, which then sent a request to an API endpoint I
| built, which then stored it in a TinyDB file on the server, which
| I then backed up to Backblaze using restic. The code behind the
| endpoint also sent me a graph of the last two weeks worth of
| entries, and the date I last weight that much or less.
|
| I then decided to decommission the server hosting the endpoint,
| and in order to avoid having to pay for something else rebuilt it
| as a combination of Airtable and GH Actions. I have a base in
| which I enter the daily weight, then a GH Action fires a few
| hours later, and it gets all the entries in the base, reads a
| TinyDB file from a separate repo, updates relevant records,
| updates the TinyDB file, and deletes old entries from the
| Airtable base. This is now costing me $0, which is fun in its own
| right.
|
| ---
|
| I started working from home during the pandemic, and my living
| room worked quite well as a personal office while I was single,
| living with just a cat. As my wife and I moved in together, there
| have been some challenges with working from a shared space, and
| we particularly found a need to communicate when I'm on a video
| call.
|
| I used the Circuit Playground Express I got at PyCon 2019 as an
| on-air light. It was plugged into my computer, which exposed it
| as a USB drive, and it ran an infinite loop that set the LEDs to
| red if I was on a call and green if I wasn't. I wrote a script
| that would detect the presence of a Zoom call process to do that
| automatically, and then another to manually toggle the flag using
| xbar.
|
| ---
|
| EDIT: I thought of one I actually wrote for work! We're a small
| team and were discussing making our on-call rotation official
| some time ago. Since we were starting from scratch, I suggested
| we try daily rotations (instead of the customary weekly ones),
| largely based on some things I'd read right here on HN. We don't
| yet use any tooling beyond a manually managed Google Calendar, so
| I wrote a script to generate a fair schedule (e.g., no one gets
| stuck with all Fridays) and output importable files for both the
| shared calendar and people's individual ones. We've used it for a
| few periods of time, and it seems to be good enough for our
| needs.
| yetihehe wrote:
| RegExTractor - simple java program to search for regex in text,
| then replaces each string with another one and appends all those
| results in other text window. VERY useful when you need to
| extract something from a text dump and present it in another
| format, like extracting all events from a log and writing them in
| one line between quotes and comma separated, ready to dump into
| some db query.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I built my own lay man's digital signage solution.
|
| I wanted to have a display in my living room, which shows the
| temperature of all rooms in my apartment. So I used an Android
| Picture Frame. This is connected via WIFI, and offers FTP access.
|
| A Docker service on my local in-house server grabs a random
| background image from a folder. Depending if we have day or night
| time, the picture will show satellite images from earth's day or
| night view.
|
| It then connects to my home assistant instance, and pulls all the
| necessary values. A SVG template is then filled with these
| values, and they are merged with the background image. The
| service then uploads the image to the picture frame, and it will
| refresh the image after some minutes.
|
| The whole thing uses templates and config files, so it's easy to
| extend.
|
| Unfortunately, the picture frame broke down since, and I haven't
| had the chance to buy another one yet.
| daniel-s wrote:
| I this similar to some of the smart mirror projects that exist?
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Somehow, yes. Except for the mirror part. :)
|
| In theory, the tool is extensible. The first version used an
| e-Ink display, which of course requires a different way of
| communicating. So the docker service can upload either to a
| FTP, or can communicate via REST at the moment. I really only
| implemented what I needed at that time.
| 08uhr wrote:
| I've made a tool to create 3D tours based on Threejs Editor and
| it has been really useful to make presentations more compelling.
|
| To create the presentation, you have to import 3D models
| (preferably fbx or glb) and place them in the 3D environment as
| desired. To create a "slide" you just have to click on the "new"
| button under the "slide" tab and it will capture the camera pose.
|
| After creating some slides you can press the "start" on the menu
| to preview the presentation. Once everything is loaded, you can
| scroll through the preview page, and the camera will be animated
| sequentially between the captured poses.
|
| That's the basic usage, but there are also other features
| available.
|
| The editor page:
| https://arthurmiy.gitlab.io/editor_slide_3d/editor/index.htm...
|
| Presentation made using the tool: https://arthurmiy.gitlab.io/se-
| webview/jaguariuna.html
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| I built a terminal-based gpt client for myself. It uses a sqlite
| db to store conversations and uses bubbletea for terminal
| drawing. I use it frequently while I'm writing code. It uses
| another library to render markdown so that code snippets gpt
| produces look pretty. It's not perfect by any stretch but it
| feels great to use it because I made it.
| https://github.com/collinvandyck/gpterm/
| plank wrote:
| I built a 'prezi file fixer'. In the old days, prezi used pez
| files which could get 'corrupted'. Not really corrupted, but when
| someone scaled some objects too much down, the prezi editor could
| no longer solve the issue, and the prezi file (really: a
| presentation) could be considered lost.
|
| Solved it locally at first: unzipped the pez file, searched for
| the smallest objects, and scaled them up. It might look a bit
| funny (that ball which had been made much smaller would have been
| scaled up), but people could again fix it using the prezi editor.
|
| Used this manually to 'fix' other peoples presentations, in which
| they send me their pez file, I would 'solve' it and send it back
| (usually: they would invite me to be a co-author, I would make a
| copy, fix that and make them editor to that copy). Used to do
| this quite a lot on the prezi forum.
|
| In the end automated it completely: made a service in which one
| could upload a pez file, my NAS would decompress it, fix is,
| compress it again, and mail a link to the corrected pez file.
|
| Software is defunct as problems have disappeared (and changes to
| prezi way made it no longer work).
|
| Incidentally not my first prezi product: I guess that was the
| Android app that made it possible to view a prezi on an Android
| phone or tablet, ways before Prezi themselves made the Android
| app (I think they already had the iOs app, not sure). [That app
| ran in more then 50 countries, but that is another tale;-0]
| verdverm wrote:
| declarative code generation https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
| because I was tired of having to change 10+ files in a full stack
| app to add a field to one type, so I brought ideas from devops to
| application development
|
| it's now generalized and for everyone
| dvirsky wrote:
| * When RSS was a thing but in my country a lot of news/content
| websites hadn't adopted yet, I wrote a service to quickly define
| scrapers that turn those sites into RSS feeds.
|
| * In one of my former workplaces I wrote (alongside another
| person) a gamified shared playlist app that allowed everyone to
| participate in being a DJ for our company hackathon (people
| getting more upvotes getting more playtime, songs getting many
| downvoted being skipped in the middle, etc). That was a lot of
| fun and surprisingly a very emotionally engaging experience for
| everyone.
| xnacly wrote:
| Currently i think my markdown to html converter, which i wrote
| without any dependencies and completely from scratch (except for
| a websocket lib). It supports watching for file changes and
| creating a live preview in the browser.
|
| Source: https://github.com/xNaCly/fleck
| kirubakaran wrote:
| I built https://crushentropy.com/ one weekend and I've been using
| it to plan my day ever since
| mojoe wrote:
| A browser extension to help me rate science fiction stories for
| compellingsciencefiction.com. It triggers an AWS Lambda-backed
| API to store my ratings and some story metadata, makes things way
| less tedious!
| kashnote wrote:
| Idk if this counts but I built myself a Rubik's cube timer and
| eventually made it public:
|
| https://cubedesk.io
|
| It was a weekend project which I used for several weeks before
| sharing it on Reddit. The feedback was so good I decided to make
| it public.
| [deleted]
| mourner wrote:
| Not too fancy, but I built a math model & interactive
| visualization of my parking spot to understand how to efficiently
| park there without bumping into anything:
| https://observablehq.com/@mourner/kinematics-of-reverse-angl...
|
| Discussed on HN here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891919
| prbs23 wrote:
| I rewrote the UI for an off the shelf WiFi digital photo frame so
| that it shows the latest raw images sent back from the
| Perseverance Mars rover. https://prbs23.com/blog/posts/picture-
| frame-from-mars/
|
| The picture frame secretly ran Android under the hood. Which
| meant I could replace the app which showed pictures pulled from
| the manufacturers server, with one which pulls photos from the
| NASA website. Fortunately they left ADB enabled with root
| permissions, so it was trivial to replace their startup app with
| my own. All the source code is public here:
| https://gitlab.com/prbs23/mars-photo-stream
| higgins wrote:
| I partially encrypt/decrypt a file based on the presence of
| special HEREDOCs (ie <<PRIVATE) so I can keep a public daily
| journal and keep some notes private.
|
| The tool is still a WIP as it isn't portable between machines --
| https://github.com/higgins/privatize
|
| more on it here: https://encapsulate.me/writing/Privatize.html
| purpleblue wrote:
| I wrote a program in C++ to download massive amounts of stock
| data from a data provider. The binary itself is 2 MB, memory use
| rises to over 16 GB and it frees everything at the end, so there
| are no memory leaks (I'm particularly proud of that). Over the
| years I've found better and better ways of making it run faster
| because a daily run will take over 6 hours of downloading and
| writing to my database.
|
| I also wrote a multi-threaded backtester in C++ because the
| program I was using was only single-threaded. I stopped using
| that several years ago but the act of writing it was a lot of
| fun.
| gaws wrote:
| Is the code public?
| l2silver wrote:
| I should really give c++ a go...
| bschwindHN wrote:
| If you're going for multi-threaded and "frees all memory at
| the end", it's probably going to be way easier to write it in
| Rust, and you should end up with essentially the same result.
| jak6jak wrote:
| My friends and I used to watch movies almost every night online
| during COVID and to decide on the movie I created a polling
| website that pulls information from TMDB. It was really useful
| because we could see the movie description, genre and length
| right there while voting instead of having to google for every
| movie title. I planned on adding new voting methods as well
| instead of majority vote like ranked voting, a movie randomizer
| that the chance a movie wins is based on how many votes it has
| and others. Unfortunately, we no longer watch that many movies
| together so the incentive to add those features decreased.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| I created an AI foot generator. Whenever I had someone take a
| photo of me, they would often cut off my foot. My program would
| generate an artificial foot for the photo. To be honest, it had
| some hilariously bad results sometimes.
| dgently7 wrote:
| there are two things I've built that maybe aren't groundbreaking
| but I think fit the brief. Might be helpful context that I'm not
| a professional programmer so these are both hobby projects.
|
| 1. I have too many aunts/uncles/cousins but we have a long (30
| year at least) tradition of doing a family gift exchange over the
| holidays. After one too many years of forgetting who I had or
| having my mom get asked by my aunt what my cousin should get me I
| build a website for my family that allows them to manage a gift
| list. Started as a super basic Django app and that was about 7
| years ago and every year I add one or two features. Now it's got
| all kinds things like notifications and will even help you track
| your incoming packages and know if they are gift wrapped or not.
|
| Thing 2, was a wedding evite/website for My wedding. At the time
| I looked around and hated how impersonal all the evite options
| were, so I created a website with a cms that would give every
| user a customized, personalized experience. Invited to the
| rehearsal dinner? you see that dates and details. Are you one of
| my friends? You get the set of content with our inside jokes. It
| didn't need any kind of login or passwords but provided everyone
| with a custom page. It also provided me with a full database to
| manage rsvp, song requests, track who gave us gifts (and what),
| etc. Yes my partner thought it was overkill (to answer that
| question) but it was super fun to build and ended up getting
| retooled for my sister in law's wedding last year.
| exotree wrote:
| Probably not as cool as everyone else's but I made savonius wind
| turbine to learn more about the basics of wind energy. It was a
| fun jaunt!
| NiagaraThistle wrote:
| Not sure how interesting they are for others, but i built a few
| things to keep myself accountable and track progress on parts of
| my life I wanted to improve - small parts, but things I just kept
| procrastinating on.
|
| 1. I built a small web app to provide a cycling routine to help
| me go from zero miles and overweight to riding a century (100
| miles) this summer. I used to ride move frequently when I was
| younger and my longest ride was 87 miles with camping gear on my
| back. But 2 decades, a web dev job, and 2 kids later I am lucky
| to be able to get 10 miles per week for any consistent stretch of
| time. The app takes my recent riding skill and athleticism, and
| creates a 6 week riding 'program' for me basing itself on # of
| miles per day for the 6 weeks and increasing each week until the
| culmination of the 100 mile ride, allowing for 2 rest days each
| week. It isn't the most robust but it's gotten me motivated to
| ride this summer.
|
| 2. I built a reading list tracker that I can add the books I want
| to read for myself and my kids. It suggests which book to read
| next if I can't decide. It tracks # of books to read, #
| completed, # of pages & hours to read (so I can see how unlikely
| it is that I will ever finish my list or can plan time
| accordingly to know through the list systematically), allows me
| to categorize the books, and lists them as MY reading list or a
| list to read with my KIDS.
|
| 3. A European travel planner that I track country and city costs
| with, can create custom travel itineraries, which then will show
| actual costs for the itinerary based on the costs I am
| tracking/inputting for cities/countries/attractions.
|
| 4. More fun for myself and friends: A soccer scores predictor
| game. We each follow teams and clubs from various world leagues,
| and pick the scores for upcoming matches. Then the app scores us
| based on our predictions and we have annual competitions with
| each other. I built this before these were as popular as they are
| now, and well before the likes of FanDuel/gambling sites.
| servercobra wrote:
| It's not specifically just for me but for my team at the World
| Largest Trivia Contest [0]. It's a 54 hour long contest,
| questions are broadcast over the radio, you have the length of 2
| songs to call in the answers, and you can use any source to find
| the answer. Sounds easy, right? Just Google it? Nope. "In a big
| screen flick, XYZ is talking to ABC about something. In the
| background, a train passes. What does it say on the train?"
|
| This has led to a ton of fun little coding projects to help us
| answer questions better. A lot of very hard to Google questions
| involve album covers, so I ran every album cover I could get
| through Google Vision and built a little search engine. Another
| part of the contest is short (1-2s) clips of songs being
| broadcast and you have a few hours to come up with what they are.
| We built a massive fingerprint library ahead of time and used it
| to answer some of those (Google finally got better at this too,
| before we built this, it'd never work because the clip was so
| short). We also use AWS to live transcribe the broadcast because
| one of the hardest parts was remembering "were they asking for
| the actor? their character? the movie?" and having to wait until
| they ask the question again between songs.
|
| Next up is a parallel auto-dialer. There's only a handful of
| people answering phones, so actually calling in the answer can be
| a struggle.
|
| [0] http://90fmtrivia.org
| dmitshur wrote:
| I made a personal website [1] that aggregates my notifications
| from GitHub and Gerrit in one stream. It updates in real-time
| without me needing to refresh the page.
|
| It also hosts a small set of personal Go packages. For this, it
| implements a git server, module proxy protocol, issue tracker and
| change tracker. At some point, I want to differentiate the code
| review UI with nice-to-haves specific to Go, but haven't gotten
| there yet.
|
| I'm playing around with compiling the whole thing (written in Go,
| of course) to WebAssembly that runs client-side, along with
| server-side rendering for the initial page load. This is mostly
| to make iteration easier and faster for me.
|
| It also lets people leave comments or reactions to blog posts and
| such by signing in via a URL rather than username+password.
|
| [1] https://dmitri.shuralyov.com
| timwaagh wrote:
| I mean I guess I did build an overbed table to put the TV on. I
| don't know whether it counts as tech though.
| nrobinaubertin wrote:
| We were using facebook exclusively for the 'private group'
| feature with a some friends in 2012. We liked the fact that it
| was private and asynchronous. But I didn't like the fact that it
| was tied to facebook. I decided to put into practice what I've
| learned that year at my informatics school and created forum
| written in php. It was not much but we liked the fact that it was
| ours.
|
| Ten years later, I'm still fiddling on it and it has grown to a
| real open-source project that you can find on github [0]. It's
| still primarly here to serve me since I'm the only maintainer but
| starts to be driven by external propositions. It's meant to be
| easy to deploy, easy to use, cheap in resources and reliable.
|
| [0] https://github.com/zusam/zusam
| lenova wrote:
| Hey, just wanted to say this is very neat! I'm going to try it
| out this weekend as a self-hosted Google Keep alternative.
|
| (PS: I may have broken your demo server, I'm not certain ;-) )
| nrobinaubertin wrote:
| Thank you very much ! No problem, it should reset every hour
| Joe2337 wrote:
| A toolset for learning Japanese with focus on listening
| comprehension. Most resources suggest a "writing systems first"
| approach, which seemed counterintuitive to me. So I started
| coding my own tools 10 years ago. First, a small spaced
| repetition system for vocabulary connected to forvo
| (pronunciation database) and lateron an addon for Anki (popular
| spaced repetition system). The addon is made for studying with
| movies and includes a dictionary and a parser for converting the
| original script to something simpler.
|
| In retrospect, it was totally worth it: I reached a decent amount
| of fluency in listening comprehension and used the tools to
| create a Japanese course for others, which became popular on
| ankiweb: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782
| vinu76jsr wrote:
| this is very wholesome, is there a way to port it for other
| language.
| serp002 wrote:
| My brother and I built a mini webapp that takes data from the
| Strong app for workouts, and shows you a list of all your muscle
| groups and filters it with color based on how much fatigue each
| muscle has accrued over the week. It also gives you
| recommendations of how much weight you should lift for your next
| workout. It's a nice way to make sure each muscle group is
| getting exercised enough each week!
| jiveturkey wrote:
| VLF (polar) heart rate monitor receiver. stress reaction feedback
| to the wearer via audio.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| I used to run a hackspace, so quite a lot! But in no particular
| order these are some of my favourites:
|
| - A tracking airsoft turret that would point at and fire at
| movement. Was coded in Processing.
|
| - A world clock of digital clocks that synced with NTP and could
| be set to many regions when working with different timezones.
|
| - A QFH antenna for receiving live satellite images via SSTV from
| weather satellites
|
| - A core xy assembly with a peristaltic pump that can be placed
| over a frying pan to make fun designs of pancakes
|
| - A screenshot tool that uploaded to a private site with a short
| code URL for sharing screenshots without relying on ott SaaS
| products
| [deleted]
| drewbeck wrote:
| Starting in HS and continuing for years I developed the first and
| only complete software package I've ever made, for my father.
| He's a EE and was doing a lot of his board design in excel -- if
| I remember this meant he then needed to map the excel design onto
| a layout program to connect all the parts; the layout program
| generates a netlist and the netlist then goes to the actual
| layout person who figures out the final position of parts/traces
| on the board.
|
| He hired me to make a VBA program that generates the netlist
| directly from excel. Refined it over the years and I believe he
| still uses it to this day. He can turn around a design in far
| keat time than it used to take.
|
| I'm no EE -- and it's been probably 15 years since I've touched
| that code -- so I may have gotten some details wrong here. But it
| was a cool project to work on and taught me a lot about code!
| jojohack wrote:
| For fun I stitched together a map of my hometown from older fire
| insurance maps ( taken in 1914 ) Ironically much of the downtown
| area was destroyed by a fire two years later.
|
| https://www.joeycato.com/stuff/paris-texas-1914/
| crowdhailer wrote:
| I've built my own small embeddable functional language with
| structural record unions and effect types. By focusing on making
| the language tiny I have been able to embed it in arduino, web
| and server projects. The aim is to eventually use it for every
| side project I make. https://petersaxton.uk/log/
| callamdelaney wrote:
| This looks really cool!
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Your site triggered the iOS Safari prompt to allow your site
| access to my microphone
| crowdhailer wrote:
| oh yeah. I also made an voice assistant called Colin on the
| homepage
| adnanc wrote:
| I made an iOS app which I use to control the Bontrager Flare and
| ION bike lights via Bluetooth LE.
|
| It turns on/off the lights, changes the mode and also shows the
| battery status
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| The first build of DemoTime was for myself. Obviously it no
| longer is.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| perfect example of how to say you are the founder without
| saying you are the founder?
| l2silver wrote:
| If you build for yourself, you never lose.
| elesiuta wrote:
| A little buzzer/led you can plug into an epee to detect hits
| without a scoring box, there's no grounding so it still triggers
| on hitting the opponents weapon but was more than good enough for
| practices.
|
| It was very simple, using a 555 timer and took almost no time to
| make, but it was among the best returns of effort I put in vs
| value I got out of it. It also stands out as one of my few
| personal projects that was something physical since most of them
| are only software now, and more tools than things purely for fun.
| prevent6672 wrote:
| I want to learn to type telex on Vietnamese so I made a super
| simple app: https://0-sv.github.io/viet-typing-tutor/
|
| I still have to add a lot of words though, any feedback is
| welcome
| ecliptik wrote:
| A "framework" to convert my Jekyll blog into Gemini and Gopher
| sites. Mainly converts markdown with Pandoc, but also generates a
| rudimentary site index and headers/footers for each page.
|
| https://github.com/ecliptik/ecliptik.github.io/blob/main/_sc...
| qwerty3344 wrote:
| OOOH I've got one - I made a short script that lets me play any
| video on any site at arbitrary speed (speed controlled by arrow
| keys).
|
| //@ts-check window.kVideoSpeed = 1; window.initialVolume = 1;
|
| NUMPAD_3 = "99" NUMPAD_2 = "98" NUMPAD_6 = "102" NUMPAD_5 = "101"
|
| UP_ARROW = "38" DOWN_ARROW = "40"
|
| let timeoutId = null; document.onkeydown = (e) => { if
| (!document.querySelectorAll("video").length) { // no-op for pages
| with no videos return; } window.initialVolume =
| document.querySelector('video')?.volume || 1
| let myDiv = getOrMakeDiv(); e = e || window.event;
| let KEYCODE = e.keyCode; // NOTE: can't use
| left/right b/c those go forward/back 10s on some sites if
| ((KEYCODE == UP_ARROW || KEYCODE == NUMPAD_6) &&
| window.kVideoSpeed < 4) { // up arrow
| window.kVideoSpeed += 0.5; myDiv.textContent =
| window.kVideoSpeed; } else if ((KEYCODE == DOWN_ARROW ||
| KEYCODE == NUMPAD_5) && window.kVideoSpeed > 1) { //
| down arrow window.kVideoSpeed -= 0.5;
| myDiv.textContent = window.kVideoSpeed; } for
| (let el of document.querySelectorAll("video")) {
| el.playbackRate = window.kVideoSpeed; // prevent
| volume from changing setTimeout(() => {
| el.volume = window.initialVolume }, 100) }
| if (timeoutId) { clearTimeout(timeoutId); }
| // set timeout to remove div timeoutId = setTimeout(() =>
| { myDiv.remove() }, 1000);
|
| }; function getOrMakeDiv() { if
| (!document.getElementById("myDiv")) { let
| div = document.createElement("div"); div.id =
| "myDiv"; // add styles to div
| div.style.padding = "8px"; div.style.textAlign =
| "center"; div.style.fontSize = "16px";
| div.style.position = "fixed"; div.style.fontWeight =
| "600"; div.style.border = "1px solid yellow";
| div.style.color = "white"; div.style.backgroundColor
| = "black"; div.style.zIndex = "999999";
| // insert div at the top of the body if
| (document.fullscreenElement) {
| document.fullscreenElement.prepend(div,
| document.fullscreenElement.firstChild) }
| else { document.body.insertBefore(div,
| document.body.firstChild); } } return
| document.getElementById("myDiv"); }
| asim wrote:
| Lots of things. But one I am coming back to is called Malten
| (https://malten.com). It was essentially a place for me to
| blackhole my thoughts anonymously rather than putting them on
| twitter. Recently as I've seen ChatGPT take off it's made me
| revisit the project and create an integration for it (not yet
| publicly hosted). Ideally I'd just be able to voice my thoughts
| to an AI now in a private manner. Let's see.
|
| https://github.com/asim/malten for anyone who wants to run it
| themselves.
| jansan wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what do you hope the AI will do with your
| thoughts?
| asim wrote:
| A cheaper form of therapy. Therapists are mostly mirroring
| your own thoughts or helping you see things you can't see.
| Ideally you have something that can just listen and echo your
| thoughts back or acknowledge them, without the need to pay
| $100/hour.
| jansan wrote:
| Wow, that's an application for AI that I never had thought
| about. Fascinating idea.
| asim wrote:
| Thanks! Still trying to figure out the AI aspect, it was
| mostly just anonymous ephemeral messaging for a long
| time. So trying to understand the best way to add that
| in. Also whether I even care about charging for it tbh.
| bluetwo wrote:
| Currently working on building a virtual art gallery populated
| with fictitious works from dead artists generated by Stable
| Diffusion. Users in the same room can talk to each other using
| WebRTC.
| btbuilder wrote:
| I built a program in Go to defeat GeoIP lock-outs for my home
| network.
|
| It runs on our home router and functions as the primary DNS
| server. If the record name matches a regex the DNS request is
| forwarded over a VPN to a DNS server in the target country. Any
| other requests are forwarded to my ISP's DNS. If the response is
| a CNAME then the A record name is cached so that follow-up
| requests are also forwarded over the VPN.
|
| Before returning the IPs in the foreign DNS response /32 routes
| for the IPs are added to send any home network traffic for them
| over the VPN.
|
| This means that any client on our home network can transparently
| access GeoIP locked sites. It's worked for around 8 years with no
| modifications.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is brilliant!
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| My ISP is total crap and charges a fortune for a miserable
| service that at this point should be nationalized, and I'm not a
| radical communist either. Anyway, I need to monitor my usage and
| the interface they provide is a dumpster fire so I created the
| most spectacular Rube Goldberg abstraction to get access to all
| my past data using damn epoch timestamps and a data scrapper and
| now I can forecast my usage, set SMS alerts, get usage on a
| Telegram bot and access all my data via API. I think other people
| might want to use it but I've always been too busy to polish the
| product for an audience.
| l2silver wrote:
| I think all of Canada would be interested.
| psadri wrote:
| I improved our kitchen hood vent by attaching a semi-rigid
| aluminum duct to one of the fans. The other end of the duct can
| be positioned right over a frying pan to suck in cooking smell.
| It works much better compared to the vent itself.
| zacksiri wrote:
| I've been working on https://instellar.app. It's a SaaS product
| that will enable anyone to turn their own infrastructure into a
| PaaS without needing to hire a DevOps.
|
| I did this because I've had problems hiring DevOps (lack of
| resource / lack of people to hire / and kubernetes was just too
| complex). I decided that I need a tool let's me have my own
| heroku on my own infra and here we are.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Reminds me of https://tsuru.io/ :)
| zacksiri wrote:
| Nice! Good to see others are tackling the same problem!
| Implicated wrote:
| Years back I was living in the foothills just outside of the
| Yosemite NP gates and fell in love with the trails through the
| Sierra Nevada. It wasn't long before I realized that how much
| weight I carried dramatically affected _everything_ about my
| trips - so I got serious about finding a good compromise between
| "ultralight" and "comfortable but still light".
|
| The gear and testing it was very expensive, I wanted to make my
| own but didn't know how to sew - but quickly found the "cottage"
| industry of lightweight and ultralight backpacking gear and fell
| in love again. Now I loved the trail and the gear, but I was also
| broke.
|
| One of my first non-visual basic programming projects was
| building a scraper for a handful of backpacking forums' used gear
| sections - I found that I was able to acquire and test the gear I
| wanted at a fraction of the cost this way, as well as find buyers
| for the gear I was ready to cycle out.
|
| While I did build this for myself I eventually realized that
| there were so many good deals and people with good gear looking
| to offload it - but the forums and the communities were so
| fractured it made it hard for others (just like it did for me). I
| ended up building the whole thing (again) as my first foray into
| playing with Laravel.
|
| It's still up and working - thousands of people still using it,
| maybe some of you would also enjoy it... [0] (no ads, no
| affiliate offers, ever)
|
| 0: https://lwhiker.com
|
| * Note, I'm aware some of the "source" forums are broken/no
| longer scraping properly, will be updating it soon.
| denvaar wrote:
| I made a shell script that can be used to generate a diff of what
| data was modified in your pg database between two points in time.
| I use it to help me get a quick sense of what certain actions do
| without having to dive into the code too deeply. It's a pretty
| simple thing, but has been valuable to me quite a bit.
| https://github.com/denvaar/pgdiff
| parentheses wrote:
| I'm so glad I'm on page-2 of this thread. This is a fantastic
| tool! I would use the hell out of this :)
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm building an automatic file ingestion and processing pipeline
| which will run on a Raspberry Pi 3. It'll do some mundane tasks
| like renaming, and/or converting video files and sending to
| relevant people.
|
| It's like Node Red, but simpler and less resource intensive.
|
| The idea is to get the file to the "Inbox" of the system, and
| rest is automagically handled.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I just wrote a long bash script to automate the trimming and
| organising of a large collection of videos.
|
| I recently bought a drone for photography. But the video looks so
| good that I end up taking a lot of video, too. Video is new to
| me, so the raw files keep piling up in my "in" tray. I will have
| to learn to edit video, one day, or send them to a pro to edit
| for me.
|
| I decided that the least I could do is watch the videos, organize
| them, and trim them to just the interesting parts. Saves on disk
| space.
|
| I wrote a bash script to help me:
|
| - Loop over all videos in a dir.
|
| - Play each video.
|
| - Extract the clips I want.
|
| - Tag, rate and organize the clips. The script
| opens each video in two MPV players. One is full screen and
| unscaled (watching 4k on a 2k screen means the video appears
| zoomed in to a 2k region). This is for pixel peaking. I can
| quickly check, at a glance, the raw video quality. Another MPV
| window acts like a PIP, taking up a quarter of the screen, and
| showing the whole video scaled down. If a video is
| DLOG, a LUT is applied to MPV to show the video in a more natural
| colour (raw LOG video looks grey before it is processed).
| Hacking this together, without a plan, I use simple msg boxes, on
| top of the playing videos, to control the process. Better than
| having to flick back and forth to a terminal window.
| When I see a good place in the video to start my cut, I press the
| "Start" button. An input box pops up, prefilled with the current
| time of the player, e.g. 00:00:09 if the video is 9 seconds in.
| I watch some more of the video and notice some messy, jerky
| camera movement starting at 38s. I press the "End" button, and
| another input box pops up to capture the end time of the clip. I
| change it to 00:00:37 to exclude that jerky part. Now,
| in the background, ffmpeg is called to extract the section of
| video between 9s and 37s. I use keyframes so that video does not
| need to be re-encoded. It sets the real start time to the nearest
| keyframe before the start, and the real end time to the next
| keyframe after the input end_time. This means the output video is
| always a bit longer than I chose. I can trim those few extra
| frames when I use the clip. Because we don't re-encode, the
| extraction time is near instantaneous. A preview of
| the clipped file is played back at high-speed. If the
| source video is long, and contains more content I want, I
| continue playing until I see the next clip I want to extract.
| When I finish with a source file, I am asked to give a star
| rating (1-5) for the videos and then to choose tags. For these I
| make use of the rating and file tagging extended metadata (xdg).
| I can select any number of pre-existing tags, and add new tags.
| Some metadata tags will be added automatically, such as
| frame_rate, resolution, and colour_profile. Now the
| clips are in the output dir, and I choose to send the original
| file to the wastebin. The next video in the source dir starts
| playing, and the process continues until the dir is empty.
|
| Then, using Dolphin file browser, or Digikam, I can click on a
| tag and instantly see all clips under it. I can see all videos
| that are 50fps and DLog color. Or, I can filter all clips tagged
| "sea" and "sunset", or "mountains" and "sunrise".
|
| The result is a neat pile of trimmed and catalogued video clips.
| Ready to be thrown into some YouTube video.
|
| Only problem, now? I'm more interested in refining the bash
| script, than I am in learning to use Resolve to make a finished
| video.
| koliber wrote:
| A shortcut on my iPhone, that I can dictate a note to, and it
| transcribes it and puts it into my GTD inbox in Notion. It helps
| me not forget things. Lowers the friction and allows me to make
| note of fleeting ideas, thoughts, and things to get done.
| l2silver wrote:
| I'm guessing this wasn't literally a shortcut
| tuckerconnelly wrote:
| Machine-learning predictions for Draft Kings (NBA) :)
|
| It scraped basically every single player's performance in every
| single NBA game ever. I tried XGBoost and Keras, and the Keras
| model outperformed the XGBoost model. Was about to incorporate
| real-time injury data, so if a player was injured or out that
| game it would not select them.
|
| In the end it didn't perform too well. I think the limitation was
| my lack of domain knowledge, and not really knowing what features
| to select that would predict a players performance. Also data. I
| hear MLB is more consistent than NBA because there's just more
| data.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I'm sitting on MLB data (converting it to a BigQuery
| warehouse), am also interested in this space. The challenge w/
| MLB is randomness plays a larger element - most folks in the
| MLB gambling space prefer other leagues where an information
| advantage more directly translates to profits.
| [deleted]
| piercebot wrote:
| I made a safe-to-wake light for my son out of a Raspberry Pi. It
| serves up a responsive website on the local network so you can
| manually change the lights or update the schedule.
|
| Been running like a champ for over 3 years now, which has been
| the most pleasant surprise. I'm used to ecosystem entropy causing
| things to break.
|
| I documented my adventures in a 6-part series:
| https://ajpierce.com/2020-01-04_safe-to-wake-pt1/
| TySchultz wrote:
| The old Yahoo News Digest app from years back was incredible and
| I never could find a replacement. I decided to build my own.
|
| It uses Embeddings to gather thousands of articles and compare
| against each other. Then uses a relational graph to combine those
| into collections and uses an LLM to create a succinct summary,
| quote, map, and other info about the topic.
|
| It lets me the news for the day within minutes instead of
| endlessly scrolling.
| alex_lav wrote:
| 80% of a basketball simulation engine
|
| 80% of a Teamfight Tactics simulation engine
|
| 80% of a data analytics platform for sports data
|
| 40% of a PaaS to manage common open source software deployments
| to the cloud
|
| I don't finish much. It's my absolute greatest flaw.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Hey hey! I also let a sports analytics platform flail until I
| got tired of paying for the server. projectbaseball.org,
| frontend still up but the backend is gone.
| sandeshnaroju wrote:
| I built an open-source low-code platform to build mobile apps in
| JSON, https://www.nanoapp.dev/
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Nothing special, but I didn't want to share my dietary habits
| with an unknown number of third parties, so I built my own
| calorie tracker. I didn't use anything fancy, I just ran Grist on
| my home server with a half dozen tables. Had to rewrite it a
| couple of times to support stuff like recipes, but it's good
| enough for my purposes. Didn't even need to add auth to it, I
| just use Tailscale on my personal devices to access the server
| from anywhere without exposing it to the internet.
| XMasterrrr wrote:
| That's very neat, any chance you'd be willing to open source
| it?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| There isn't much there to open source, just a bunch of Excel-
| like formulas that progressively roll up data from
| ingredients to the final results for the day.
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