I wrote a small utility that helps me to kickstart writing blog posts. https://github.com/scriptnull/sblog (Been saving me a few minutes ever since)
That's neat. I love ideas like this that remove small amounts of friction from useful behaviour.
Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
11–20 of 458 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#12I've made a lot of things for myself. Of the things that come to mind:
1. An Alexa Skill that allows me to ask my bookshelf for the position of a book. I've spoken at PyCon India 2019 about this. (https://stonecharioteer.com/2019/10/12/pycon.html) 2. A Discord bot (https://stonecharioteer.com/sarathi.html) to update my blog's TIL page. (https://stonecharioteer.com/til.html) 3. A shell script to connect to the right Wi-Fi at my office (useless now) 4. A script to set/unset proxies on my work laptop so I could download packages from external registries. 5. A script that would collect weather information to correlate with my migraines. This eventually ended up being a correlation is not causation situation. 6. A NAS using a Raspberry Pi 4 so that all TVs at home can stream from my movie/anime collection.
I am in the process of building more things, as a way to learn Rust, and as a way to scratch the programming itch that I have. Do reach out if you want to discuss any of my projects. I will blog more stuff eventually. I use the same handle on Twitter.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#13A webapp to help me calibrate hydraulic models of water networks.
The original concept was in excel and VBA.
I ended up pulling out the engine as a separate open source library which I've used on a few other projects.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#14I got tired of firing up an image editor every time to create a simple open-graph/social image for my blog posts and built https://thumbnail.ai
It's been a great time saver and a handful of people use it daily.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#15I wrote this (at work) to update versions in our projects from one place, and even partial versions. Saves me some headache and mental space every time. I know there are competitors but none I found was just simple, everything else was bloated with Git-integration or regex search instead.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#16Better habit support for Todoist:
https://habitsfortodoist.com/ and https://github.com/travisjungroth/habits-for-todoist
Algorithm practice: https://github.com/travisjungroth/algo-drills
A tiny script that adds articles I want to see again onto my todo list: https://github.com/travisjungroth/boomerang/blob/master/boom...
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#17Decoder Ring: https://james.darpinian.com/decoder/ to look up error codes. Started with OpenGL, then added Windows error codes, Linux, HTTP, and Vulkan.
I was a bit frustrated always pasting error codes into Google, as it doesn't always come up with the best result. You often have to extract just the code from a larger message, and potentially convert to/from hex or signed/unsigned, e.g. Windows error codes like "-2005270521". My tool handles all that for you. Just paste an error message containing codes in whatever format and it'll find them, and it's incredibly fast.
I also made https://aqi.today during the California wildfires. I was frustrated by other air quality sites that load way too slowly and don't emphasize the one number that matters. Airnow.gov has improved since I made this, but but I still prefer mine for the simplicity, speed, and much better data sourced from Purpleair. Airnow.gov sensors are typically 5+ miles apart, and data is delayed by an hour or more, while air quality can vary on a block-to-block and minute-to-minute basis. Purpleair has far better sensor coverage and data is delayed only 10-20 minutes.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#18When wunderlist was shutdown i had to find an alternative. I only used basic features of wunderlist and wanted something similar. But all options was just too much. So I built it myself. I've used it every day since. For shoppinglists and work tasks and any household tasks. It's perfect for what I want. It even looks a bit like wunderlist. Https://github.com/lallassu/doit
Then I also wanted to read my news from the shell in a simple manner. And I knew what I wanted but no existing rss client had the feeling I wanted. So I built Gorss. I use that every day as well. Https://github.com/lallassu/gorss
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#19Not small, but myopic in a way.
I've been tinkering on and off with my own programming language for the last couple of years: http://www.adama-lang.org/
The key motivation is dealing with the complexities of managing all the state between people as they play a game with a strong boundary for privacy.
I am debating what my next steps are with what I've learned. Do I focus on growing things around it, or do I abandon yet another project and do something that might actually achieve success.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#20As a Wikimedian who used to spend sleepless nights editing on the Malagasy language Wikipedia and Wiktionary, I have been developing botjagwar (https://github.com/radomd92/botjagwar) on and off for the last 10 years. More details at https://github.com/radomd92/botjagwar/wiki/Backstory
It's mostly bot scripts written in Python. Data is stored in a self-hosted PostgreSQL. In addition to a backend I'd written myself, I also use PostgREST. A rather rustic front-end was written in 2020 (https://github.com/radomd92/botjagwar-frontend) as a COVID lockdown side-project. Other scripts also use Redis as a page cache to speed up operations involving a large number of page reads.