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Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#131

Post by 65 »

positr0n wrote: post #112
65 wrote: post #81

Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…

How does the full text search work? On-device copy of all the notes? Text index in another database? Just download them all from s3 when you search?

Text gets indexed in another database every time a note gets saved/deleted/created. There might be better solutions with AWS Athena but using a simple MySQL database was by far the easiest (and quickest in terms of querying) way to add full text search. My database is paid via usage so I don't have to spend much money, if any, to index my notes.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#132

Post by BoppreH »

I have a 3-letter domain that I use as my personal playground (think "xyz.com"). It features:

- One-click anonymous upload of text, clipboard, and files. So from any computer, I can visit xyz.com + ctrl+v to upload the clipboard, write notes to myself, drag and drop a file, etc. It's a risky feature, but there's nothing to attract attention and you don't even get a URL back.

- Authenticated sessions see a list of uploaded files, with buttons to copy link, download, delete, or generate QR code. There's also real-time notifications for each upload.

- Simplified RSS feed reader[1]. It scans my feeds every 10 minutes, and displays the URLs of new items. It has one button, that opens all URLs in new tabs and marks them as read.

- A Server-sent-events channel[2], and a UI that displays visitors in real time. The channel allows me to send redirects/file downloads to any visitor, so I'm constantly asking people to visit xyz.com when I need to hand them something digitally. Visitors are color coded with randomized backgrounds for identification.

- Youtube video downloader (powered by yt-dlp), along with audio extractor and pitch+speed correction for songs.

- Authentication is by approval from an already authenticated session (usually my phone). In the worst case I can edit the text file via SSH.

I add or remove widgets according to my needs. At one point I had chat integration with Facebook+WhatsApp+Telegram (got me banned from WhatsApp), radio player (replaced with Spotify), and even balances by scraping my bank accounts, credit cards, and Steam (removed after a bank started asking questions).

The whole thing runs in custom pair of Go and Python servers, developed slowly over the last ten years, and I use it multiple times a day. Feels like a digital tree house, messy but fun and useful.

[1]: https://github.com/boppreh/feeder

[2]: https://github.com/boppreh/server-sent-events

Edit: people have found it and started spamming uploads of "HELLO FROM HN". One IP looks Swedish. Well, Hi! But I'm taking it down for a few days to avoid tempting more people.

And shoutout to the Go team, that server has been rock solid and 100% backwards compatible over the past ten years.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#133

Post by doubled112 »

xolox wrote: post #122

Over the years I've built lots of small and large tools for personal use, some of them I'm still planning to release as open source "one day", others I have no intention of ever releasing. One of the biggest and most useful of those tools is a Django web interface that accepts JPG/PNG/PDF file uploads of scanned documents and in case of images (JPG/PNG) it will run "tesseract" to OCR extract text from the images (in…

I use paperless-ngx but the concept is the same.

It is hard to understand how much easier this makes dealing with all of the paper in your life until you have it.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#134

Post by lelanthran »

Yes. My task tracker works better for me than anything else I've tried over the years (decades, even), including every single one showcased on HN.

It's quick to start, non-laggy to use and matches my thought process exactly. Has both a CLI and a GUI.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#135

Post by johnisgood »

halotrope wrote: post #55

Yes many things actually. - A mac app to generate to read text as playlists from openai tts api (my gf can't use the api) - A automatic visual scraper that can get arbitray information from any website (e.g go to target and get the top 3 milk prices or get the licensing information from this opensource project) - An ETL tool (called tabmaster) that can sync arbitrary json apis into postgres tables. with automatic sch…

> A automatic visual scraper that can get arbitray information from any website (e.g go to target and get the top 3 milk prices or get the licensing information from this opensource project)

Sounds interesting. How does this work exactly? How do I input that I want the top 3 milk prices, and how does it retrieve that data?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#136

Post by KaiMagnus »

I wanted to say my Figma plugins that I made for myself, but I published them so it doesn't count.

When I was around 15 I wanted to try out Win Forms. I also used to play a lot of Dota 2 so I created this app to calculate how many Techies mines would to take down a hero with X HP. Complete with sliders, input field, radio buttons and checkboxes to select ability levels and items. Pretty sure it will never get published, but the .exe is still sitting on my desktop.

https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Techies

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#137

Post by kingofthehill98 »

beattheprose wrote: post #78

Web service that turns a YouTube channel to a Podcast-compatible RSS feed, just by changing the URL from https://youtube.com/XYZ to https://$SERVICE_URL/XYZ . Use it almost every day. It’s nice to keep up with channels I care about while escaping the algorithm. Something I work on-and-off on. Could be interested in open-sourcing it fully if folks are interested in helping out. Im a pretty junior engineer, so work is…

I would totally use this no matter how bad the code is.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#138

Post by carom »

I wrote a desktop client for an IPTV service. They have a mobile app and Apple TV app that are good, but there was not a good way to watch on the computer.

I threw together a Python QT app that parses the show listings, displays them, allows filtering, and has some short cuts for searching IMDB and trailers on Youtube. The best part is that the media opens in VLC instead of some custom player.

Anyway, I will never publish it because of the whole facilitating copyright infringement thing.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#140

Post by igniuss »

A framework to make presentations in svelte and markdown files, exports to a static website on GitHub, used it for roughly 12 presentations so far, a lot of them programming focused. I tried a bunch of different ones but none that made it painless enough.

Also a bunch of Obsidian plugins, to have nicer macros and templating.

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