Back in the early 90s I created a mosquito repeller page.
Based upon the electronic mosquito repeller kits that emitted a frequency.
Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
161–170 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#162When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…
Your anecdote gave me a genuine “that’s cool” smile, the sort that I haven’t had over a piece of tech in a bit. That must have been a fun email. Thanks for sharing!
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#163"The Matrix" raining characters, but really bad, and in Bash (: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/bad-matrix/
Oh man that brought back a memory. I once had a job operating an ibm mainframe. it was the night shift of a low tier job mainly feeding tapes to the machine. I would spend the downtime reading the documentation for what was for me a foreign system. The mainframe. This system was set up as vse(a batch processing operating system) over z/os, however the operators would login to cms(a more interactive operating system)…
Wow that's a great story; thanks for sharing! If you have a blog, please copy-pasta this there. It needs to live!
This made me chuckle... it is how all great hacks begin.
> "This is not trivial, the 3270 does not want to do this"
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#164Since AI is all the hype I hardcoded a tic tac toe.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#165I had created a program that would listen to my keystrokes and then draw a different shape on each keypress in a canvas, some keys would fill colours, others would change size of an existing shape. It could also insert images from a defined folder. I could "start" and "stop" by pressing a hotkey. At the end of it, I would have a random art generated.
I found the GitHub repo too although I am a little embarrassed by the code now
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#166Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#167Way back in the 80's I synchronized the clocks on 3 IBM PCs (originals w/5151 green monitors) in the computer lab and ran a simple digital clock program on each, showing hours:min:sec across the 3 in glorious PC text graphics.
After awhile I noticed about a dozen students standing around the 3 PCs -- they were waiting for the time to roll from 7:59:59 to 8:00:00, perfectly synchronized like magic! (Remember no networks back then!) I found this pretty funny...
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#168I wrote a program to count the number of times a word appears on a grid, for those semi-fraudulent tv competitions:
https://gmargari.github.io/serres/
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#169The bug following your cursor on https://jo-m.ch/ (code: https://jo-m.ch/bug.js)
An, of course, Onlytrains https://trains.jo-m.ch
Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
#170One of my first projects was a clock that displayed the time as a hex color (#hh:mm:ss) https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/nvC62sw6cP