181–190 of 484 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Cancelling your ISP doesn't leave you surrounded by peers who default to solving problems from scratch.
As a freelancer I invoice in multiple currencies, and I couldn't find a program to generate them that wasn't an overly complex $100/mo SaaS. So I build a little cli to generate my invoices. 100 loc and super simple. I miss the 70s when programming was the default way to solve problems. Excessive abstractions and proprietary software often slow us down.
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I think they're more referring to several decades ago when someone had a software need they wouldn't get some off the shelf proprietary tool that costs $$$$ and is crazy bloated and locks you in. Instead they'd hire someone and that person would work with them to deliver exactly what they need and that solution would last for decades and the eventual off the shelf software that replaces it is widely seen as inferior by the employees.
There are famous stories of this. A highschool once had a student write their entire automated HVAC system on a C64 for free. It has worked really well for 3 decades, but they struggle to find replacement parts. They asked for bids to replace it from several companies and were flabbergasted to learn it would costs them an insane amount of money. So instead, they call up the kid (now an adult who still lives nearby), to occasionally do maintenance. Which solution is better? The OP is just talking about how they miss the times when a lot more people were going for the custom in-house C64 option.
- Danish Swimming Water Quality App[1]: Native app for my iPhone that I use to check the water quality. The official one wasn't working for me, too slow and too buggy. Ultimately, it's just a JSON of public data spread on the map, very simple. - Artwork Framer[2]: Script using Blender that converts .png into a framed 3D model. You can even adjust the frame if you want and then export it as a model to be used in VR (works even in Apple Vision)
[1] https://github.com/bartaxyz/denmark-swimming [2] https://github.com/bartaxyz/artwork-framer
I built a hydroponic garden as a covid hobby. I wrote software to maintain the garden, water it on schedule, apply ph changes to the water, turn lights on / off, humidify, as well as monitor statistics (temperature, humidity, water temperature, water ph, water conductivity). Rough guess would be that I spent 50 hours actually working on the software. There's a handful of raspberry pis involved. I wrote everything in…
At the end of the day, I gave up and just put everything in Dan. Apparently, it's more lucrative to just sell them.
Yes. I made two recently. - TalkToYoutuber[1]: Download the transcripts from a youtube channel and hook it up to gtp4 with RAG to let me "talk" to youtubers. There's a bunch of youtubers who have useful knowledge to share, but no blog or wiki, so semantic searching their video transcripts is the next best thing. - YoutubeThumbnailSearch[2] - Embded all of a youtube channels thumbnails using CLIP and search them using…
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.
As a freelancer I invoice in multiple currencies, and I couldn't find a program to generate them that wasn't an overly complex $100/mo SaaS. So I build a little cli to generate my invoices. 100 loc and super simple. I miss the 70s when programming was the default way to solve problems. Excessive abstractions and proprietary software often slow us down.
When you get deep enough into writing a custom tool it starts doing things a generic tool would never accomplish (or it would have to be bloated with features no one needs) Hard coding values and constraints for personal use makes such elegantly simple interfaces.
For example, my agenda is a beutiful boulderdash-like grid of icons. The data is a set of arrays [1,2,1,0,0,1,1] and an object for special days. There are no setting, it has zero buttons to press.
I've made countless silly things other people could use if only they knew it existed.
https://go-here.nl/real-salary-calculator.html
https://title-spider.go-here.nl
https://salamisushi.go-here.nl
endless things I've made for personal use. I think something like 60% needs one or two lines of love to work in 2024.
The key feature is that you can put in a Wikidata ID (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1536639) and it will auto populate the name, artist, release date, and Spotify ID. It will then grab covert art from https://coverartarchive.org/, which it resizes and mirrors to S3 (previous versions of this project used images manually uploaded to imgur, but broke when they changed their secret API).
So basically all I have to do is write the description and I've got a new entry on the site.