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

I’ve developed several webapps to help our family and personal life:

* Vehicle Maintenance Tracker: Logs all vehicle maintenance and sends reminders based on time or mileage for upcoming tasks. This one is probably one of the most used and useful of everything I have made.

Lend/Borrow Tracker: Keeps track of items we've lent or borrowed, to/from whom, and when. We use it most for books, but it can be used for anything.

Library Book Manager: Lists all the books we checked out from local libraries, displaying their cover images and ISBNs. Using a barcode scanner, we can quickly "check in" books on return day, accompanied by an adorable "ding ding!" sound recorded by one of my kids. Really beats manually searching the paper printout. It can be used on multiple devices at the same time - the checkin status of each book is synced live between all users, so each kid can find and check in their own books.

School/Home Lunch Manager: Displays the school lunch menu alongside each of my kids’ names. We mark school/home lunch days at the start of the week for easy morning prep.

Sickness Documentation: Tracks sickness details like symptoms, medication, temperatures, and timelines, helping us coordinate how we are going to take care of the kids when they are sick.

These apps, along with a few others not listed here, run on a server in my home, accessible only within our network (in home of via a VPN).

Something like that really deserves to be written in C so you don't need to install Ghidra to use it. The way I imagine it working is if I want the function `foo` then I'd say `objsuck -ffoo -ofoo.o prog.elf` and it'd look at the elf symbol table to find the `.size` of `foo` and copy that symbol into the .o. I guess you would then need to use xed to disassemble the opcodes to see what other symbols it jumps into or calls, and grab those too, along with any memory references, and then emit relocations. Overall I support this, since it'd be the easiest way to expropriate content from open source codebases whose source code is too byzantine to let me extract one teensy tiny little feature without the bloat. To me this is perfectly normal. You'd also be smart to only support COFF if the person uploads the binary to a hosted service you control and pays you money. In fact this would be even better if it could generate .s files from the object content, so no one would get triggered by binaries.

I got annoyed at all the invoice generators so I recently built my own in a weekend. I put the data in Airtable and a python script generates the pdfs using typst. Much more flexible than any of the solutions I found and it took me less to build it than the time i spent trying out the available solutions.

I wrote a tool in Haskell that continually polls my city's (Toronto) bike share API and dumps it into a database, along with a web server component that does a bunch of on-the-fly analysis of the data and serves that up as various visualizations and stats.

I got so frustrated with my city's bike share program one night and I wanted to figure out whether the problems I had been having were widespread or not.

Surprisingly enough there's a standard for bike share APIs [0] that my city adheres to. I'd been looking for an excuse to learn Haskell and figured the best way to stay motivated was to make useful tool for myself.

I've been working on it for the better part of a year at this point (probably >200 hours) and I use it roughly daily. After gathering a few months of station-level data it became clear enough that the system (specifically, how the e-bikes are handled) has some pretty serious issues.

I ended up sending the city a couple of freedom of information requests for some data I was missing and for the contract between them and the company that operates the system. The contract says that the operator gets paid a fee for every dead e-bike they move to a charging station - regardless of whether or not that bike actually manages to charge.

The city owns around 2000 e-bikes and there are frequently times where a whopping 20 are available - the rest are out of battery, sitting in docking stations for multiple days. Occasionally the operator shuffle the bikes over to the handful electrified charging stations, and about half the time the bikes don't charge (they just completely fill the stations, meaning nobody can use them - one of those stations happens to be right outside my partner's place). Then 4-7 days later they come around in a truck and get rid of the bikes, and the whole cycle repeats again in a couple days.

Basically, we're getting fleeced by the system operator. It isn't even clear to me if it's intentional or not, or just the usual combination of lax municipal oversight and an apathetic operator.

I've been meaning to send my data and the contract over to a few reporters who care about that sort of thing, since (a) the bike share system is genuinely a great way to get around (when it works) and (b) financially it's really good value for the city [1], and I'd like to see the problems fixed (especially given that the city is planning on massively expanding the e-bike fleet).

[0]: General Bikeshare Feed Specification: https://github.com/MobilityData/gbfs

[1]: The per-trip subsidy is $0.67, versus $4.08 for a trip on our transit system (!)

This is genuinely cool, but, just curious, why not use an ad-blocker like uBlock?