Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

About 18 months ago I started using Letterboxd. Also, I like Roger Ebert's reviews. I wanted both in one place.

So I wrote some code to scrape his nearly 8000 reviews from rogerebert.com and then import them to letterboxd:

https://letterboxd.com/re2/

(I only put the first two paragraphs of his review on letterboxd then link to his full review on his site.)

The hard parts of this were:

- Extracting the text of his reviews correctly from his site's HTML. That wasn't too terrible though.

- Matching his reviews to the correct movies on TMDB. This just required a bunch of trial and error and about 20-30 manual corrections. I employed various strategies to match by using movie title, year of review, year of movie release (if on his review, but often off by a year or two), director, producer, cast if on his review.

I also built this for myself:

https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy

I should put my bin directory full of random scripts up on GitHub. I tend to build them as I need them. They're often very simple things like:

- jqpaste -- which is just "pbaste | jq"

- jsonl [jq|gron --stream] which takes it input and if it isn'v valid JSON, converts it to a JSON string so that I can paste random log output which is sometimes a mix of JSON and not into jq or gron.

Those are just a couple off the top of my head.

It seems like a toy compared to most of the other tools in this thread, but FWIW I have a little script I call "did":

    grep "$1" ~/.bash_history | tail

It just shows me the last ten commands that include a search term. E.g. "did foo" shows the last ten commands that include "foo".

This is the best thing since sliced bread, but it doesn't work for me on a recent Ubuntu. Tried with both Python 2 and 3.

Compare:

  $ sudo du -sb /etc/* | sort | uniq | sort -rn | head -10
  2897355 /etc/brltty
  436966  /etc/java-11-openjdk
  402728  /etc/ssl
  251196  /etc/apparmor.d
  244732  /etc/ImageMagick-6
  219185  /etc/X11
  170093  /etc/fonts
  144084  /etc/java-8-openjdk
  131407  /etc/init.d
  117524  /etc/systemd

With:

  $ sudo du -sb /etc/* | distribution
                           Key|Ct (Pct)   Histogram
                 9795     /etc/ssh|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
  97442   /etc/speech-dispatcher|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
            9592  /etc/sysctl.d|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
      9461        /etc/update-manager|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
          9438    /etc/locale.gen|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
         9376     /etc/libreoffice|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
             92   /etc/host.conf|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
              91  /etc/networks|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
         9077     /etc/libblockdev|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
                  9074    /etc/pm|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
           9013   /etc/bluetooth|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
             890  /etc/gshadow-|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
              890 /etc/gshadow|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
                8894      /etc/skel|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------
                  887     /etc/rpc|1 (0.40%) -----------------------------------------

The indentation is all janky. And it's not sorted how I'd like.

I've been leaning pretty heavily on Discord during COVID to stay in touch with friends. I play D&D with some of them and wrote a Discord bot for dice-rolling since we already used Discord for audio/video during our sessions. It's not very complex, but it was good practice for using the Discord bot API, and I can host it on my Raspberry Pi in my apartment.

https://github.com/micahpress/discord-dice-roller

> killUnusedTerminalsAndBC.sh

How do you ever find anything if you have 100+ rxvts open? Do you just open new terminals all the time and never go back to the old ones? (Have you heard about terminal multiplexers?)