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Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#231

Post by tumidpandora »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #36

I have a small YT channel [1] and I used to spend 30-40 mins recording and then 2-4 hrs editing to get a final 10-15 min video. Then I fully scripted my video editing using Python+MoviePy [2]. The time savings are sweet. I just feed it my raw video and get the finished video a few minutes later. It cuts out all the dead air as well as the parts I don't want (which I indicate in-video). In general scripting video edit…

Nice! I built something similar with automating a movie making process by pulling gifs from Giphy, convert them to mp4 with ffmpeg, stitch, add a sound track, opening sequence and credits and produce a movie, all with just a keyword. Check out my code here

https://github.com/mohapsat/auto-giphy-movie

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#232

Post by ammar_x »

nethunters wrote: post #225
ammar_x wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! Adding it to my favorite dictionaries.

Let me know if you've got any feedback, suggestions or feature requests.

I couldn't find results for the Arabic verb: يعيب or its past form عاب. It means something like criticize. Any tips?

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#233

Post by svilen_dobrev »

"tell me what tools you've made and i'll tell you who you are." Really.

Probably i make one sw tool per month - whatever annoys me enough to go over the lazyness treshold.

Most of my toys (made last 25+ years) stay at https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_bin

https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_util (python stuff)

apart of the bigger ones there with own repos

most used stuff seems:

* shell wrappers/configs to make using terminals a more humane+repeatable thing. A system (="language") of plenty of aliases and shortcut keys, for many combinations of x-terms/shells, so regardless of which one it is, it gets same human interface. Remember 4dos? there. F2 is dir/ls..

* similar thing for vim. F2 for save. ctrl-f for find. etc..

* vcs.sh - similar thing for 5-6 revision control systems

...

* sound files searching/cutting/diffing - searching one record within another - think recognizing start and end signals of some radio show, cutting it out from several alternative recording sessions - e.g. digitized analog vs http/rtmp streams; and diff'ing the results ; the timeline can be warped a lot (Wow and flutter, yes, with some charts out)

* hundreds of others.. some of them i dont remember anymore what they were for :/

have fun

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#234

Post by huydotnet »

A web based code editor [1] that supported a small set of languages (C++, JS, Go, Python and Rust), it also supported Vim-key binding (thanks to CodeMirror), came with a localStorage based "file system", so you can save multiple file in your browser. You can get the source on GitHub [2]. To host it on your server, you'll need Docker for the runtime btw. It's pretty helpful to code when I only have access to the iPad during the weekend.

[1]: https://kodes.app [2]: https://github.com/huytd/code-playground

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#235

Post by version_five »

I have a lot of poorly engineered

    curl | grep | tr | awk
pipes written into a loop in a bash script to scrape web pages and pull out text or data. I find if I'm just doing a one of, I can usually identify some feature of the html to pattern match one that lets me strip out the data in a very simple script and not have to use beautifulsoup etc.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#236

Post by DamnInteresting »

I operate a long-form nonfiction website, and back in 2012 we wanted to introduce a podcast episode version for each of our articles. I started tinkering with making recordings, but I suffered from the cringe of hearing my own voice, which was amplified by hearing every mistake and retake.

I finally got past this problem by rolling my own audio recording software. I paste in the script, and the software highlights one sentence at a time. I tap a key to start recording that sentence. If I make a mistake or I'm not happy with how it sounded, one key press discards the audio and restarts the recording. When satisfied, one key press moves it to the next sentence.

When I'm done, I can download all of the recordings into one merged WAV, and I never have to hear any bad takes (it also trims 0.1 seconds from both ends of each sentence's audio so the key press noise is removed).

It's a little clunky, being home-grown and all, but it works great. Recording stuff is pretty easy now. I keep thinking about making it available to the public, but it's not yet polished enough for that.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#237

Post by sirwitti »

I love this thread! Here's my list of tools that I actually use(d). I guess I have quite some itches that need scratching :-P

Project-cmd [1] (current itch):

A cli tool to standardize working on projects in different technologies. Think of package.json but for declaring/starting/stopping containers, creating db dumps, declaring data files (archives) to back up and restore and pushing db dumps + archives to a server via ssh and pulling them. Also editing the hosts file and jumping to a project's directory with a single command.

TouchOsc Generator [2]:

If you have tried to create complex TouchOsc [3] files things get repetitive and ugly very quickly. Touchosc-generator is a templating engine for TouchOsc files. You can create and reuse components and repeat + place them in grids via simple json files.

Emailed invoices

A simple node script checking my inbox for emails containing invoices simply regexing the sender and subject and automatically uploads them to the correct month's folder on my nextcloud server. Highly useful for accounting.

Accounting

A terrible meteor spa I wrote in 2015 for creating invoices and giving a simple accounting overview for my consulting business. It's quite crappy in some respects, but I created every single invoice since 2015 with it, so who knows...

D39r

My last flat had 2 levels and opening the door for the mailman meant running as fast as I could to the other end of other level of the flat. After opening up the intercom and finding that pushing the door button simply closed a circuit between 2 cables which in turn opened the door of the apartment building. An arduino relais, raspberry pi and a little bit of hacking later I could open the door via my smartphone. I used this as long as I lived there.

Mushrooms

I digitized a book about mushrooms with ~1200 pages by taking the book apart, scanning all the pages, writing a script to restore the pages order, using opencv to automatically detect blocks of text and images in the scans and mapping each image to the corresponding text blocks. Then used tesseract for ocr, manually corrected ~3000 paragraphs of texts with my girlfriend and developed several scripts to extract mushroom features for easily indexing/finding with a web app. Wouldn't/couldn't publish due to obvious copyright issues. This was a lot of work and I loved it!

[1] https://github.com/martinwittmann/project-cmd

[2] https://github.com/martinwittmann/touchosc-generator

[3] https://hexler.net/touchosc

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#238

Post by jetrink »

This is pretty trivial compared to some of the others, but I made a personal TV Guide for myself and my girlfriend using Trello and TVDB. (Screenshot below.) The purpose is to help keep track of what we're currently watching, since it's usually 5-10 things at once, and what we want to watch in the future, since that is almost infinite. Also, it helps keep track of shows that we set aside between seasons, but want to come back to (On Break).

The part I built (the part that isn't just Trello) is not strictly necessary, but it was fun to make and it makes the guide more fun to browse. When you drop a new title on the board, a script grabs the description and cover image from TVDB and adds them to the card. Searching by title isn't foolproof, so in case it gets it wrong, the script temporarily embeds the other search results in the description. Marking one with an asterisk will trigger a fix.

1. https://imgur.com/a/hZlg7Rl

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#239

Post by dlivingston »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #236

I operate a long-form nonfiction website, and back in 2012 we wanted to introduce a podcast episode version for each of our articles. I started tinkering with making recordings, but I suffered from the cringe of hearing my own voice, which was amplified by hearing every mistake and retake. I finally got past this problem by rolling my own audio recording software. I paste in the script, and the software highlights on…

That’s so cool. Any chance you’d be okay sharing the script?

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#240

Post by wazoox »

A couple of tools that may be useful:

Macs use a different UTF8 encoding for file names, that causes all sort of weirdness when sharing files with Linux / Windows machines, so I've made a tool to convert these: https://github.com/wazoox/utfmacmv

I was constantly in need of cleaning my ssh known hosts list, so I've made a small script around "ssh-keygen -R" that removes both the lines for the hostname and its IP: https://github.com/wazoox/khc/blob/master/khc

Also I've made a small CGI script running on my PC to scan the local network and identifying newly connected machines (because I'm building and testing servers): https://github.com/wazoox/PingScan

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