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Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

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Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#261

Post by stevekemp »

tomschlick wrote: post #187

https://zonewatcher.com After having multiple clients change their DNS settings without warning and then email us when shit hits the fan I knew I needed some type of warning system. This checks every X minutes and saves each version so you can see the revision history for all your DNS zones across many providers.

Might be better to go in the reverse direction - get them to store their DNS records under revision control and then when changes are committed/pushed they are deployed.

I wrote something like that for Amazon's rout53, https://dns-api.com/ but it wouldn't be hard to wire up a git hook with APIs from DNSMadeSimple, Dyne, or similar I'm sure.

(Of course if you don't host your clients DNS then it might be a fight to get them to change. But if you do it might be worth a think..)

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#262

Post by zitterbewegung »

I created a uuid generator in racket(then called PLT Scheme) after being told to abstract into a library. It was downloaded thousands of times and I never got a bug report. https://github.com/zitterbewegung/uuid-v4 http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=uuid-v4.plt...

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#263

Post by arms »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #158

https://shellshare.net I have migrated my wife's (then girlfriend) computer to Linux and sometimes I had to configure something on her computer (e.g. a printer). This ended up generating lots of back and forth on the phone with me telling her commands to write in the terminal, and she reading the output out loud. I wanted an easy way to see her terminal. So shellshare was born. Shellshare allows you to run a single c…

This is great. Thanks for creating and sharing. I've made sure to bookmark it.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#264

Post by stevekemp »

jajern wrote: post #55
schindlabua wrote: post #7

I'm not sure whether "proud" is the right adjective, but that batch file I wrote when I was 12 or 13 which moves all images from the Desktop into a folder called "images" has been the single most useful thing I've ever written.

This is actually one of the few types of examples that I think fit here. Most of the other people are just posting their side projects. When I clicked this I was expecting some quick bash/batch/python/etc. scripts that do useful things.

Perhaps the tools here might suit then? https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#266

Post by jimminy »

rileyt wrote: post #169
jimminy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for a Discover Weekly saver for a while, but resorted to using just screencapping the list, and saving the good tracks internally. One issue with saving a Discover Weekly list to Spotify is that Discover Weekly is generated based on the content in the user's playlists. If you add a bunch of Discover Weekly lists that are 28/30 duds you're going to start reinforcing the system to generate crappy lists. I…

I have heard talk of this before, it would be great to get an answer from someone who works at Spotify. I wonder if saving the tracks in the playlist and not creating the backup until the next week would get around that? There is no way they are track all plays, saves, playlists, skips for every user over all of time.

It doesn't track plays at all, it takes songs in your playlists and calculates close matches based on songs in other users playlists.

It's a relatively simple graph-transform that is just using occurence in playlists tor generation. Which makes adding the playlists self-reinforcing, which could have negative situations.

I have a wide range of musical taste, but a low number of playlists and can drastically change from metal to dance to hip-hop by adding a prebuilt playlist week to week.

Here is an article on how it works, and there have been discussions from the staff elsewhere on why DW is so good.

http://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes-spotifys-discover-...

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#267

Post by scoot »

blauditore wrote: post #200
mk4p wrote: post #116

https://izuded.com (i.e., "iz u ded?") I made this because I adopted a puppy and realized that, if I got hit by a bus on a Friday, he could be stuck in his crate for days before anyone realized. Morbid, but useful. It texts you every X days and asks, "u ded?" -- if you don't click "naw" before X days pass, it'll notify your contacts. It's a portfolio project to show what I've learned in the realm of "serverless" arch…

Google has a similar feature to give trusted people access to your data if you've been inactive for a given amount of time (so probably dead): https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

That's a fantastic hidden feature - thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#268

Post by xanderstrike »

http://xanderstrike.com/responsive/

My responsive demo, resize the screen ;)

Also https://github.com/xanderstrike/whatui, a dirt simple what.cd web interface similar to Couchpotato or Sickbeard, but without the terrible performance and extra features of Headphones.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#269

Post by btilly »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #158

https://shellshare.net I have migrated my wife's (then girlfriend) computer to Linux and sometimes I had to configure something on her computer (e.g. a printer). This ended up generating lots of back and forth on the phone with me telling her commands to write in the terminal, and she reading the output out loud. I wanted an easy way to see her terminal. So shellshare was born. Shellshare allows you to run a single c…

I like https://tmate.io/ for this. It also has a read-write option. :-)

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#270

Post by cromo »

jeffbr13 wrote: post #157
cromo wrote: post #94

The simple tool I wrote that I get the most bang for my buck out of is synesthesia[1]. I spend a lot of my time tracing things down across multiple log files, and having to pick out the important lines visually or trying to isolate them with custom grep incantations was wearing on me. Synesthesia allows you to specify regexes, and it will color matches based on the value of the match itself, meaning that it's statele…

Reminds me of Internet Explorer 7(?)'s coloured tab groups. I actually thought they were quite a neat UI idea.

I don't remember how those worked. I think it automatically kept a hierarchy of what tab parented other tabs and colored them that way. That gets kinda strange because it's trying to represent a tree in a flat space, and I don't think the colors reflected their heritage. Since a tab could technically be a parent and a child, you lost tabs to one group or another.

Thankfully synesthesia is really simple - match the string, take the md5 of it, lop off some bits and interpret that as a color. There's no additional structure to superimpose on color selection.

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