Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

I have GoPros on my bike and often when I arrive to work/home I forget to turn them off and the batteries die, so I wrote an app so I can shout across the room, "Hey Siri, stop all cameras".

I don't use it anymore myself and got a bug report last week. It's a couple of years since I've written any Swift at all, so I'm not mad keen on working on it, and I feel a bit bad that I have published it and it's not working. I never put the code on GitHub because the reverse engineering of the Bluetooth was somewhat incorrectly documented in the code and I didn't want to share bad information. Now GoPro have an SDK I could use.

Similarly, I wrote a Siri Shortcut for checking where the nearest Jump (bikeshare) bike is (Python on AWS Lambda). Then Uber sold Jump to Lime and there is no API access for me anymore (Sacramento).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RzahKxUYqc

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/stoppro/id1453312416

https://gopro.github.io/OpenGoPro/demos/python/sdk_wireless_...

https://github.com/BrianHenryIE/Bikeshare-Siri-Shortcuts

I wrote a PPPoE client with failover so I can keep the session even when one of my gateways fails or is rebooted (this lets me do regular maintenance without interrupting my internet connection); I put it on github[1], but I doubt anyone will use it. I hope there are few people left with the scourge that is PPPoE, and my OS choice means many people would need to switch OSes to use it, so yeah. Also, I don't care to make it easy to use or to promote it, really. (I've mentioned it once or twice and did a Show HN that got less than ten votes, which I kind of expected).

I've also got my personal (network) monitoring software, some 'IoT' stuff to capture temperature and humidity data around my house, and I'm working on a ESP32 based alarm clock pulling data from iCalendar feeds.

[1] https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing

I've written and still writing small tools to help with my work or personal computing life all the time. Some of them live long and become sophisticated tools, some of them stay as small scripts to help with mundane tasks.

The most used one is a tools called Railgun (https://github.com/hbayindir/railgun/) for sending e-mails from command line via Mailgun.

I've also built a backup tool for SMB shares [0], a simple time tracker [1], and a semi-sophisticated tool for helping me managing PXEBoot symbolic links[2].

Currently I'm working on, albeit slowly, on a tool for organizing Pocket (https://www.getpocket.com) items.

[0]: https://github.com/hbayindir/smb-backup

[1]: https://github.com/hbayindir/Daily-Log-Analyzer

[2]: https://github.com/hbayindir/Hex-IP-Toolkit

I had a nice little Python hack that would watch the weather and set the color of a light in the foyer based on the weather, and override that with a dim red at night because I really did not want a bright blue light when I got up late on a rainy night. I never set up the lights after moving across the country so it’s been dormant.

(There are services out there that can set the color of a light based on the weather, OR on the time, but I’ve never found anything that can do both.)

The most complicated one I created was a widget showing the status of the factory where I was working at the time.

This wasn't strictly speaking for personal use, but I created it and I was the only one who used it as far as I know.

The info was the same as the main status screen, but I made it frameless and always on top of other programs, and gesture aware. It was about 150 px by 700 px, with little blinkenlights for the statuses. It hung out on the right side of my screen and I could see at a glance whether things were running or not. There was a button to summon the main screen for more details.

The main work was understanding how to handle windows, and UX refinements.