Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself? • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by vollmond » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

I got tired of having to think with date math, specifically determining the difference between "how many days between these dates" and "this is day x of span y", so I just made a tool specifically for that 2nd case.

Eg, in my journal entries I make a note of which day of covid lockdown it is, by bookmarking this on my phone home screen:

https://day1of.com/?startDate=2020-03-12&condition=COVID19+L...

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

#302

Post by ammar_x » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

nethunters wrote: post #246

ammar_x wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well you've found an عيب in the dictionary! Currently it uses a single dictionary, Hans Wehr, which doesn't contain that word (I've checked in my physical copy also). In my backlog is adding additional dictionaries to fill in where Hans Wher is lacking, with next in line Lane's Lexicon. Hans Wehr is a good dictionary for students and contains approximately 90% of the words they will encounter in their first few years…

:)

Great. Good luck with adding new dictionaries and thank you for your efforts.

By the way, have you seen the work of Taha Zerrouki. He has produced many open source tools to deal with Arabic language [1]. Thought you might be interested.

[1]: https://github.com/linuxscout?tab=repositories

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

#303

Post by antonkar » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

I was frustrated with how slow the Apple Notes app was, so I made k for myself (https://getk.com). k launches instantly to your keyboard and camera, so you can take notes and photos in no time. I use it instead of Notes and Camera.

It's 100% Swift and collects no data at all. k is my 3rd app and it took me 2 month to build

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

#304

Post by JazzXP » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

I had one a number of years back when I was writing an iPhone app to be whitelabeled for various clients, that would overlay a "Beta" banner on their icons for beta releases. I wrote it for fun (and so I could easily differentiate between beta and full release versions on my own device), and right as I was finished, it ended becoming a client request anyway.

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

#305

Post by dorkwood » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

In an attempt to gamify my own fitness, I wrote a simple workout tracking app that used energy bars which depleted and refilled over time. If I hit a particular muscle group that day, the energy bar for that muscle group would deplete and take a couple of days to recharge. The idea was to keep all the muscle groups on cool-down. It was actually quite fun for a while. Kind of like looking at a simulated representation of your body recovering over time.

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

#306

Post by app4soft » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

hashamali wrote: post #172

I made https://paymewith.xyz to share my social payments faster. Got tired of the “do you have Venmo/Square Cash/Paypal” dance.

It seems like an alternative to https://linktr.ee

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

#307

Post by rokobobo » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

Every night at midnight, I have a script that sends me a blank email with a smiley face as subject. It’s a nice way to very quickly distinguish emails from today, yesterday etc. and also to stunt my prior that every email I get is going to be stressful.

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

#308

Post by nethunters » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

ammar_x wrote: post #302

nethunters wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you've found an عيب in the dictionary! Currently it uses a single dictionary, Hans Wehr, which doesn't contain that word (I've checked in my physical copy also). In my backlog is adding additional dictionaries to fill in where Hans Wher is lacking, with next in line Lane's Lexicon. Hans Wehr is a good dictionary for students and contains approximately 90% of the words they will encounter in their first few years…

:) Great. Good luck with adding new dictionaries and thank you for your efforts. By the way, have you seen the work of Taha Zerrouki. He has produced many open source tools to deal with Arabic language [1]. Thought you might be interested. [1]: https://github.com/linuxscout?tab=repositories

جزاكم الله

My website was originally a Flask web app which used his Arabic number converter, Arabic stemmer, Arabic normaliser and other modules. But in order to use offline as a PWA I end up porting these to JavaScript. I will release the source code once tested properly and porting is completed.

Also just going through your blog, enjoying the summary of Abul Hasan Ali Nadwis book. Keep up the good work!

Edit: Also Taha's work is amazing and on the back of that I've been creating a programing language specifically for string processing, so it can be used for stemming algorithms etc which compiles to multiple other languages.

The idea is to hopefully port Taha's work over and hopefully benefit communities of other programing languages.

Hit me up if you're interested!

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

#309

Post by bootlooped » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:56 PM UTC

Scraper to check for covid 19 vaccination appointments for my dad. Never had to use it as his health care provider proactively got him signed up.

Scraper to check Target for PS5 stock every 90 seconds. Never returned any hits in a week, which I believe reflected reality, then I found one at Best Buy.

Daemon to repeatedly check internet speed and spit out a CSV, which I then graphed. Point was to see if I was getting sub par speed and ask for a credit; turns out the speeds were fine.

Just for fun daemon that spammed my friends' WordPress blog message form. Involved using OCR to break the (very weak) captcha, which was fun. Sent over 100k snippets of various garbage fan fics. I don't think they ever checked wherever the messages go.

Scraper which looked for chair massage appointment openings and emailed me when it found them. We used to get massages at work, but the slots went quick. Worked great.

TODO: I found out some of my photos in Google Photos are of interior quality. I want to write something to compare my local copies to their cloud counterparts and indicate which are sub par. I'll then upload the higher quality versions somehow.

TODO: scraper to enter all my financial account balances in a spreadsheet daily. I currently do this manually twice a month.

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

#310

Post by TT-392 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:56 PM UTC

Wrote some tools to convert a bunch of kanji (japanese, originally chinese characters) stroke diagram (diagram on how to write the character) csv's I got from some open github database into png's with nice colors per stroke. Which I then added to a kanji anki deck for learning japanese. Maybe not quite the kind of thing you were asking for since it is not a tool I run regularly, cause you only run it once. But I use the results on a daily basis.