Near our work there is a single public tennis court that in normal (pre pandemic) summers is heavily contested for bookings. So I wrote a script to book in whatever set of sessions me and my colleagues wanted to play for the following week. It was pretty consistent, would still miss a few though - other people were either staying up to midnight, or they'd written their own bot!
Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
311–320 of 458 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#312I usually print books I buy as PDFs and then bind them myself as well. The process is very nice and meditative. So, I wrote this script[0] that converts a pdf in seams of 16 pages that can be printed directly in correct order on a normal printer. So, I can just send the PDF to a printer without worrying about anything and fold and bind them later by hand.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#313I used to etch PCBs at home a lot when I was in college. I used a glossy sheet to print the PCB Gerber on it. Most times I had to etch multiple PCBs and then two things used to happen when I used the same glossy sheet again and again. They were expensive where I lived.
1. The glossy sheet would get blackened due to printing multiple times on the same side.
2. I did not have a printer so I went to a cyber cafe to print and he would charge me for every print even though I was printing on the same sheet.
3. I had to carry my laptop to manually adjust the gaps and often it got screwed up.
So, I wrote this script [0] that would combine the gerbers in a single PDF that I could print in a single go. I used it a lot and saved a lot of Money to keep the hobby alive :)
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#314I wrote Unix/bash utility as a repository that when cloned into your `.config` directory makes it very simple to isolate available environment/functions/scripts/config based on the current directory you are in. The resulting config that you make is stored centrally in your .config directory but is only active in the corresponding file path (or globally, depending on the use case). It's been very useful.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#315Another one is a physical tool [0] to help people who do electronics and PCB design. I made this ruler that helps in designing new parts for PCB CAD softwares like KiCAD/Eagle. Then a few friends pumped me up and I got great feedback. So, I built a fabricated on with local manufacturer in Pune, India. Then someone was like you should sell them. So, I sold them via Tindie [1] and shared it with a lot of different people from around the world. I still use it. I am working on a V2 these days :D
[0] http://rohitg.in/2014/12/14/Tinker-Rule/ [1] http://rohitg.in/2016/01/01/MakersRule/
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#316Not sure whether this meets your "definition of a tool" but I started tracking my investments publicly a couple of years ago here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tBrZEMFK9XNWxiqOxE8o... The GoogleFinance Function has been a great way to help me "visualize progress" in a very different way compared to default visualizations provided by stock brokers I have also tried to keep track of analytics more manually bu…
Are you updating it as you invest or irregularly? Last investment seems to be from April.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#317I made this [1] little thing just to change a Commodor Amiga emulator opacity so i could copy some images in Deluxe Paint II or even Deluxe Paint in DOSBox.
Made it in like 20 minutes for that absolutely weird use case. Almost never used it again.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#318https://github.com/roveo/vertica-query-paste
This is a small script made to do one thing: take an SQL query from the clipboard and output a CSV file with results.
As a data analyst, part of my job was sending results of ad-hoc queries to a bunch of people on slack. The data warehouse was quite slow, so I had to:
- write a query in DataGrip (or any SQL client)
- execute it
- wait for results
- remember that there was a request for data
- save the results to CSV file (with my mouse)
- send it to the person on Slack who asked for it
With many requests per day, many of them concurrent, this was a problem.
With this tool, I just had to write a query, make sure it works, copy it to clipboard and execute:
vertica-query-paste | slackcat --channel some.person
I also had an alias in my shell set to
vqp=vertica-query-paste | pv -l
It works with Vertica, but can be generalized to any DB engine that has a CLI client.
Really simple, but probably saved my many hours.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it also trims 0.1 seconds from both ends of each sentence's audio so the key press noise is removed If you wanted to, you could probably use something to wait for sound level to drop, and then cut until the silence ended. Although a fixed cut probably works fine, too.
Or trigger on key up? Though I suppose maybe there's a slight sound still when the cap hits it's maximum travel if it releases the switch before that?
I would think key up is going to be noisy, plus maybe you need a bit to compose yourself before you start speaking.
Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
#320Wrote a command-line tool called Erudite to download articles from Instapaper or Pocket, convert them to an appropriate format such as EPUB or MOBI, and add them to your Calibre ebook library.