Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 458 posts

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

#361

Post by ApolloRising »

franze wrote: post #266

My SEO Live Test Framework https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/franz-enzenhofer-s... Runs a lot of SEO checks (including Google Search Console Data) over your websites Static,Rendered and Idle DOM Built it cause I can and put lots of my technical SEO edge cases knowledge in there.

I just bought your book to support your efforts (soft copy) via paypal and just wanted you to know your success page upon return from paypal is not functional. (The page you were looking for could not be found. It might have been removed, renamed, or did not exist in the first place.)

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

#362

Post by schappim »

I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen[1].

macOCR is a command line app that enables you to turn any text on your screen into text on your clipboard. When you envoke the ocr command, a "screen capture" like cursor is shown. Any text within the bounds will be converted to text.

You could invoke the app using the likes of Alfred.app, LaunchBar, Hammerspoon, Quicksilver, Raycast etc.

  [1] https://github.com/schappim/macOCR

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

#363

Post by iso1210 »

tasuki wrote: post #219
iso1210 wrote: post #43

== killUnusedTerminalsAndBC.sh == This kills off any open bc instances I have, and then any open rxvts I have which aren't running another program After a day or so I can easilly have 100+ rxvts in the background, some of which are running vim, some sshed into other servers, but many of which are just old windows I ran to do something briefly but never killed off == another config differ == Someone else on the team h…

> killUnusedTerminalsAndBC.sh How do you ever find anything if you have 100+ rxvts open? Do you just open new terminals all the time and never go back to the old ones? (Have you heard about terminal multiplexers?)

> Do you just open new terminals all the time and never go back to the old ones

Yes. If I'm in a firefox window looking at an email, I'll hit alt-enter, do my task, possibly one of several open windows (I often end up with 4 quarter rxvts on monitor 1, half screen browser on monitor 2, and a half width rxvt on monitor 2).

When I finish whatever I'm doing the windows tend to get lost in the background and I reap them later.

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

#364

Post by mattkevan »

itsinthenews wrote: post #343
mattkevan wrote: post #269

This isn’t anywhere near as impressive as some of the examples here, but anyway: I run an Etsy store that sells artwork. One of the most time-consuming tasks was creating the mock-ups for product listings, so I wrote a shell script that used Imagemagick to automatically generate all the images. I was pretty pleased as I’d never written a Bash script before and it saves hours and hours of work. I also wrote a Ruby scr…

Nice I like the Etsy Ruby + Jekyll idea. Is the repo open source?

Yes, it's open source. Here's the link [1].

I'm sure there's some sort of rule against posting code this bad on HN, bit worried it'll get my hacker status revoked :). Was a total Ruby n00b when I wrote this (still am) - haven't even worked out how to handle offsets in the Etsy API.

Anyway, it does a good job of creating Jekyll collection items from Etsy listings – here's the site I'm building with it, though it's still a work-in-progress [2].

[1] https://github.com/MattKevan/Etsy-API-to-Jekyll

[2] https://dev.thedoveandtheseagull.com

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

#365

Post by irthomasthomas »

oezi wrote: post #285
irthomasthomas wrote: post #221

I made this for fun after watching some breathless microsoft video about AI in VS code which amounted to autocomplete sorted by popularity. I told a friend I could knock out something more useful (at the time) in half an hour. It's a ahk wrapper of howdoi designed to find code snippets from stack exchange and put them right into the code file you are editing. It is so simple but I actually found it pretty useful for…

Can you explain what it searches for? Is it the 'I feel lucky' first code block from the first match of the search term? How does it know the language? Window title?

I set it up with a autohotkey client and a python server. I did that because I am actually a linux user now and I intended to write a linux version later. The ahk client uses WinGetTitle to figure out which language you are working on. I wont lie, it is pretty cheap and dirty, but it works smoothly in vs code.

The python server handles the search logic and it is mostly relying on the howdoi project which already did most of the work in this area. So I send a query to howdoi and that does a normal google search (or ddg/bing if you wish) and returns me the results which I further filter down to try and be more useful.

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

#366

Post by oxplot »

https://github.com/oxplot/pdftilecut : tiles a PDF to help with printing on small printers

https://fpx.oxplot.com/ : Tiny module that allows powering anything with USB-C

Some small scripts:

https://github.com/oxplot/gists/blob/master/flashserve : creates a QR code to transfer a file over Wi-Fi from terminal

https://github.com/oxplot/gists/blob/master/qrconnect : Read a Wi-Fi password QR code from the camera and connects to Wi-Fi

https://github.com/oxplot/gists/blob/master/qropen : Opens a webpage from QR code read from webcam

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

#367

Post by HKH2 »

brad0 wrote: post #336
HKH2 wrote: post #119

I have an unorthodox system of things which is all quite interdependent. I prefer to just adjust things as I go. I know I'm reinventing the wheel at times, but I would rather a more personal UX than a UX for the lowest common denominator. I have a variable loader that I can use in scripts/programs so that I don't have to hardcode filepaths and so I can change settings quickly. Variables can refer to other variables,…

> I have a sort of data representation in which I can note how things/concepts are linked, and also express doubt, references, references to references and so on, to allow expressive representations of thoughts including incompleteness or ambiguity. Could you tell us more about this?

I use it mostly for memory completion. If something comes up in my mind and it's older than a few years, and I have no idea what prompted it, then I just record it and anything in relation to it.

Some things I am not sure about so I prefix them with a question mark. If I'm not sure about the spelling of the word itself then I start the word with a question mark.

If I was with the thing itself in the experience that a memory is referring to then there are no reference marks as prefixes (the symbol I chose may not have been the best choice), but if the thing was mentioned etc. then I put however many reference marks as a prefix to express how many jumps I was away from the thing referenced.

So there are groups of things that act as a placeholder.

When I am reviewing, sometimes I can quickly look at the placeholder and jump to a memory that is even 'fainter', and sometimes see what I think is the reason why the thought re-emerged in the first place (usually what seems to be residual curiosity).

Sometimes it prompts me to quickly search for a name so I can see what the person looks/looked like etc. That way, labels that keep resurfacing become more than just empty placeholders; they become contextualized. It's basically just declaring curiosity, and I can just leave it as a placeholder if I don't care to explore it any further at the time.

I also find it good at exploring situations I feel embarrassed or awkward about. When I write, I cut out any grammar, emotions, concern for style or correct wording, and just focus on what things I have associated with them, so that I can do more to 'see' a situation as it was, regardless of how I felt/feel about it. I think that has helped me a lot in accepting how things are.

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

#368

Post by genderismadeup »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #251
dlivingston wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a little embarrassing, but the tool is actually browser-based, powered by Javascript and PHP. I know that's not the ideal foundation, but those were the skills I had at the time. I do have a copy of it online that I used to demo it for a friend. Being browser-based is not really a problem for me, because I run it on my local dev server and everything is instant. But over the web it has to upload each wav file…

A fiend of mine works at an Audio Reading service and they have wanted to improve their volunteer recoding workflow for ages. This sounds like it could have potential for them, and js / php might even be better than alternatives in their case.

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

#369

Post by swyx »

jacobmischka wrote: post #279
bool3max wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a fun learning project, but in the real world it's very counterproductive. You can obtain the base64 representation of the current clipboard contents very quickly using a single terminal shell command.

This is an incredibly weird reply. "Very counterproductive"? You hit ctrl+v and click a button using the app, that is roughly equally, if not more, convenient than switching to a terminal and entering a command.

and its sharable to the rest of the world
Post reply on HN