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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#371

Post by danlindley »

hermannj314 wrote: post #329

I hooked up an analog phone to Whisper, ChatGPT, and TTS. I used of one of those old timey candlestick phones you'd see in a 1920 gangster movie. Initially this was a prop for a murder mystery party I was hosting (ChatGPT would give clues if you said certain words), but now I use it for a silly distraction here and there. Ask ChatGPT a question by picking up a phone like it's last century! I think it is fun. I am usi…

That sounds like a lot of fun, and really interesting to boot! I hadn't heard of Asterisk until today.

Have you written anything on the development of this project, or is this something you'd consider? I would love to build something similar, and the idea of combining old analogue technology with modern tools and integrations- especially PBX- is quite intriguing.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#372

Post by danmaz74 »

I built a Chrome extension to be able to use spaced repetitions for chess puzzles/exercises that I found online. Used it for a couple years and gained at least 200 Elo rating with it :)

Recently I built a public facing website for that, if anybody is curious: chess.braimax.com

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#374

Post by can3p »

I've built two projects that I'm very happy with.

I'm still using livejournal.com social network nobody cares about today and when I was really into common lisp I decided to build a cli client to it. What makes it cool is that it's just markdown files locally and the client works almost like git, you can even pull and push posts. After I wrote it I was able to pull all my posts since 2007 or so from the service and have them locally as markdown files, any updates would be synced.

The other thing I've built mostly for my self is a notes taking service https://dabdab.org which allows to take notes the way I want it. What was cool about it was that I was able to almost reinvent django or rails but in go, so everything is fast, but still compile checks. From the product side I've managed to get to the same level of comfort one would get with github issues (markdown, image upload etc).

Both things have 1 user at the moment (me) do I think that counts :D

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#376

Post by dorfsmay »

I did not join social media until very recently but wanted an easy way to send pictures to close friends and family so built this small python script that sends N pics out of a text file list (so if even if I sort 100 in one day I only send 5 per batch) sends one pic per email, reduce the size of the pics, sets a custom from field, hide the recipients' addresses in the BCC field.

https://github.com/dorfsmay/emailFiles

There's nothing extraordinary about it, it's not far from a standard spam bot! What's interesting about it is that I've been using it for more than a decade with fairly little maintenance.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#377

Post by mike_hearn »

Some developer tools that spun out of my current product (but not launched thus counts as "built for myself" and nowadays "ourselves"):

- A build system that is simpler and easier to use than Gradle. It also has a much better rendering of progress and output for tests when they fail. I mostly use it to run tests, actually. Supports parallel incremental and cached work.

- A Kotlin Scripting runtime that exposes a high-level UNIX shell-like API along with many other useful utilities like printing markdown, tracking progress of long operations (including hierarchically), working with files and remote programs over ssh and many other things. We have almost entirely replaced bash with it.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#378

Post by xcubic »

mvcalder wrote: post #334

I trained the raccoons that visit my house at night. I started them out getting a peanuts from a water bottle. Then I tied the bottle to a rope. Then kept raising the bottle higher. At that point, I built an automated feeder system using a linear actuator activated by pulling the rope with the bottle attached. It had LEDs that were green / red to show when the feeder would / wouldn't dispense peanuts. It was all driv…

This is so geeky and awesome at the same time!

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#379

Post by IgorPartola »

I didn’t exactly build this from scratch but it is pretty heavily modified: I use an ESP8266 with a relay module to control my garage door via Home Assistant. I use a second one mounted on my bike as a WiFi presence detector. This way when I turn the bike on, the bike module connects to my home WiFi and Home Assistant opens my garage door. Once I leave the property and WiFi disconnects, the garage door closes a minute later. When I come home the same happens: as I approach the garage door opens and after I park and shut the bike off the door closes. There are a lot of solutions for how to open the garage door from a bike but this has been the most elegant that I’ve tried.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#380

Post by rpastuszak »

The most interesting tech I've build for myself is boring: a writing tool I use every day for journaling: https://enso.sonnet.io

With that out of the way here's some more ridiculous stuff:

In 2016, I made a browser based AR party game where you'd fight kittens falling from the sky by dancing with vegetables in your hands (CMYK was easier to track using the webcam). I have some photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/g6Dp8GLDbuuhT1TRA

From a technical PoV it was exciting (running AR, in a browser, in pre Pokemon GO, pre WASM times!)

I also made a simple photography lighting tool, replacing professional lights with computer/tablet/phone screens (facade.photo). I put it in an old wardrobe bought in a thrift store on Brick Lane and during my startup launch. Results: https://goo.gl/photos/RZ3fCRcScYSGr7aG6

Ah, I also made an AI-powered voice assistant in 2014. The tagline was HTML5-powered voice assistant, as AI wasn't really _the_ buzzword then, but _HTML5_... oh yeah.

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