I started an ambient radio station — http://moss.garden
A sort of sonic wallpaper to accompany work or daily activities.
Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
41–50 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#42I'm working on a programmable tooltip on Mac OS X (https://github.com/tanin47/tip), as in you can write your own script (ruby/python/bash) to provide tooltip items.
It's my first real app on Mac OS X. I started the app before the covid crisis though.
But these days I have so much time to iterate on it...
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#43Building the Redis API using DynamoDB as the storage backend. I want a way to have storage that can handle any load without having to provision server or pay when it wasn’t being used. Dynamo is superb, but the API is too low level and arcane to use directly.
Want to try selling licenses as well, let’s see if I can do open source full time.
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#44Digitizing some old family movies. On the lockdown front, it's been nice seen pictures of family. Technically, I've had a number of side quests along the way that were more challenging than actually digitizing the old tapes.
If you're thinking about doing the same, for formats and media, I settled on:
DVDs: yes, they're old, but they support more resolution than VHS, and practically every new Bluray player still plays them. Also, DVDs support 352x480 resolution. It's still more than VHS, and you can squeeze more content on the disc or encode it at a higher quality.
VP9+Opus+webm on a DVD. This codec/container combo is supported by Firefox, Chrome, Windows Media Player, and Android, so while new, I expected it to be supported for a long time. AV1 looks promising, but probably not ready.
I'm not bothering, but for iOS, use x264 and AAC in an mp4 container. Those were the only modern codecs and containers I got to work. Also, Apple, x264 and x265 are good, and all, but there's no excuse to not support VP9.
I'm saving the unencoded files as ffv1/flac in an mkv container.
For the actual DVDs, I'm using MDisc archival media.
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#45I'm collecting insights on the impact of coronavirus on the future of various aspects of our world: https://postcovidfuture.com/ . If anyone took this time to write anything on this topic, please share. I'll be happy to add it to the list.
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#46Taking a break for the rest of the lockdown from this https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#47I shipped an MVP of an instant messaging app that re-imagines the dynamics of chat. Your conversation is no longer limited to the vertical direction. It can expand in the horizontal direction to separate different but simultaneous topics!
I also did a couple of Show HN posts for it. Didn't get much traction with either, but it's ok because I think my next steps are to revise the landing page and get a more proper UI.
Feedback is very welcome!
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#48Building:
- a native iOS personal finance app while learning Swift/Xcode/UX
- Backed by two REST API services (one is auth service and other one that manages the finances) written in Spring Boot; running on docker-compose on AWS ec2
- Learning how to run these two services behind nginx proxy and on SSL - using mkcert on local box and letsencrypt on aws ec2.
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#49I took up the French Horn to get away from the computer. Surprisingly cheap to rent from an appreciative local business, and it’s been nice focusing on something artistic and separate from my career during lunch.
Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
#50I've been building a minimal social CAD tool / platformer game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qBOXfzHybU
(Built with three.js / react-three-fiber, and a simple Node backend.)