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

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

#41

Post by tvst » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

ttymidi http://www.varal.org/ttymidi/ Written around 2004 to allow me to make custom MIDI devices with Arduinos.

NiftyPlayer http://www.varal.org/niftyplayer/ Made in 2000ish to play mp3s on a friend's website.

Cardapio https://launchpad.net/cardapio Made around 2010 to replace the app menu in Gnome to support search, ability to navigate folders, and plugins.

TomatoInTheSky http://tomatointhesky.com/ Pomodoro timer with the ability to pause (which goes against the technique). Made in 2010 for my wife to study for dentistry classes while working in hospice care.

FiveHeadlines http://fiveheadlines.com Reddit reader that pulls 5 headlines from my favorite news subreddits, so I don't browse Reddit for too long. Made around 2014.

And now my joint project with some friends is where I work every day! Started in 2018 https://streamlit.io

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

#42

Post by nicolashahn » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

I built this image differentiation tool to automate comparison of images generated by two different (one legacy, one replacement) image processing services: https://github.com/nicolashahn/diffimg

Seems to have become useful for a lot of other people, which I didn't really expect.

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

#43

Post by iso1210 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

== 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 had a nodejs based config checker (a script which every 10 minutes logs into -- like rancid, but looking nice). It broke after some minor change in one of the 456,914 imported scripts, so I bashed together my own and dragged in a visual diff tool.

I looked at rancid but it felt rather cumbersome, and I didn't want to store stuff in an VCS, it was quicker and easier just to do it myself

== vlc multiviewer == I wrote a VLC wrapper in python using a VLC Gtk widgit to give me a multiviewer so I could monitor multicast RTP streams and easilly mute/unmute from a touchscreen

== continuous pinger == Just a program to sit in the background pinging a list of servers continuously, traceroutes every 10 minutes, and storing them, then a webpage to show the results and summarise them (highlighting any losses and pinpointing the exact second, etc)

== multicast test tools == A couple of quite python multicast send/receive tools to check connectivity. The receiver can also dump out an output and generate a jpeg from the contents (using ffmpeg), and ties into monitoring to ensure that the streams are all working and we haven't had something like pim dying on a router (which has happened in the past)

== cheese.sh == Loads up mplayer to cheesefm and logs what's played (ICY Info lines) to a text file (having first rotated the last one)

== sshold == To ssh into old cisco switches. Barely a script

  ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-dss -oKexAlgorithms=diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 $@

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

#44

Post by amar-laksh » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Got tired of having to pause/resume media while watching food, made a script to automatically pause/resume media if I'm not focusing on the screen. https://github.com/amar-laksh/focusTV (the code was not great but it works)

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

#45

Post by romes » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

I did a calculator TUI to visualize binary and hex while developing an emulator :) https://github.com/alt-romes/programmer-calculator

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

#46

Post by sandreas » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

m4b-tool - merge, split and edit audio books (https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool/)

This one has become pretty popular in the meantime - did not expect that :-)

---

graft - file transfer utility with regex, mdns and sftp server (https://github.com/sandreas/graft/)

Designed to have tools like find and copy also on Windows - not maintained any more, since I found sfk, rclone and others...

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look - a log file watcher (https://github.com/sandreas/look)

Designed to have tail on windows, not maintained any more, because its ready for my use case.

---

pilabor - a hugo blog to manage my personal notes (https://pilabor.com)

Started as an experiment a few month ago for organizing my personal notes in a hugo project. Worked out pretty well so far.

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

#47

Post by thescriptninja » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

Wrote a VS Code extension to solve a very minor inconvenience. All it does is that it adds a shortcut to add the current date. Needed this as I use VS Code for journals, notes. Midway, I found another tool that already did the same, but was too excited to build my first extension, so did it anyways :) https://github.com/parth-paradkar/ClipDate

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

#48

Post by donohoe » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

I work in media and have been pushing to improve web page performance for a variety of reasons (better UX, lower bounce rate, load ads faster, higher ad CPMs, etc.)

I created a tool to show how my org (at the time) was doing relative to others, and also to apply a bit of friendly competition to motivate for improvement's:

https://webperf.xyz/

At the time I started, I was at The New Yorker and we were in the top 20, with a Speed Index closer to 8,000. Now its in the 40-50 rank with a Speed Index around 25,000 :(

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

#49

Post by scambier » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

SIM Notes, a wysiwyg markdown notes taking tool, based on Notational Velocity. It's a tool I literally tailored to my needs: 100% flat markdown files, in-place rendering, no structure, no tags, but a powerful and fast search. It's my own perfect zettelkasten.

Unfortunately I had to stop working on it when I had a burnout, so it's still buggy but good enough for me to use it every day.

I'm very slowly working on a v2, with a simple localhost daemon and no Electron.

https://github.com/scambier/SIM-Notes

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

#50

Post by tjchear » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

I made a webapp (sheetUI) that turns a simple google sheet into a beautiful webpage. I used it when I was apartment hunting, amongst other things. I tabulated the data of each apartment I found (fb marketplace, craigslist, etc), along with images, into a google sheet. Then I used my tool to display them as a grid of cards. There were auto generated filters on the top of the webpage that I could use to filter the cards by whatever criteria I choose.

I made it public last year and it's quite enlightening to see what people have been using it for. E-commerce, contacts, work check-ins, image gallery, inventory, workshop listing, etc.

It's not the best tool, and I don't make a lot of money from it, but I'm happy I'm providing value to others. I still keep the free version around since plenty of people are relying on it.

I'm working on a new version catering to business's internal use cases now, with read/edit/permission control capabilities. Hoping to get it out soon :)

https://sheetui.com if you're interested.