The first build of DemoTime was for myself. Obviously it no longer is.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
41–50 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#42Lots of things. But one I am coming back to is called Malten (https://malten.com). It was essentially a place for me to blackhole my thoughts anonymously rather than putting them on twitter. Recently as I've seen ChatGPT take off it's made me revisit the project and create an integration for it (not yet publicly hosted). Ideally I'd just be able to voice my thoughts to an AI now in a private manner. Let's see.
https://github.com/asim/malten for anyone who wants to run it themselves.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#43My ISP is total crap and charges a fortune for a miserable service that at this point should be nationalized, and I'm not a radical communist either. Anyway, I need to monitor my usage and the interface they provide is a dumpster fire so I created the most spectacular Rube Goldberg abstraction to get access to all my past data using damn epoch timestamps and a data scrapper and now I can forecast my usage, set SMS alerts, get usage on a Telegram bot and access all my data via API. I think other people might want to use it but I've always been too busy to polish the product for an audience.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#44I suppose this counts: Although not that interesting, I have one of those AC units in my apartment that sits on the floor with an outlet tube terminating at a window to pipe out hot air. The internal reservoir for this unit is quite small so I hacked together a float valve that triggers a pump to offload the condensation water to a larger bin, that way I don't have to empty the reservoir as often. Pretty simple, but…
> I have one of those AC units in my apartment that sits on the floor with an outlet tube terminating at a window to pipe out hot air
You might want to add an intake tube, to cool the compressor more efficiently: https://imgur.com/gallery/kA4Z0uV
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#45This started out as a password mangager. It evolved into a graph database coff after reading Linked - How Everything is Connected to Everything Else
https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Interact/History.aspx
Still under development...
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#46I suppose this counts: Although not that interesting, I have one of those AC units in my apartment that sits on the floor with an outlet tube terminating at a window to pipe out hot air. The internal reservoir for this unit is quite small so I hacked together a float valve that triggers a pump to offload the condensation water to a larger bin, that way I don't have to empty the reservoir as often. Pretty simple, but…
It's the little things in life.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#47Probably boring to most people but I created a tool to nail exactly 40 hours a week contracting using the laziest possible inputs getting me out as early as possible on Friday:
https://github.com/cynoclast/time
Usage example:
tm 8.5 9.27 8.83 8.87 9:45-1:23 1:33-
14:11
54 minutes
Notice you don't have to give it AM/PM? Also don't have to give it any flags. It figures out what to calculate based on number of arguments alone. And it knows 9:45 to 1:23 is around 4 hours, not -8.
And during the week, decimal hours for timesheets:
tm 8:30-12:30 12:40-6:40
10.0
I used it 5x a week during my contracting days.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#48I built a VR environment for making and thinking about music, intuitively playing with alternate tuning systems, building instruments in space and livestreaming.
https://www.youtube.com/live/v4uHqdTr-bs?feature=share&t=426...
There are a few simple but powerful building blocks. One main feature is an egg shaped "note" which can be placed, resized, retuned and cloned on the fly. It's played by physics interactions with a "mallet" or sports balls, anything with a collider.
One of the instruments is a sine wave organ which has drawbars to control the amplitude of overtones. Unlike a classic organ, these overtones can be independently retuned and assigned envelopes to produce a range of timbres. Pitch is consistently mapped to a spiral - an isomorphism of pitch space.
It has a theremin which provides visual and tactile feedback and a voice with vocal formants controllable with a thumbstick.
It has a physics based sequencer of sorts which consists of "mallets" on a wheel which spins at a desired ratio of whatever BPM is set in a DAW. These wheels can be cloned and multiple mallets arranged around the circle using the Euclidean rhythm algorithm.
Since low latency audio in Unity is tricky, the VR app is really just a controller for synthesizers running in Max/MSP and IEM spatial audio VSTs running in REAPER. One day I'd like to package some portion of it into a mobile VR app for things like remote jamming or music lessons where models of the theoretic ideas are right there in front of us to tinker with. For now, it's just for me.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#49I built some groundbreaking technology to make it easier to browse torrents on the RARBG website.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#50Eh, at the moment a universal remote control app for my home theater. I expanded it somewhat for many other devices than I need, for friends and people on the AVSForums who requested things.
https://github.com/nicko88/HTWebRemote
It's not all that impressive per say, but a number of people seem to really like it.
Also an app to add a "wind" effect to a home theater as well.