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Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
401–410 of 484 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#402An out-of-spec DNS server implementation that helps me understand and control my internet usage. The DNS server resolves queries based on rules I've set up. Essentially, I can configure certain categories of websites to only resolve at certain time periods. For example, I could make it so reddit, HN, etc, only resolve for a 5 minute time period (either anytime or only in the mornings) every day. The point of the serv…
Nextdns also has support for resolving queries based on the time. If you ever get tired of rolling your own that is.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#403I built January.sh to finish more backend projects in less time.
Most of my freelance work is API development and most of it are repetitive tasks so I thought I could solve this through compiler generator.
Early this year I decided to open it up for others, still beta though
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#404an online store item price watcher - saved me some money while shopping online
a feed reader - I was never satisfied with other feed readers so I've built my own
small utilities I use from time to time
All these apps were in active development for at least a year each and were deployed to my home server where they continue to work to this day. I fix bugs and add new features when I have time. Many of my apps use the libraries I publish publicly. It's always a pleasure to work on my own projects.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#405I wrote a tool to do automated QA on internet video (HLS/DASH, tech used for Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, etc.). It evaluates streams against a database of 100 or so "quirks" that identify either general issues or issues that will only manifest on certain player libraries. For instance, specific "in spec" encodings which are actually non-standard in practice get flagged. Built on TypeScript/node/Docker over the course o…
I’d be interested if for no other reason to see if some of the hiccups I see in streaming video recordings are more common than just me/just random.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#406I was selling an apartment in a developing country. I wanted to know, given the constantly updating property sales tax and rapidly worsening exchange rate, how much I’d end up pocketing in USD, if I sold for X vs X - 5% vs X - 10%, etc That would inform my “I’m willing to go as low as” selling price. So I built myself an app to scrape the current tax from the government’s online calculator and assemble a dozen what-i…
I tend to think about these types of problems this way as well. But then there’s folks that will throw this together in Excel, and I realize I would not know where to start. Anyone got pointers?
Part of this was in Excel. XLOOKUP() is magic.
My data source was a worksheet that was generated by my app.
Worksheet 2 - Scraped tax Data + Excel fetches current exchange rate from its "financial market information"
Worksheet 1 - My "dashboard" with a dozen possible price levels, agent fees, etc and using XLOOKUP to read from Worksheet 2.
The benefit of compiling this into Excel rather than a custom frontend is 1) Excel comes with unparalleled tools for sorting/filtering/visualizing data and 2) I shared this XLS with real estate agents.
They couldn't fathom somebody selling a property for any price other than whatever their market analysis provider says.
Before sharing this XLS with the agent, the conversations were... frustrating.
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"I want to pocket a minimum $x USD after this deal. What should I set my price at in local currency?"
"Currently comparable apartments in your area at selling at Y local currency"
"Okay, but ultimately I'm leaving and after the sale I want to immediately exchange and transfer the money and pocket $x USD after fees and exchange rates"
"It's illegal to sell a flat in USD"
"Yes I know. I'm selling it in local currency. But my end goal is to get $x USD after fees and taxes. What should I set my price at to achieve this?"
"If we try to sell your apartment in USD, the buyers will be angry and won't come"
"I'm not trying to sell my apartment in USD. I'm selling it in local currency. What I'm saying is that after selling, I will convert this local currency to USD, and I want that to be at least $x USD. Can you calculate the fees and taxes, so that you can tell me how much in local currency I should set it for, so that in the end I get $x USD?"
"Currently comparable apartments in your area at selling at Y local currency."
"But after taxes and fees and money exchange how much will that get me in $ USD?"
"It's illegal to sell a flat in USD, so we can't do that."
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#407Almost all of the software I make in my free time is for my own use. My most used tool I have is a note taking web app that automatically saves markdown files to S3. The most important feature I added was a little button that would automatically make a note for the current day, and put it in the daily notes folder, all sorted and organized. I also have full text search which is very helpful for finding old notes. I a…
> Using the Spotify API you can find random music, then find random instrumental music from that random music. For this, I made a Spotify playlist with 41 hours of instrumental soundtrack music that helps me focus. It's not random like yours, but with that many hours, there's enough variation if you put it on shuffle. It's mostly epic and uplifting movie scores. Or suspenseful and building up to something... none of…
Since your #1 song on this playlist is a Star Wars track, there's a fun little easter egg in a Spotify client. The progress bar is replaced with a lightsaber and you can change its handle by clicking on it.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#408I routinely turn any task I need to do more than three times into a script that automates it. I've published a couple of these, like
- This pair of scripts for starting an RDP session with a resolution matching the size of the current window (from back when I was using herbstluftwm): https://gist.github.com/YellowApple/6e6134b7493485aa3e56f255...
- This script for running Windows programs in a specified Proton-managed Wine prefix (though nowadays there are better tools for this): https://gist.github.com/YellowApple/8f91daf000153195e643e8d7...
- This script that populates ID3 tags for MP3 files I've downloaded (via youtube-dl or yt-dlp or whatever) based on their filenames and folder structure (so that I can easily play what I want from a USB stick plugged into my truck's head unit): https://gist.github.com/YellowApple/7b9cc54cf6fbc20bf79cf240...
but a lot of them I've never gotten around to uploading, and most are buried away on old machines (or backups thereof) or lost forever on employer-owned machines that got presumably wiped after I left.
This post did, however, inspire me to go back through some of those backups and look through some of those scripts. Some results after a few minutes of spelunking and reminiscing:
- A couple Perl scripts that would convert hex digits into eight-dot Braille characters (to represent a fictional country's number system, back when I was actively roleplaying on NationStates.org as a teenager)
- A trio of Perl scripts to turn CSVs into SQL insert/update/upsert statements (possibly related to the time I accidentally blew away some of a prior employer's production data; we couldn't bring down the whole DB to do a normal SQL Server restore, so instead I pulled up the CSV dumps of the relevant table (for our ETL pipeline) and used those to build the necessary inserts/updates to restore what got deleted)
- A one-liner `tr '\r' '\n' $2` called "mac2unix" because I was trying to import a CSV into SQLite for some analysis but the sender created it on a Mac and of course the default spreadsheet app still uses lone carriage returns for linebreaks like it's nineteen-eighty-fucking-nine
- Another one-liner `exec xdg-open "$@"` called "open" (don't remember why; maybe because people kept sending me shell scripts written on Macs?)
- A whole bunch of other little scripts to populate toolbars from my herbstluftwm-using days
- A bunch of scripts to generate ZPL code to print various labels on Zebra thermal printers
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#409a lot of cool projects here, but i will share my relatively mundane ones:
- made a tool to import all of my local music library to a spotify playlist by analysing the music itself. used a music tagging api to analyze a small section from the middle of the track to get its details. went through the effort because some of the music i had was very old and i did not keep up with updating their media tags.
- i finetuned musicgen on instrumentals of some of the music i like. i now have an interface that randomly generates a short track, which can sometimes create a nice banger. cannot publicly release due to licensing issues.
call me lazy and selfish, but i only bother doing things outside work if i am really interested in it and want to do it for myself.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like that really deserves to be written in C so you don't need to install Ghidra to use it. The way I imagine it working is if I want the function `foo` then I'd say `objsuck -ffoo -ofoo.o prog.elf` and it'd look at the elf symbol table to find the `.size` of `foo` and copy that symbol into the .o. I guess you would then need to use xed to disassemble the opcodes to see what other symbols it jumps into or c…
> Something like that really deserves to be written in C so you don't need to install Ghidra to use it. I think there's the Witchcraft Compiler Collection if you want a freestanding option [1], although I haven't looked into it too closely. The problem is that object files are made up of section bytes, a symbol table and a relocation table. You can't just rip bytes out of a program and call it a day, you need to recr…
It's trivial if you can compile the binary with `cc -static -r` and you don't need to extract dwarf data too. If relocations are stripped, you're fine so long as you can count on st_size being present (i.e. doesn't contain handwritten assembly) and you're able to parse the machine language. If symbols are stripped, then it simply can't be solved. It's just reverse engineering at that point.