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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?

#421

Post by deafpolygon »

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…

Next, train them to raid other houses for shiny things and deposit at your house.

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

#422

Post by tehwebguy »

Moving box management system!

I used AirTable as a backend and UI, added boxes with a room, box number, barcode and contents details.

Before beginning I printed barcodes for the first 10 or so boxes. I used thermal shipping labels, sliced them into 3 stickers with 2 barcodes each and slapped them on corners so every face had one.

Then I just packed like normal and when a box was full I took a photo of the contents from the AirTable mobile app, scanned the barcode and jotted a note about the contents down.

My local machine was pinging AirTable every few seconds to look for new boxes with photos and would then print out 2 full size labels with the photo, box number large, contents and room name which I then put on 2 sides of the box.

Arriving was amazing, every box had a destination (room) so no double moving. Every box had contents on them so no opening boxes until you are ready. Plus the AirTable made searching for an item and it’s containing box trivial.

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

#423

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

I have a wonderful group of friends from back home, ranging all over the age spectrum, who all golf together almost religiously every weekend. I made them an app that resembles the PGATour's live scoring, so folks can be on the course and input their scores on the holes and get a live leaderboard of how everyone is doing, factoring in everyone's handicap. There are some commercial apps that kind of do this, but the issue with us there are several members who for one reason or another don't. have phones to input their scores themselves, so my app lets one person in the group put their scores in for the other ones.

After I left the country, this has had the wonderful side benefit that I can still follow along with everyone's game, and has been instrumental in me staying in touch and connected to my friends, so that when I come to visit on vacation it's like I never left!

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

#424

Post by remify »

mariusvaporware wrote: post #413

A software developer and football (soccer) fan who lives in an antipodean time zone, I enjoy watching games on demand the morning after they occur. Apart from watching the games of the team I support, I like to watch one or two of the most entertaining games in any given week, but score spoilers absolutely ruin the experience for me. So, I created https://laterball.com : a web app the algorithmically determines the b…

This is very nice, It would be great to add other leagues and cups.

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

#425

Post by fghorow »

Prior to the 2017 "Great American Eclipse", I made reservations at two hotels -- each within a day's drive of my location that were near the path of totality. I then built a screenscraper from one of the weather sites (WUnderground, IIRC) that took the cloud forecast for the eclipse and presented it as a time-series. (Yes, I knew there was significant uncertainty involved!)

About 3 days before the eclipse, I decided which site to visit and ditched the other hotel reservation.

It worked well. My wife and I each saw our first total solar eclipse!!!

There's one coming up in 2024 too. Maybe some enterprising soul would like to expand on the idea and create cloud-coverage forecasts for the entire path of totality?

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

#426

Post by phkahler »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #149

My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels. She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio,…

I love how this requires ZERO learning effort on her part, she simply has a personalized ratio station rather than whatever someone else puts on.

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

#427

Post by noisy_boy »

nhaehnle wrote: post #25

A tool called "diff modulo base": https://git.sr.ht/~nhaehnle/diff-modulo-base Given two version (old and new) of a Git change (i.e., individual commit or patch series from a pull request) it produces a diff that is actually useful for reviewing purposes, assuming you've already reviewed the old version of the change. It's sort of like `git range-diff`, but where `git range-diff` produces a "diff of diffs" that is ve…

Maybe you can put a small example of code changes that illustrates this. The diagram helps but actual output based on a toy example would drive it home, I think.

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

#428

Post by Fatboyrunning »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #386

I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up local video content to a schedule I create. The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an…

What a great idea! Are you inclined to make a guide? If so, my old-school wife and myself would be grateful.

Otherwise, I will enjoy the fun of figuring it out for myself some day.

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

#429

Post by leblancfg »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #423

I have a wonderful group of friends from back home, ranging all over the age spectrum, who all golf together almost religiously every weekend. I made them an app that resembles the PGATour's live scoring, so folks can be on the course and input their scores on the holes and get a live leaderboard of how everyone is doing, factoring in everyone's handicap. There are some commercial apps that kind of do this, but the i…

Definitely a marketable idea right there, ChicagoBoy11
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