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Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#431

Post by JaggerJo »

kredd wrote: post #428
JaggerJo wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanted to check it out and was surprised that it requires an account.

Yeah, totally fair point. I should probably add a simple guest access. Had to lock it behind auth as I keep adding features for myself that require some backend action, and was too lazy to write different code paths depended on authentication. I guess, that's also one of the drawbacks of writing something for myself, as you just forget about inconveniences that it can cause to others.

I note that explains what happens with the location data would also be nice.

Like is my complete health uploaded to your server? (I assume not)

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#432

Post by kredd »

JaggerJo wrote: post #431
kredd wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, totally fair point. I should probably add a simple guest access. Had to lock it behind auth as I keep adding features for myself that require some backend action, and was too lazy to write different code paths depended on authentication. I guess, that's also one of the drawbacks of writing something for myself, as you just forget about inconveniences that it can cause to others.

I note that explains what happens with the location data would also be nice. Like is my complete health uploaded to your server? (I assume not)

Nope, no health data is being sent to me. The only time your location gets recorded is when you use it to generate a challenge based on your current location. For just mapping and visualizing your walks, everything is local.

But yeah, obviously a ton of polishing can be done. Sorry about the troubles!

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#433

Post by ChuckMcM »

emilburzo wrote: post #314
ChuckMcM wrote: post #259

Yes. But the list is too long to put in a message here. Generally tools which do things that I needed done at the time, like convert PDF bank statements into CSV transaction files that can be ingested by a simple ledger application. I always have a 'hacks' directory in my home directory of code that does something I need doing. Sometimes I use it again and again, sometimes its a one-off that answers a question. I'm m…

> like convert PDF bank statements into CSV transaction files I've tried this recently and it's surprisingly difficult. Any pro-tips? Extracting pdf tables, while respecting the cell position, seems almost impossible in a way that works in all cases (think borderless tables, whitespace cells, etc)

It is remarkably difficult and continues to provide a good example of the limitations of LLM based systems.

In my case, I used perl, and exploited the fact for for a given bank, the statements are consistently formatted. Further, PDF OCR conversion responds consistently to the documents with the same formatting. With this combination, it is possible to extract the characters and numbers that are associated with transactions from the document, and then to take those extracted bundles of text and transform them into lines for a CSV file.

The caveat is that it works for only that bank, that "kind" of account (usually checking, credit card, or savings), and when using that specific document OCR tool. Within those constraints it is eminently reliable but utterly non-transferable to a general case.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#434

Post by duckmysick »

BoppreH wrote: post #132

I have a 3-letter domain that I use as my personal playground (think "xyz.com"). It features: - One-click anonymous upload of text, clipboard, and files. So from any computer, I can visit xyz.com + ctrl+v to upload the clipboard, write notes to myself, drag and drop a file, etc. It's a risky feature, but there's nothing to attract attention and you don't even get a URL back. - Authenticated sessions see a list of upl…

> removed after a bank started asking questions

What? That seems crazy. A bank was giving you an earful for accessing your own balance?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#435

Post by grogenaut »

When I was growing gourmet mushrooms I was just sending data from esp32s and humidity/temp sensors to grafana/graphite on my nas. A few hundred loc total.

Many years before that I did sports arbitrage. Wrote my own xpath system before xpath for it. Worked great.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#436

Post by Epaphos »

I wrote a few apps when I realized that I couldn't find anything ready-to-use for my tasks.

For example:

Conversion between .env and .json configs: https://github.com/magicxor/EnvJsonConv

Web scraping different platforms and sending results to my favorite messenger: https://github.com/magicxor/ExtensibleMessageBroker

Transformation of copied text using regular expressions: https://github.com/magicxor/ClipboardTransform

It usually takes 3-10 days to implement and polish the core functionality. Some apps I use on a daily basis (e.g., bots in my favorite messenger), and some 1-2 times per month.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#437

Post by fcarmona »

I'm a web developer so I try to fix all my problems with javascript, one of them is maintaining my Plex library across multiple server migrations. I made this little helper I use as a bookmarklet to get a movie's name from an IMDB page in the correct format that Plex will identify without issue: https://gist.github.com/carmona/09cd03fddeb7db25ace42a21cf3d...

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#438

Post by hakfoo »

A little Python/Tk script that scrapes weather.gov data and provides an icon with the local temperature and a forecast dump. It was sized to fit the fairly large-iconed dock of my X11 desktop and be a bit more modern than old WindowMaker dock apps.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#439

Post by mstipetic »

jasondigitized wrote: post #392
mstipetic wrote: post #195

I got annoyed at all the invoice generators so I recently built my own in a weekend. I put the data in Airtable and a python script generates the pdfs using typst. Much more flexible than any of the solutions I found and it took me less to build it than the time i spent trying out the available solutions.

What wrong and inflexible about off the shelf solutions?

They assume a specific format of the invoices and conditionals aren’t easily supported - like if I’m removing VAT use one format, if not use another.

Another problem is the annoying data input where things aren’t organized using tables for quick input, rather than forms on different screens. One more thing that comes to mind is it’s hard to reuse elements, sometimes I have a generic template per client and just swap in and out line items etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?

#440

Post by BoppreH »

duckmysick wrote: post #434
BoppreH wrote: post #132

I have a 3-letter domain that I use as my personal playground (think "xyz.com"). It features: - One-click anonymous upload of text, clipboard, and files. So from any computer, I can visit xyz.com + ctrl+v to upload the clipboard, write notes to myself, drag and drop a file, etc. It's a risky feature, but there's nothing to attract attention and you don't even get a URL back. - Authenticated sessions see a list of upl…

> removed after a bank started asking questions What? That seems crazy. A bank was giving you an earful for accessing your own balance?

I was scraping their website every few minutes, from a cloud provider, using a cookie I created by logging in manually while VPN'ing through the cloud (so the IP looked the same).

Eventually the cookie started "expiring" quicker and quicker, and they eventually thought I was being hacked. I knew how sketchy the whole thing was, so I didn't want to admit that I was doing the "hacking" myself.

It was probably against the terms of service, triggering alarms on their side, and risking being classified as actual hacking. Not worth it.

Eventually I got a bank account and app with instant transaction notifications, so now there's no point in scraping anymore.

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