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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?

#441

Post by fragmede »

liamYC wrote: post #266
vintagedave wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a linker developer, I'm going to send this to him :) Not sure about heresy according to computer science. Sure, it's not intended, but it's a very clever thing to be able to do.

Technology like this will create huge selection pressures against desktop apps if it becomes easy for people to reverse engineer, remove payment mechanisms, and then freely distribute. Wouldn’t you think?

The tools and know-how to remove payment mechanisms from binaries have existed basically as long as binaries themselves have.

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

#442

Post by tnvmadhav »

I dogfood almost all my side projects and a few are open for the public as well.

My most used (by me) software is my social media posting tool (twitter/x). It's public but I've disabled signups (due to free tier posting limits since Elon's acquisition)

> How did you make it?

It's written in Django and hosted on DO

> How often do you use it?

Almost everyday :)

Others are used intermittently and they include image generator, screenshot tools for iOS and macOS, etc.

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

#443

Post by bevesce- »

I scrape all of the food, wine and beer recommendations that I find and display them on a map in a web app. I can see the list of all of the places that are closest to me: restaurants, wineries, ice cream parlors, breweries and so on. If the source of the recommendation scores places or products made by it it's part of the data and I can filter by the score. I probably spent many weeks working in it. I'd love to make it a business but I have no idea how to approach the legality of it. I use it all the time because I travel a lot.

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

#444

Post by stogot »

fardinahsan wrote: post #171

Yes. I made two recently. - TalkToYoutuber[1]: Download the transcripts from a youtube channel and hook it up to gtp4 with RAG to let me "talk" to youtubers. There's a bunch of youtubers who have useful knowledge to share, but no blog or wiki, so semantic searching their video transcripts is the next best thing. - YoutubeThumbnailSearch[2] - Embded all of a youtube channels thumbnails using CLIP and search them using…

> I am thinking of making a scaled down version of [1] so I can "talk" to long videos, like conference speeches or university lectures. Should take an hour or two to cook it up since it will reuse most of the code from [1].

This would be useful to me as well. If you do end up making it, could you reference it on your existingGithub

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

#445

Post by HackHawk »

Lots, but my favourite is a caption remover. I found a film I wanted to watch, the audio was in English, but there were Greek captions spread over the bottom quarter of the screen.

- Split the mp4 up into pngs (better quality than jpgs) with ffmpeg.

- Process each png, filling the white caption areas with data from the nearest non-caption pixels.

- Join the pngs back to an mp4 (ffmpeg).

- Get the original audio with ffmpeg and merge it into the mp4, ffmpeg again.

The actual processing was with C# on Windows because that's home turf for me.

Lessons:

1) You need a lot of space for 200,000 decent quality .pngs

2) You need to be prepared to wait a few hours for the process to run

3) ffmpeg is blooming marvelous. https://ffmpeg.org.

I probably spent 20 hours on it, maybe more. I don't use it at all now, it was a one-off solution, but I occasionally see a video and think "I could run my app on that ... "

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

#447

Post by dougdimmadome »

A few I can think of

- Note taking app that stores all data as markdown on Dropbox

- When I was getting married I created a photo upload site with a flickr backend where people could bulk upload all of the photos they took of our wedding, and as a result we got thousands of photos without needing to chase people up for memory cards etc.

- Every year I organise Secret Santa for all of my family and my wife's family through a PHP web app I wrote.

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

#449

Post by karolist »

I made a data takeout tool for the SaaS kindergarten communication platform used by my child's daycare. On it's own the software is really simple and could have been a few hundred lines of Python, but at some point I changed my mind and wanted to share this with other parents in case they find it, the things that make a project fit for publishing took 95% of actual work since you want it general and robust enough someone non-technical can use it. I now fully understand someone's reluctance to publish tools they wrote for themselves because it takes a lot of work.

https://github.com/karolistamutis/kidsnoter

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

#450

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

karolist wrote: post #449

I made a data takeout tool for the SaaS kindergarten communication platform used by my child's daycare. On it's own the software is really simple and could have been a few hundred lines of Python, but at some point I changed my mind and wanted to share this with other parents in case they find it, the things that make a project fit for publishing took 95% of actual work since you want it general and robust enough som…

I find the use of docker on Windows totally overkill and added complexity for non-technical users. Why don't you just build a single .exe they can download and run? With Golang, that should be rather easy.
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