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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?

#461

Post by lalunamel »

I built a native mac app called FileWatcher. It watches the filesystem for events like read, write, open, mount, stat, etc etc. I wanted to investigate how xcode's build system worked [1] (which relies on `stat` to determine whether or not a file needs to be recompiled) and couldn't find any tool that would do the job.

I was astonished when I couldn't find what I needed - surely this had already been solved by someone else! There are things like inotify and watchman, but they don't provide process information about the events.

I haven't figured out how to distribute it quite yet because the API it uses to collect file system events isn't allowed in apps distributed on the app store. I recently made a short video demo, though[2].

[1] https://blog.codysehl.net/2023/Understanding-the-XCode-Build... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhMWXzoBWY

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

#462

Post by Hadriel »

rpastuszak wrote: post #380

The most interesting tech I've build for myself is boring: a writing tool I use every day for journaling: https://enso.sonnet.io With that out of the way here's some more ridiculous stuff: In 2016, I made a browser based AR party game where you'd fight kittens falling from the sky by dancing with vegetables in your hands (CMYK was easier to track using the webcam). I have some photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/g6Dp8…

enso is cool!

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

#463

Post by epiccoleman »

One of my big "side projects" over the last few months has been my personal website and blog (https://epiccoleman.com). It's not very interesting per se - I mean, who doesn't have a blog these days - but it has been really educational and fun to work on. It's a really simplistic stack which makes working on it pretty frictionless. I spent a lot of time tweaking the look and feel of the site and am pretty happy with how everything has turned out.

I've also been putting a lot of work into a React component that renders a nice looking SVG Circle of Fifths, and just recently got to a point where I felt I could call a release "1.0.0". This has also been a really educational project and I'm super proud of the component. It's a little basic right now, but it looks very nice, and I have a lot of cool features planned.

It's licensed MIT, so if this sounds like something you'd like to use in an app, you can check it out here: https://github.com/epiccoleman/react-circle-of-fifths. I'd love any feedback, issues, etc.

Edit: Oh, I just thought of one other thing - a single line of code I wrote which frequently gives me great joy. In zsh you can define a function called `command_not_found_handler` which gets invoked whenever a command ... isn't found.

Mine says: `figlet lol, $@`, so whenever you make a typo like "gits status" or something, you get a big "lol, gits tatus" printed out, which is amusing.

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

#465

Post by tanng »

I have built VS Utils [1] mostly for myself since I work with WordPress and they use serialize(), unserialize() functions a lot, and sometimes I need to convert base64, timestamps value without leaving the editor. I find it's easier to write an extension for daily use functions and publish to VS Code so I can download it easier, sync across devices. Hope it helpful for others too.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tanftw.v...

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

#466

Post by afavour »

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…

For those interested in doing something similar there's a Plex add-on for making custom TV channels:

https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

Personally I want almost this. I want to rotate the TV shows my kids watch in the morning but I don't want to start part way through a show (the one part of the old analogue experience that I don't miss at all). Difficult to square that circle.

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

#467

Post by dtertman »

I hate the weather where I live (Chicagoland), so I spent a week a couple years ago downloading weather data from WUnderground and geo data from a bunch of places and turning it into a reverse weather index - instead of searching by place, you'd search by weather.

I found the best weather for me was in Antofagasta, Chile, but I never did anything with this knowledge :)

Unfortunately it was all built on an OpenShift gear on the free tier, so it's dead now.

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

#468

Post by cehrlich »

When language learners learn vocab, there are two main processes: 1. Use a premade list of the top x words. Pro: they are guaranteed to be common words. Con: Once you make it past 2000 or so, they might not show up depending on what sort of niche things you read/watch/talk about 2. Look up random words as you come across them, and learn those. Pro: These are words you really saw. Con: You don't know how common that word is, maybe this is the only time in your life that you'll see it

I made a web app that lets you note down words that you come across and might want to learn, and then generates a learning order of those words based on a variety of frequency lists, as well as linking offsite for sample sentences etc. It allowed me to pass the JLPT N1 with just 6k known words (people usually need 8-10k)

vocab.c-ehrlich.dev

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

#469

Post by mxstbr »

I built a TypeScript-based DSL for Karabiner Elements that allows me to work with hyperkey sublayers, thus enabling me to have keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything I do across my entire Mac: https://github.com/mxstbr/karabiner

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4b_uQX3Vu0

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

#470

Post by SeanAnderson »

Uhh, I'm building a virtual pet ant farm combined with journaling / breathing exercises. Ants get fed when I submit data. It pushes me to keep on top of my mental health each day in the same way getting a dog pushes someone to go for daily walks.

It's kind of weird, but it's fun to make and serves a decent purpose.

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