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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?

#491

Post by chankstein38 »

jo-m wrote: post #254

I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it. It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/ . Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.

This is such a cool project! I live right next to a busy road and for a long time have wanted to do something like this that would count the vehicles passing. I've always been curious how many cars pass on a given day and I feel like the hardest part now adays would be getting the right camera angle so if cars are occupying all 3 lanes they aren't counted incorrectly. From there I just need to detect cars as they pass and count them.

It's really cool to see it used like this! The resulting images are really neat as well!

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

#492

Post by j3d »

Shared Slides Clicker [1] - an extension to allow for multiple people to remotely drive a single Google Slides presentation. I created this because it drives me insane when I hear people saying "Next slide please"! It leverages React and Firebase.

Simple Weekly Meal Planner [2] - a very simple, free PWA for deciding what you want to make for dinner each week and tracking all the ingredients you need to get from the market. I built this because meal planning is one of the most annoying parts of adulting. It was built with Svelte and Firebase.

Audiobook Locker [3] - a Tauri-based desktop app for managing your audiobooks. Think calibre-for-audibooks. I created this because I wanted a nice way to keep track of which audiobooks I'd completed and which to read next. It uses Svelte for the UI and Rust on the backend.

[1]: https://fonner.gitlab.io/shared-slides-clicker/ [2]: https://simpleweeklymealplanner.com/ [3]: https://fonner.gitlab.io/audiobook-locker/

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

#493

Post by leblancfg »

My wife has a goal to run 1000km this year, and uses an Apple Watch to track them. But getting to the YTD total is a pain in the fitness app.

So I made the worlds most basic iPhone app with React Native, that grabs the data from HealthKit and shows it across a percentage of the year.

Simple but effective.

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

#494

Post by ScottWRobinson »

I made a "bot" server for myself, which is really just a server and app framework to host a bunch of scripts. The framework handles:

- Running bots periodically - Receives webhooks - Handles OAuth - Provides a shared DB - Posts updates to and receives commands from Slack

It's not very innovative, but super helpful. I love that I can deploy a new script so easily and already have all the tools I need so I can just focus in the logic. A few bots I have running:

- I run a site with thousands of articles, so one bot checks 10-15 articles per day for spelling mistakes, broken links, broken images, poor formatting, etc. Tasks to fix these are then posted to Notion. - Monitor Hacker News and Reddit for mentions of the sites/apps that I run so I can respond. - Sync calendars between apps without having to make them public - Gather financials and reports from various sources for bookkeeping - Monitor all of the servers we run and sync their status to Notion

Probably at least half of the automations could work on something like Zapier, but this is more fun and I get a lot more control over them.

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

#495

Post by _andrei_ »

The most useful thing I built for myself is my workflow. Being both on the ASD and ADHD spectrums, I intuitively knew I need systems, and started working on them, long before I was diagnosed and got treatment.

One of my dearest parts of my system is the knowledge, task, and time management part. There's many things to improve, but I'm really happy to where I got.

TLDR; custom org/markdown/hyperlists-inspired document syntax powered by tree-sitter, go library for accessing the data, command line utility with interactive task manager (built in with a custom React-like component-based TUI framework), Neovim plugins and integrations.

This short video explains more than I can in a short time: https://gist.ro/slang.mp4

Extra - Thank you Org mode: I do my work in a terminal emulator, so (obviously) my editor is Neovim. Two years ago I allocated a few weeks to learn Emacs and to review Org mode, I was hooked on so many concepts, and I loved it. Didn't like Emacs through, it's just too slow for me, and Elisp felt very meh if not yuck. There's quite a few things that I liked so much while testing Org mode, and that I tried to port.

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

#496

Post by pbrw »

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 website looks beautiful, what tools did you use to build it?

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

#497

Post by yboris »

Simplest File Renamer - https://www.yboris.dev/renamer & https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer

I wanted to be able to quickly rename files with my text editor (using keyboard commands), so this lets me do it. Plus I share the app online for free.

Video Hub App - https://videohubapp.com/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I started it just for myself, but it ended up so good I spent several more years improving it as people kept buying it (up to almost 5,000 purchases since I started).

Also wrote a couple of dev tools for myself (sharing via NPM too) - https://www.yboris.dev/

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

#498

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

RowanH wrote: post #255

The G-Seat as part of my sim-rig. 9 AC Servos, borderline dangerous, beast of a simulator. The G-Seat I decided to do better than commercial offerings (had tried "the best" and it was pretty average). CNC brake folded aluminium seat with moveable flaps controlled by AC Servos - had to 'de tune' as they were literally at rib-breaking speed initially. About a year worth of development designed and prototype in Fusion 3…

That is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time!

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

#500

Post by bitcodavid »

This hearkens back to the analog days, but I can't drive without music. My last car had a crappy stereo. I happened to have a project box lying around so I built a 12-watt, 4-channel amplifier. The best part is that I also had these beautiful old backlit analog VU meters lying around. I only had two, but it made the thing look totally awesome.
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