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Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#51

Post by atum47 »

I wrote a dictionary generator so I can get WiFi from business: back then I was too poor to pay for it.

I know now that there are many options out there, but I think my tool addressed my needs more efficiently.

I've noted that business in the town I lived back then used some sort of telephone number + name of their business combination for their wifi password.

The script actually gave me a 60% rate of success. Went through 4 years of college without contracting a ISP.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#52

Post by bostonsre »

I wrote a tool to copy stdout from a remote machine to my windows clipboard. I alias ssh to ssh with port forwarding to a static port that isnt used anywhere, run a flask site locally on my laptop that has an endpoint for accepting base 64 encoded posts for copied data and an endpoint that has some bash function definitions for doing a curl post of base64 encoded piped data to the port that was forwarded over ssh. I have a terminal hot key which does a curl get of the bash functions and imports them.

so this on a remote machine:

some_remote_machine> echo hello | cb

Will base64 encode hello, post that to localhost:1234 on the remote machine which gets forwarded to my laptop flask site, it base64 decodes the text, then since im in wsl, the flask site runs powershell to write it to my windows clipboard.

It's good for note taking and sharing output in slack easily. I also have an alias for cbc or clipboard with command which prefixes the text with the command used to generate the output.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#55

Post by psacawa »

I wrote a 10-line script to interactively query JSON documents using jq from vim in a tmux pane. Like jid[1], but better. Here it is:

  jq-repl () {
   local query_file json_file new_pane_height nodemon_cmd change_aucmd jq_args
   query_file=$(mktemp) 
   json_file=${query_file}.json 
   cat /dev/stdin > $json_file
   new_pane_height=5 
   jq_args="$@ -C -f $query_file $json_file" 
   nodemon_cmd="clear; jq $jq_args | less" 
   change_aucmd="au TextChanged,TextChangedI  write" 
   tmux split-window -l$new_pane_height $EDITOR -c "$change_aucmd" -c "set ft=jq" $query_file
   nodemon -q -d 0.3 -w $query_file -x "$nodemon_cmd"
  }
dependencies: vim, tmux, jq, nodemon

[1] https://github.com/simeji/jid

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#56

Post by riekus »

On a different note. I made my own laptop stand out of carbon fiber because I wanted specific things that I couldn't get out of the store. I am a digital nomad and finally build the thing after 4.5 years of country hopping. Got lots of interest and now working on a production run: https://www.fiberstand.com :)

Software wise, mostly scrapers for classified ads ect.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#57

Post by jffry »

I wrote a small script, executed with a cron job, which adjusts the color temperature of all my Philips Hue light bulbs throughout the day.

The Hue device bridges have a simple HTTP api available over the local network, and with a combination of curl and jq it was easy to retrieve the IDs of lights that are currently on, and then set their color temperature.

I've since moved the functionality into a small service I wrote in Clojure that runs on a Raspberry Pi, as part of an effort to consolidate a few different things under one roof.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#59

Post by shafkathullah »

I made HackerCards(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackercards/ncblkm...) to easily skim over HackerNews on chrome new tab page.

Another one is Hijri for Chrome(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hijri-for-chrome/m...), a Hijri date viewer that too made for myself for tracking ramadan fasting count.

And yes my own Chrome theme 'Space Grey'(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/space-grey/cohabkm...)

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#60

Post by Osmose »

I built a music player for videogame music formats because the only other player on MacOS that supported them had a terrible UI and didn't support all the formats I wanted. I consider it a tool because I use it a ton during work to play infinitely-looping songs to help me focus.

https://www.mkelly.me/moseamp/

The progression of me building the app was (over a span of maybe 7 years):

- Prototype compiling GME[1] into asm.js, generating sound samples on a webpage, and piping them into the Web Audio API.

- Turning that prototype into a desktop app in order to learn Electron.

- Giving the desktop app a proper UI in order to learn React + Redux.

- Switching to a native node.js addon to fix slowdown/memory use during playback.

- Switching to musicplayer[2] so that I could play Playstation music.

- Adding a Windows build so I could listen to music while coding on my Windows computer with the same UI as on MacOS that I had by now grown accustomed to.

- Adding a visualizer to learn how, well, visualizers work.

- Adding a piano-roll visualizer for NES music and rendering-to-video because my friends who make chiptune videos on Youtube use an old, inflexible program to make their videos.

I would say the number one driving force is that I made a tool I use pretty much every day; tools I've made that are only occasionally used never really motivate me enough to bother fixing them up, but with Moseamp every fix is an _immediate_ improvement in my day-to-day.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/mpyne/game-music-emu/wiki/Home [2] https://github.com/sasq64/musicplayer/

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