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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?

#51
I wrote a few things I use all the time.

1. A youtube bookmark manager for Emacs using Sqlite as a back end. - You can keep track of individual videos. - Manage series that span multiple videos. - remember interesting moments.

2. A system to help manage my finances by tracking what percent of my assets are in a given category. This helps with maintaining, say, a 60%-40% stock vs bond split across multiple financial institutions.

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

#52
A custom, DIY smart monocle from off-the-shelf parts, 3d printing, and custom electronics: 1080p60hz, 8-11hrs of battery life on a belt-clip battery + computer combo, has wifi & lte/cellular, can run ML models on device. One third the weight of upcoming Apple AR/VR glasses and one-sixth the cost. Just having it working has increased my efficiency a ton without obstructing vision or requiring me to look at secondary monitors or phone.

Working on replacing my wireless keyboard and trackpad with some "gloves" so I can use it while on hikes or just generally outside. Then, gonna integrate some custom AR and ML/GPT.

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

#53
I built carefulwords.com simply because I wanted to type a word into the address bar and get a large list of synonyms and some historical quotes using the word quickly. For example:

https://carefulwords.com/solitude

https://carefulwords.com/think

etc. Also unlike thesaurus.com, the search bar actually focuses so you can just start typing!

It's not perfect, I need to do a lot of editing, but nonetheless I use it almost every time I write, now.

The site is a little over 30,000 static HTML pages built with a number of TypeScript scripts that compile some sources for synonyms, parts of speech, and the quotes.

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

#54
Old School Runescape recently released a feature called "group ironman" that lets you play the game while only being able to trade with or assist others in your small >=5 man group. I made a small service that periodically scrapes the game's hiscore data and generate reports and metrics about the group's progress. And then a Discord bot to interact with the service

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

#55
post #28

I bought one of these LED screens (you get 64*32px, so not a lot!), and I wrote an app to view my local surf conditions on it (so I know what I'm missing out on while working). But because it doesn't support a way to run local apps that fetch from APIs, I had to add a way to show the forecast for other spots and make it "official". No idea how many people use it, but I saw it on instagram ads so that was some kind of…

wicked, I love these display projects

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

#57
post #32

I'm a big SNL nerd and have favorite sketches/memories going back over 30 years. I find it very rewatchable, but streaming services don't have full episodes, and even downloading full episodes wouldn't make it easy to find individual sketches. So I built a Plex library of over 500 individual sketches using some automation. I used yt-dlp to download the metadata for over 6,000 videos on the SNL Youtube channel. I put…

Awesome! I hope you make this public one day.

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

#58
In 2011 and 2012 in between jobs I wrote a few bits of software, of which

- one was a SQLite3-based, all-SQL reimplementation of a subset of UName*It (an object-oriented database from the 90s meant for storing NIS/DNS/etc. data)

- another was an RCU-like lock-less, very fast user-space data structure written in C, born of frustration with read-write locks in Solaris

Of those the latter ended up being useful to me about 5 years later, and I still use it in production, though I originally wrote it for myself.

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

#59
Over the past 3 years, I've been building "FreeCRT", a 24/7 Twitch streaming setup dedicated to casual Smash matches. Since I don't have a coding background, I used Node-RED to create custom flows that help manage the stream by connecting a MSI Gaming Laptop, Intel NUC, and Raspberry Pi 4. OCR and Node-RED extract text from the switch, while performing arena error logic, which connects to the Raspberry Pi to run macros to reset the open arena if it's closed. I just recently whipped up a Twitch Chatbot called FreeGPT that hosts the arena anytime. I've built it up slowly but it's been such a fun long term project.

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

#60
I made a small 4 digit LED display that syncs to my work calendar and counts down the hours/minutes or minutes/seconds to my next meeting, depending on how close it is to starting.

Currently working on moving the ICS calendar parsing part from a python script down to the microcontroller itself, then I can release.

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