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Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#511

Post by tailspin2019 »

Definitely.

The magic here is that there is a lot of hidden, intrinsic value that comes from doing this sort of thing, which isn't immediately obvious to others, and often even you at the time.

I have noticed a trend, when creating software and technology projects for myself, which is that a surprisingly percentage of those projects end up being useful in the not too distant future for commercial projects. In ways that always surprise me.

And even without that, the skills I learn tend to end up being as valuable as whatever direct or time-saving value the script/program gives me.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#512

Post by tailspin2019 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> A "sanity check" program for my internet connection to see if the problem is me, or Comcast

It's funny, I've never thought of doing this, but now realise it would be quite handy. Not just for connectivity but also some quick bandwidth/latency tests, and perhaps even a few basic internal network checks too.

The number of times I'm trying to troubleshoot Zoom calls these days... it would be handy to have a little bash script to run to rule out obvious issues.

For my specific use case, a big one would also be a quick automated check for whether my primary network connection is Wifi or Ethernet since I swap between the two and often forget which I'm currently using (which can impact connection quality if it's not the one I intended).

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#513

Post by playpause »

One thing I do (and am curious if anyone else does anything like this) is I dynamically generate PDFs, generally to print out planning sheets and stuff. I like using templated printouts for planning my day/week, because I can scribble over them and break out of the predefined structure when necessary. But I also like digital calendar-type tools for their extra powers - they can pull in weather forecast data, events from shared work calendars, stuff like that. So I have a script that dynamically generates a day-planning PDF in my preferred tabular format, augmented with info from digital sources, before sending it to my printer. It's the best of both worlds.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#514

Post by citeguised »

I have a hobby-project where I collect stickered Laptop-Lids [1], and since I get most photos from twitter or by mail, they are often not centered and straight, but somehow skewed. I made a small MacOS-App [2] with Swift that allows me to click on the laptops corners, and export a cropped image (using CIPerspectiveCorrection). Photoshop has this exact feature under "perspective crop", but I wanted to do some Mac-Dev and save some time by not having to boot PS.

[1] https://devlids.com [2] https://github.com/niorad/Skewbacca-Native

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#515

Post by throwaway787544 »

Thousands.

Back in the day we used to clean them up and release them to Freshmeat. Clones of Freshmeat still exist today, but the kids today don't know about it, so nobody uses it, so it's mostly just old apps that are still maintained. But Freshmeat used to be the very first site you'd visit to find open source apps. Sooooo much easier than today where you have to search and search through various sites and still you're only seeing the most popular projects.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#516

Post by probabletrain »

isubkhankulov wrote: post #506
probabletrain wrote: post #500

Out of frustration with the built in Mac Notes app, and with the loading times of Notion, I made my own while waiting in airports on the way to and from a holiday: https://notes.probabletrain.com/ It was a handy excuse to try out YJS, as I (for no good reason) wanted it to sync live without conflicts, despite it not really being a multiplayer application. It can be opened across tabs on the same machine with updates…

This is great! I would love to self-host this. Are you planning on releasing the code?

I'd definitely like to, the only thing holding me back is getting the code to the point where I wouldn't be embarrassed by it - it was a very rushed job, and parts of it are incredibly hacky. So it's mainly a question of finding the time.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#517

Post by mkl »

Jaruzel wrote: post #489
omaranto wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the generator from xkcd sounds pretty good. https://xkcd.com/936/

For ages I remembered this as 'battery-horse-staple-correct' but then I see loads of people saying 'correct-battery-horse-staple' so now I think I'm the one who is wrong. I wonder which way round is actually the right way to say it?

Neither? As the linked comic says, it's "correct horse battery staple".

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#519

Post by mikevm »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #433
lobocinza wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I use passages from books. Easy to remember a >60 char password, can always check the book and it brings back to memory a book that I enjoyed each time I use it. For PINs I like to use a long sequence of digits of a physical/mathematical constant.

Just FYI, if there is an incentive to get your password, there are existing programs to match arbitrary length strings from books or any text source. One such program has been used to steal cryptocurrency from wallets that are generated from a passphrase like NXT.

That's why I also add punctuation to the phrases :), or some suffix.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#520

Post by madmax96 »

lucb1e wrote: post #256
slowbdotro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I prefer memorable passwords, thus, correct-battery-horse-staple style passwords in bash: (Install cracklib, or any dict file) #!/bin/bash pickaword() { WORDFREQFILE=/usr/share/dict/cracklib-small; WORDLENGTH=$1; awk -v wordlength="$WORDLENGTH" 'length($1) == wordlength {print $1}' "$WORDFREQFILE"|shuf|head -n 1; } [[ ! -z $1 ]] && numWords=$1 || numWords=4 separator="-" count=0 currentWord="" while [[ $c…

Please don't use $RANDOM or $((RANDOM)) or standard `shuf` for password generation. These RNGs are not cryptographically secure. Use input from /dev/urandom instead. Modulo operations like these are another thing to avoid. To get equal chances for each word, the simplest thing to do is e.g. do wordlistlength = 10e3 randomnumber = os.urandom(1) * 256 + os.urandom(1) while randomnumber > wordlistlength return wordlist[…

I'm curious. What kind of attacks do you open yourself up to if you use $RANDOM in this situation?

Also, why do we avoid modulo operations?

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