Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

I'm learning how to sew. Adam Savage (sewing his EDC bag) and other folks sewing masks (to give them away) have inspired me.

I have found this to be a great starting point: https://youtu.be/rnTwT-ifLkU

Took over all of cooking at home - all meals so as to give the spouse a break. Lesson learnt, cooking once in a while is fun but cooking every meal every day (in lock down from march 22nd) is really really hard since it requires meal planning and execution every day from the moment you wake up.

Decided to open source some of the personal projects of mine. https://github.com/vivekhub/password-generator and https://github.com/vivekhub/simplenote-backup. Nothing fancy but something I have been meaning to do and started doing it. Started learning K8S as well so that is a positive. Decided to setup a personal website https://www.vivekv.info as well and had to learn hugo to do that. So on the whole feeling good. Sorry about all the links and plugs but hey I am genuinely proud of what I have done :-)

I have launched a project where I sell Keycloak themes and share tips for Keycloak users [1].

Keycloak is a very good Identity Manager but the default theme is not easily adaptable. Making new themes also requires effort and a little bit of knowledge, which means additional time to invest in learning the platform. On KeycloakThemes you can find ready-to-use themes (for now one, more to come) that you can upload and start using in 5 minutes.

[1] https://keycloakthemes.com

making a minimal self-hosted bookmarking site https://github.com/jonschoning/espial

I've had a feeling that certain state scratch off lottery games can be beaten thanks to certain actions the states take in the name of transparency. For example, they publish daily reports of the number of prizes remaining.

A simple example is imagine a game with 10 tickets sold for $1 each and a single $9 grand prize.

If 1 ticket is sold each day and if the lottery publishes the number of remaining winning tickets each day, then you can just wait 1 day and if 1 ticket was sold and 9 tickets remain and the prize wasn't claimed, well now there is a 1/9 chance of winning $9 and the expected value is even.

I started scraping several state for daily numbers and calculating the expected value of each game. Every now and then one gets over 100% EV. (Not taking into account annuity discounts and taxes)

https://scratchoff-odds.com

It's also an excuse to try out a lot of different technology and patterns that would be too experimental for most real jobs, so it's a great side project.

I'm currently working on a user section with Clojure, Fulcro (https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/), and Crux (https://github.com/juxt/crux).

Another fun little side project that was also an excuse to work with Clojure was https://ezmonic.com/. The app was built with ShadowCLJS, Re-Frame, and ReactNative. I've used the Major System mnemonic to remember things like my credit card numbers and I've always wanted to know how optimally short the mnemonics I come up with are. That app uses the CMU phonetic dictionary to search for an optimal phrase.