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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?

#571

Post by derivagral »

Yep! Made a note app for tracking HN users. Fun making it build React in Greasemonkey before the toolchains matured to make it kinda trivial. It ran off of a real database because I use a few different computers, so localstorage wasn't the right thing.

Stock research platform using relatively cheap ($X00/yr)fundamental data & free pricing APIs.

Had a fun "fight" with a major pricing website for a game. When your (rate-limited! trying to be nice!) crawler needs to turn to OCR to defeat css spriting and they're leaving comments in the HTML though... a bit too combative. Fun project making it work though.

Any game with an economy I end up making stuff for. Personally, I wish games weren't so hostile to automation or user time these days!

I also once SaaS'd a weird file format translator thing on heroku for myself; sometimes old formats or algs do really just disappear!

I've made some small modules for my MagicMirror but haven't had inspiration on further stuff for that just yet.

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

#572

Post by jffry »

ryanchants wrote: post #354
jffry wrote: post #329

Most of my light bulbs are color-temperature-adjustable. So I wrote a small program which varies the color temperature throughout the day and night. I started by matching it to the solar elevation, but ultimately I like it more just on a fixed schedule. I've also programmed it to make a more dramatic warm shift near bedtime, and to fade up a bedroom light when it's time to wake up. Due to the inevitability of scope c…

I've been wanting to build something like your light system. What smart lights do you use?

Hue bulbs, the kind that talk to a central bridge over, I believe, ZigBee.

The bridge just hooks up over ethernet and provides a locally accessible no-nonsense REST api that is surprisingly well documented (sadly requires logging in with a free account: https://developers.meethue.com/develop/hue-api/ ).

Authentication is simple. Press the big button on the bridge, hit an API endpoint within 30 seconds, and you get an auth token.

The only other requests I needed were a GET to list the id and status of all bulbs, and a POST per bulb that is on to change its color temperature (you cannot set color temp of a bulb that is off).

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

#573

Post by jffry »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #364
jffry wrote: post #329

Most of my light bulbs are color-temperature-adjustable. So I wrote a small program which varies the color temperature throughout the day and night. I started by matching it to the solar elevation, but ultimately I like it more just on a fixed schedule. I've also programmed it to make a more dramatic warm shift near bedtime, and to fade up a bedroom light when it's time to wake up. Due to the inevitability of scope c…

Super curious about the inter-workings of this system

Here you go! Happy to answer any other questions not answered in my other two comments:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31026875

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31026979

Fortunately this was fairly easy to implement since Hue bridges provide a locally-accessible actually-documented REST API for me to use!

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

#575

Post by kamek »

I created a simple command line utility [1] to convert between rotation representations. If anyone has ever dealt with 3D rotations (e.g., euler angles, quaternions, rotation matrices) you probably know that it can be frustrating to know what conventions people are using, especially with euler angles (e.g., intrinsic, extrinsic, passive, active, etc.). So I made a tool where you can explicitly set those conventions with explanations on what they all mean.

I regular refer back to the README myself or test out some conventions with the tool.

[1] https://github.com/kam3k/euler

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

#576

Post by mkl »

Jaruzel wrote: post #568
mkl wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ok typo on my part... anyhoo - does "correct" go at the front or back?! Because the way I read it, the speech bubble saying 'correct' is after the horse and the other two words.

"Correct" goes at the front; see panel 4. You remember the order along with the words, and the imagery is a cue to aid memory, not a script.

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

#577

Post by vishaltelangre »

linsomniac wrote: post #369

Decades ago I had a friend that needed to scan his CD cover to start selling it online. I only had a Linux machine. So I looked up the documentation for the HP scanners, found it was well documented at the protocol level, so I bought one. I wrote some CLI tool that could trigger a scan and read the data back, into a file. Worked well enough, but I wanted a GUI. I started thinking I wanted to make a GUI for it. I star…

Very inspiring and insightful story! Thanks for sharing it.

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

#578

Post by jmmv »

Yes, many. The problem I have is that I always feel the urge to "clean them up" and post them as open source with corresponding blog posts and all, which ends up being a time sink (and limits what I do because I have to "pick my battles").

Recently, two of those programs have been web services, which are still public... but I have kept the code to myself and it's pretty liberating in a strange way.

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

#579

Post by neverartful »

Yes, I have created many. However, one stands out far above the rest in terms of how much I've used it and how big of an impact it has. That's my cloud-based music player. I have my music collection stored in Wasabi (S3 compatible) and I have client-side python code that I normally run on shuffle-play. As I move across different laptops and whether I'm at home or away, I always have my music handily available for listening. My monthly payment for Wasabi storage is $6 and I'm not tied into any proprietary system.

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

#580

Post by sn9 »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #366
netsharc wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Inclusive Coding Bot (a stupid Github bot that went around Github making pull requests replacing "he" with "they") guy should've talked to you... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877930

People need to stop thinking this bot was a serious attempt. It is very obviously a troll making fun of people who advocate for gender neutral phrasing.

Poe's Law strikes again.
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