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Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

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Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#651

Post by onli »

rosstex wrote: post #637
onli wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One less useful thing for you: https://onli.github.io/izulu/ . It is a bash script that changes the background of your desktop according to the weather at your locations, and can show the temperature and forecast. Doesn't have much functional value, but it was easy to write (though over the years it needed some care, mostly thanks to closing weather APIs) and it is a small simple thing I use almost every day, as it i…

That looks sweet! Is there a Windows version?

Thanks. Sorry, Windows is not supported. It is written in Bash, Windows was not a target at that time. It might work with https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about, but probably not since it also uses imagemagick to paint on the images, and xml_twig_tools as well as jq to interpret the api output. And it would need to detect that it is running on Windows to change the desktop background with the proper command, if that is even possible.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#652

Post by jnpatel »

rosstex wrote: post #622
partisan wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. I like the fact that the icon shows in the actual tab as a preview. I guess what is missing is the option to select a font?

What is this magic?

I didn't check the source, but rendering the to a data URL, and using something like this [0] would work.

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5199902/isnt-it-silly-tha...

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#653

Post by rspeer »

ftfy (fixes text for you): https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy

Auto-detects Unicode mistakes (particularly mojibake), and if there's enough information left to fix them, it fixes them.

Particularly useful for Web scraping and dealing with Unicode that was incorrectly exported from Excel (which is nearly all Unicode exported from Excel).

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#655

Post by cperciva »

justinsaccount wrote: post #643
cperciva wrote: post #438

The simple tool I'm most proud of is spiped. If you have two systems which need to be able to talk over TCP without worrying about evilness on the network between them, spiped is the answer. The simple tool which has probably had the largest impact is bsdiff -- now found used in hundreds of millions of devices -- but I'm not particularly proud of it because it was a quick hack and horrible code written by a C novice.…

That reminds me, I keep meaning to look into seeing how hard it would be to add a reverse mode to spiped. Right now it acts like a ssh -L tunnel, but doesn't have a mode where it acts like ssh -R, right?

Those are really the same thing, considering that you run a copy of spiped on each side.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#656

Post by rspeer »

viraptor wrote: post #642
flukus wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incoming SSH connections can/should be blocked by the router. There is also likely to be no static IP.

Connect them to a private zerotier network ( https://www.zerotier.com/#try_zerotier ) it's free and you can bind sshd just to the zt0 interface. Instant access from anywhere.

That sounds a lot harder than solving the original problem.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#657

Post by bpicolo »

The first thing I ever made and released I'm stilled very proud of. Tiny, just a Sublime Text plugin to copy the relative path to an open file from your project root. https://github.com/bpicolo/CopyRelativePath

Up to nearly 2k installs these days! https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Copy%20Relative%20Path

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#658

Post by dudeget »

I have been working on a multiplayer game as of recently

https://puzzlequest.herokuapp.com/

move with arrow keys, attack with "A"

there's a ton to work on and I've been busy with other things, so sadly the game has taken the back seat. Hopefully I'll be able to put more time into it next month

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#659

Post by mrkgnao »

0xCMP wrote: post #172
munchor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using this for years and all my work colleagues always ask me "what is that nyan cat on your text editor? that must be super annoying!" and I always have to tell them I just really like it. Thank you for building this, it's awesome!

Same! But sadly when I switched to Spacemacs I haven't set it up again.

Use the colors layer and enable the Nyan cat option. ;)

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#660

Post by flukus »

bottled_poe wrote: post #644
flukus wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

Linux tends to require configuration/debugging from the console. Don't get me wrong, I use linux every day, but I would never push it on someone who is not interested in solving their own tech problems.

If it's setup and working it requires no configuration/debugging. And it sounds like whether it's windows or linux he's going to be responsible for fixing any computer problems so it may as well be on a platform less prone to problems that he can fix better.

Just being on a platform where uses can't get infected with malware from stupid flash game sites cuts out 90% of maintenance.

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