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

Your blog is amazing, I would love to keep up by adding it to my feed reader but I'm not finding any RSS/Atom feeds.

This is great— do you have a writeup anywhere?

I did this same sort of thing. My impetus was that I have tons of shows and movies to watch but I 1) don't necessarily want to binge every episode back to back and 2) my wide selection leads to choice paralysis. I mostly want some background noise rather than something I'm super engaged in.

I wrote a script to catalog all my shows/movies then another that reads a schedule and generates a daily playlist. My schedule has daily episodes of some shows and then weekly showings of others. I even put some network block bumpers between some shows and "upcoming schedule" clips.

The output of the scheduling script is just an m3u playlist. A cron job loads the day's playlist at midnight and it plays continuously during the day. There's no controls to pause or anything, if I miss something I miss it (by design). All the video content is stored on a 5TB drive plugged into the machine.

To complete the old school analog nature of the project I picked up a low power Hlly VHF video transmitter. I've got a small CRT TV in my office that I use during the day and I can pick up the signal on the TV in the living room. The project started on an RPi with VLC but it struggled on some videos I'd ripped from Bluray so I replaced it with a little fanless AMD box with an HDMI-RCA adapter. It sits in the garage and I can pick up the signal anywhere in the house.

The best part is apart from the setup it's proven to be pretty reliable. My next step is to make a schedule output like what you linked and maybe a web based UI to let me "change channels". For right now it does what I want with no real fuss and I always have something on that I like.

I'm currently working on a service that would allow me to place orders using a satellite messenger.

Some background: When I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail few years ago, I used to order items that needed to be replaced or that I lost to the next or town stop using my phone (most towns have a general store or a supermarket, often not an outfitter).

However, it's not uncommon for sections of the trail to be outside cell service for days between town to the next one.

Anyhow, since the next trail that I plan to hike, the Continental Divide Trail, is even more remote than the PCT, I started to play with a prototype of a satellite messenger backed service to let me order items from a predefined list (each can match multiple items of a different priority) and be shipped to a predefined shipping address (post offices of trail towns along the trail).

So, for example, assuming that one of my contacts is a phone number that my service is monitoring, I can text a message like that:

  items: shoes, tape, filter, usb cable, ice axe;
  to: Chama;
  eta: 2023-07-01;

And it should place an order of a predefined pair of shoes, water filter, Leukotape and USB cable and ice axe to Chama, NM. Messages are limited to 160 characters before they get split, and so to keep it simple, I might use shorter abbreviations for some items.

If any item on the list can't be delivered until 2023-07-01 using prime shipping (unfortunately it's the easiest option), it should be dropped from the order. Alternatively, if the guaranteed delivery date is off by 1 day, I might just place it on a separate order, hope for the best and if it doesn't show up on time, it'll get returned individually after not being claimed.

Finding bugs must be unpleasant.