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

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

#661

Post by specproc »

busyant wrote: post #501

I made a "laser-beam-break" camera trigger for my Nikon D750, which I use to capture images of hummingbirds at my feeder. Instead of paying $125 for this ... ( https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1337050-REG/pluto_tri... ) I decided to build one using an Arduino. I probably spent more than $125 on the project, but I ended up buying a lot of hobbyist electronics parts, soldering gun, etc. I learned a bit about what…

Not nearly as cool, but related. I've been using yolo to pull bird frames from a GoPro left running by the bird feeder.

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

#662

Post by UncleEntity »

HornyDude wrote: post #650

Throwaway time! I built a custom smart motorized masturbator. It borrows from 3D printer design, and has a NEMA 17 stepper motor driving a 2GT belt loop around a short length of 2020 extrusion to slide a carriage along a linear rail. The carriage has attachment points that I've put clamps on, that close around a fleshlight-style sheath. There's a brace at the business end that you put around the base of the penis and…

Just to toss one out there…

You need a fitness tracker and some machine learning to really get your freak on.

Sorry, too tired to come up with a good robot innuendo.

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

#663

Post by gimili »

For 6 years I had a long distance relationship between Peru and Germany.

When you are in different timezones it can actually be nice to fall asleep with the other person "close" to you; so we kept Skype running while one of us went to bed and the other person was working on the PC.

Unfortunately the internet connection would regularly drop, ending the Skype call. Now you did not want to wake the other person by calling them.

So I wrote a small script that would allow you to send a secret word in the chat and invoke the other persons' Skype to call you instead automatically.

Kept our relationship healthy. Now we've been married for nearly 10 years and are happily living together :)

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

#664

Post by shsbdncudx »

HornyDude wrote: post #650

Throwaway time! I built a custom smart motorized masturbator. It borrows from 3D printer design, and has a NEMA 17 stepper motor driving a 2GT belt loop around a short length of 2020 extrusion to slide a carriage along a linear rail. The carriage has attachment points that I've put clamps on, that close around a fleshlight-style sheath. There's a brace at the business end that you put around the base of the penis and…

They do say you should scratch your own itch

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

#665

Post by specproc »

Msurrow wrote: post #220

I build a "SaaS" wine app, for tracking wines in my cellar and for tasting notes as well. "SaaS" in quotes since it runs in a small production setup with all the bells and whistles (ie. CI/CD pipelines, continuous releases, user signup etc.), but I'm the only user :-) I'm a wine enthusiast, i.e. not a professional but interested enough to do a WSET2 in my spare time (I'll do a WSET3 when I find time some day). I like…

Not a tech project, but made my first batch of wine this year. Was immense fun, and just about drinkable.

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

#666

Post by runeb »

mariusvaporware wrote: post #413

A software developer and football (soccer) fan who lives in an antipodean time zone, I enjoy watching games on demand the morning after they occur. Apart from watching the games of the team I support, I like to watch one or two of the most entertaining games in any given week, but score spoilers absolutely ruin the experience for me. So, I created https://laterball.com : a web app the algorithmically determines the b…

Very nice project, thank you! As a european transplanted to the U.S I feel this challenge with score spoilers as well. Streaming services that do not offer hiding scores, or who even insist on leading with scores in their UI are now brands I actively avoid. Such a small simple UX detail leading to absolute shunning of a whole media company.

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

#667

Post by JoelMcCracken »

Its probably too late to comment for anyone to see/respond, but I've been working for a long time on a personal workstation automation/configruation project:

- https://github.com/joelmccracken/workstation

At this point, its basically ready to go. Its a weird feeling. I've been working on it for so long, and now it... works.

Being able to use github actions with macos runners makes this project so, so, so much easier.

Another project I've been working on is a custom authoring format - think markdown, but customized to my needs (specifically, the format is extensible). Think markdown/xmlish hybrid. There is a lot of churn though so I'm not quite ready to demo it, but once I get something interesting I'll share it more with folks.

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

#669

Post by alaskamiller »

drcode wrote: post #593

I just moved to the bay area. I made an app that scrapes all bay area events from meetup, eventbrite, and a couple of other sites- This way you end up with around 100 events a day, way too much to read through. So next I take each event, send it to chatgpt3.5 and ask it to rate this event on around 20 parameters. Next, I take the latitude/longitude of each event and measure driving distance from my house. Then I have…

Lived in the bay the whole time, did the same thing. Multiple sources, categorization, distances, etc. Chaining GPT for rating is a nifty feature add though.
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