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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?

#691
@dang regarding pagination

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

#692

I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up local video content to a schedule I create. The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an…

I've wanted to do this for quite some time! Do you serve it over you local network or is the Pi directly connected to the television?

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

#693
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…

Best real world example of something actually useful for ChatGPT I’ve seen yet.

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

#694
declarative code generation https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof because I was tired of having to change 10+ files in a full stack app to add a field to one type, so I brought ideas from devops to application development

it's now generalized and for everyone

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

#695

I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up local video content to a schedule I create. The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an…

Very cool. This is exactly what I miss about old time TV; being able to catch a show by chance. I find it interesting that most of the time there's so much choice that I can't get the energy to pick one and stick with it. For a while there, I had 4 streaming services and never watched any of them. I just wasted my money.

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

#696
post #80

Not sure if this counts: A lighting desk for my hobby of lighting live music. For reasons I like doing live control along with the music (known as busking). Existing things are either limited and can't control moving lights, or don't have the flexibility to busk the way I want. so, having worked a long time ago for a crowd that built what were at the time the best lighting desks in the world, I built my own It has 36…

If you're ever interested in publishing anything about this to aid others in recreating it, I'm sure there'd be ample interest (for better or worse). Professional controllers are hilariously expensive for many hobbyists and the options for DIY control surfaces tend to be limited (especially with motorized faders).

I'd certainly be interested in reading about how it works, even without anything approaching build documentation.

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

#697

I built a web app that keeps track of every link I ever find to be interesting. It allows for fine-grained topics (e.g., individual academic papers, or topics more specific than that). It groups the topics in a DAG, so that you can get to a topic via more than one path from the top. And it allows you to look at intersections of transitive closures over topics in order to narrow down a search. It keeps a history of ev…

That's an intriguing idea. What is the purpose of it? Can you share screenshots?

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

#698

I built a web app that keeps track of every link I ever find to be interesting. It allows for fine-grained topics (e.g., individual academic papers, or topics more specific than that). It groups the topics in a DAG, so that you can get to a topic via more than one path from the top. And it allows you to look at intersections of transitive closures over topics in order to narrow down a search. It keeps a history of ev…

Sounds very interesting. Do I’m having trouble picturing how it works. How do you get the links into the system? I’m assuming this won’t work for links that you find on your phone, i.e. when not on your on your computer? And how do these links get indexed? By the stuff that’s on the page? What’s an example use case of where you use that system to find a link?

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

#699
Sounds super simple, but was awesome at the time. In the 90s when all of my music was either on CD or ripped to MP3, I built an FM transmitter to broadcast my computer audio (sonique or winamp) to any radio or receiver in the house. It was a perfect solution that didn't take long to implement. I didn't know anyone else who did this.

About 5 years ago, I had a car stolen and lamented what affordable tracking mechanisms I could use. I cobbled together an extra cell phone and a data only SIM. I kept the phone running in the back of my van plugged into an auxiliary cigarette lighter port. It uploaded data to google spreadsheets every 15 minutes. I had to root it to have it automatically boot when connected to power. In the end, it was flawlessly reporting its location every 15 minutes. While I was testing this, my car was stolen. The google spreadsheet pointed me to the GPS location where it was. A phone call to the police and a 40 minute wait for them to arrive got my car back only hours after stolen. Dude was sleeping with a big knife next to him, so I'm glad I let the professionals speak with him.

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