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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?

#71
I don't know if it qualifies as the "most interesting" but as a travel bug I wrote a little airfare scraper that I got plenty of value out of.

Basically it's a script that scrapes several places for flight deals and "mistake fares" and notifies my phone if it matches with my city. No searching like other flight apps, you basically just set it up and wait, and various places will pop up. Helps if you're in a hub city e.g. NYC.

The phone notification was crucial because such deals sold really fast. In case the booking didn't work out I was usually covered by the 24 hour cancellation rule [0][1].

I started off running it on my own server but later I learned IFTTT handles device notifications without paying the Apple Developer tax, so I migrated things there. Used it more when I was single but nevertheless it's helped me land some killer deals e.g. NYC-Dublin RT for $300, NYC-Paris RT for ~$400.

Thought about making a paid app out of it but the limited seating and time-sensitive nature of these deals is tricky.

[0] https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/notice-24hour-res...

[1] I believe this rule, which is not so broadly known, was imposed on air carriers in response to certain fraudulent online marketing practices going on at the time.

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

#73

I built carefulwords.com simply because I wanted to type a word into the address bar and get a large list of synonyms and some historical quotes using the word quickly. For example: https://carefulwords.com/solitude https://carefulwords.com/think etc. Also unlike thesaurus.com, the search bar actually focuses so you can just start typing! It's not perfect, I need to do a lot of editing, but nonetheless I use it almos…

I don't particularly care about synonyms (when I consulted a thesaurus too much my writing became too flowery) but the historical quotes feature was just great! I can imagine downloading the full text of several of my favorite authors and index the words from that corpus.

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

#74
Not really sophisticated but I wrote a ~200 line Python script to trawl a few data sources like USPTO and Reddit and aggregate that info into an e-mail for me to review daily. It was extremely helpful in getting me up to speed in a new job that I lacked the background for.

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

#78
A recipe manager for our family that strips all the SEO text out using the OpenAI API. I built this after someone in our family got diagnosed gluten intolerant and we had to make changes to our usual recipes.

Normal recipe sites tend to be full of irrelevant (SEO optimized) text, ads and tracking, and I wanted something to just get the recipe in a clean form.

It’s a basic web application (mostly in Go) to manage recipes. New recipes are imported from an URL, after which it extracts the plain text from the site and uses GPT to get a markdown formatted recipe and list of ingredients.

This would’ve been much harder pre-GPT, but now was trivial to implement.

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

#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 motorised faders and a bunch of other boards with buttons, that each ave their own AtTiny to run the function, they talk to a BeagleBone Black which runs the main code loop and uses its on board realtime processors to generate DMX, and a raspberry Pi to run the GUI for configuration.

Worked a treat most of the time, and I've done hundreds of shows with it, with crowds of up to 400 people, Sadly, I made a dumb decision on the protocol for the fader and button boards to talk to the BeagleBone and every now and then it causes a kernel panic on the Beaglebone, which means at best you lose control of the lights and at worst it goes dark on stage.

I started a redesign using a more sensible protocol but got hit by a double whammy of Covid killing the live music scene for a couple of years, plus the all the supply chain issues, so it's on hold now.

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