Realtime, full-resolution satellite imagery, globally.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
721–730 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#722From somebody else's design, a WWV/JYY repeater node with a copper loop antenna driven by HF gpio pin toggling on a rpi.
It's so I can NTP sync my Citizen radio controlled wristwatch which otherwise only gets time signal if I happen to be in Europe or some parts of Asia.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#723I am a teacher and built a tool to generate images of ten-frames (used in early elementary math education). I tried to package it up for other educators as well, but so far I'm the only user. :) It's online at https://10f.io
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#724I don't like Reddit's UI for browsing subreddits that are mostly/entirely images, and I don't really like their gallery viewer either. I've always wanted something ultra-simple; just a grid of images and nothing else. So I built it:
I don't think anyone else really uses it, and I haven't promoted it at all. But I really enjoy using it.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#725not excessively impressive but I built a few fun webextensions that I had an itch for.
The ones I use daily or almost daily:
a simple, scanable tab manager that lists all the tabs over all your windows in one list. you can close tabs via middle clicking them and bring the tab you want into the forefront by clicking on it.
an extension that captures capslock and a/d to cycle focus from one tab to the left or right
an extension that opens up a folder of bookmarks a few bookmarks at a time via a right click menu option
an extension to change the speed of a youtube video by having - + buttons at the bottom of the page overlaid and also tells you the current speed of the video.
an extension that made a few quality of life tweaks to the apple development docs.
a theme extension that fits what i want the browser to look like.
I have some others but these are the most useful to me
In meatspace, I built a fan box that hangs at the top of my window facing out so it can take the hot air from the ceiling and push it out while a fan at the bottom of the window pushes cool outside air in.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#726My MTG playgroup kept taking too long to play rounds because of indecision on which cards to play, and we consistently ran out of time part-way through games.
A proven solution to this problem already existed - chess clocks. However, those only work for two-player games, and we play games with the number of players ranging from 2 to 6.
So I made a little web app that's like a chess clock but supports several players rather than just 2. It's designed to be used on a phone and put between the players on the table. Your turn ends when you tap your clock. There's also a pause button for during combat so that you can't unfairly run down another player's time while deciding which creatures to block with. The KO button distributes a defeated player's remaining time amongst the players who are still in the game.
Made with 100% organic, home grown typescript. No React in sight.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#727Blind developer here; I often write tools for myself to perform some task that is not well supported by my screenreader. For example: * I wrote an add-on that allows me to read HN comments in a structured way. A typical screenreader would present page in a linear manner, so you'd have to read all replies in order, which is quite tedious in popular posts. My add-on parses the page and identifies the level of each comm…
BlindCompass sounds (pun not intended) brilliant! Did you have inspiration for this or was it an original idea? Not any less impressive either way, just curious as someone who’s not at all family with this space.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#728I 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…
Often considered doing this! I’d miss the reviews though… CellarTracker, not vivino ;)
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#729https://neighbs.us/
Really fucking dumb. Uses browser geolocation to tell me which neighborhood in San Francisco I'm currently standing in. Grabbed the lat/longs of each neighborhood from the SFData [0]. It works by plotting a circle representing your location + uncertainty and determining which of SF's 117 neighborhoods intersect with it. If your circle intersects with more than one neighborhood, it's smart enough to categorize them in order of certainty. It even automatically updates as you move, it's pretty fun to sit in an Uber and watch the neighborhood change as you move across the city. Learned a lot about polygon intersection algorithms, they're pretty amazing!
Built it a number of years ago when I moved here. Since it runs entirely in the browser, it's hosted for free on github pages and I don't need to maintain a server.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#730In the 2000s I was addicted to Elisp and contributed a ton of OSS code including JDE, EDEE, and tons of other tools.
But... I had just a MASSIVE amount of code that was literally just for me.
Emacs basically became my OS.
Emacs allowed you to just eval code on the fly and the IDE would just adapt. No reload required. So if you wanted to do stupid stuff like make control+enter open the current URL at the cursor, you just write a three line script. Then you add it to your elisp on load.
... but mine got WAY out of hand. It was just mountains of code.