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

Probably the backup and update system for my desktop.

All of my Linux boxes use btrfs as the filesystem.

I have some tools that makes snapshots of all the subvolumes I wish to keep backups of and does incremental transfers of them to my NAS. It will incrementally transfer any non-synced ones as well, so if you run make-snapshots multiple times without backing up, they'll all end up on my NAS eventually.

You can also have it create a writable snapshot out of the latest full snapshot so you can muck around with updates without breaking your current environment. It also updates the rEFInd configuration dynamically so you can boot into old snapshots if the one you're working on is broken. You can also have it spin up a VM to test as well.

I also wrote my own tiny dynamic DNS service I run on my blog's VPS so I can bind my home network's IP address to a domain name. It's just a tiny node.js app that acts an an authentication frontend to update a bind server's DNS config.

I hobbled together a software implementation of a half-QWERTY keyboard after a serious bike accident which left me unable to type with my left hand for over a month. The hardware solutions were (probably still are?) patented and we’re expensive to my then-very-broke self, so I learned enough ObjC and enough about the underlying keyboard mapping design to ~replicate the functionality in software on my Mac (right hand only until I could start actually using it), and then enough more ObjC to relaunch the thing whenever it crashed (fairly frequently, presumably from memory management issues I wasn’t trying to to deep dive at the time). I really wanted to open source it but it was just a life hack to keep working and I definitely didn’t want to also do a deep dive into the patent litigation risks.

Small aside, I hate the concepts of neighborhoods. If someone tells me they’re from Highland, or Bakerson, or Rockwell, that means absolutely nothing to me. The boundaries are so arbitrary, and when I’m driving I don’t have any indication when I cross one or which one I’m in. I’d rather people just tell me they’re close to the intersection of Major St A and Big Road B. Or that they’re near the IKEA.

It’s especially frustrating on dating apps like Hinge which only show neighborhoods. Half the time I don’t even know if they live in the same city as me.

This is lovely! Thank you for making it!!

Not really high tech, built a countdown timer with a calculator UI for quick and precise entry say 1m25s. For the Apple Watch. Used mostly for coookign but it’s great if I need it quick. Also built my own music app to listen to music the way I like it