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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?

#741

Post by gregable »

patcon wrote: post #270

I co-organized a weekly hacknight meetup of 40-70 people. I wrote a script to make Anki spaced repetition flash card decks with avatars and names pulled from the meetup API. I would use GitHub Actions to run the script a few hours before the event, then drop the importable deck into a Google Drive folder. I'd review the deck before the meetup, and then at the event, I'd not stress about names. I'd pretend to introduc…

In another context, I recall someone doing something similar, but they didn't have images in advance. So they would study the list of names, but wouldn't know who is whom. Supposedly made it faster to learn people's names anyway.

Cool trick either way!

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

#742

Post by mncharity »

My laptop picked up three extra cameras on folding sticks[1] for tracking? For MediaPipe hand pose. And chopstick wands (could be held while typing) with barber-pole marker for rotation, a small Xmas half-ornament to glide over keys for keyboard-as-graphics-tablet, and an unfinished arduino pressure sensor. Face pose, low-precision gaze and higher-precision head pointing with markers on glasses. Long-thin curved mirror bar at top of keyboard to get keyboard-as-touchpad touch events from the keyboard cam. Shallow-3D UI using eye-tracked perspective, anaglyph, or arduino LCD-shutters. I was interested in software dev inside aphysical XR, to extend rather than replace existing mature laptop dev tooling. Diverse input latencies interestingly required complex event processing and backtrackable ui state. Lenovo "portable workstation" fans would crank high just from the input handling, before 3D apps even started. Battery life under half-an-hour. But... it was oddly the flop-up cameras which most gave me joy.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERqCfdkX0AEWTN_?format=jpg&name=...

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

#743

Post by BatFastard »

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…

Impressive shots! Very nice project.

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

#745

Post by hypertexthero »

Not so interesting but continuously useful for me as a learning aid: A compass rose showing the opposite bearing of a given bearing; the back azimuth.

Useful to head back the way you came, or tell someone you see in the distance roughly where to head to meet you, in both real and virtual worlds.

https://hypertexthero.com/compass-rose-back-azimuth/

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

#746

Post by unscrew5430 »

gimili wrote: post #663

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 calli…

Love this. This is exactly what coding is about for me; improving your life and the life of others by solving some problem, how miniscule it might seem.

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

#747

Post by alden5 »

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…

mr. fancypants here with the silent tmc2209 driver lol

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

#748

Post by billylo »

I live on the flight path of a busy airport (Toronto) and have always wondered what type of aircrafts they are as they fly above me.

So, I made a "Plane Above Me" app that listens to airplane sound. Once detected, it polls data from flight APIs and read out the flight info and aircraft data.

In other words, it's my little "Flight Announcer".

https://evergreen-labs.com/PlaneAboveMe.html

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

#749

Post by orsenthil »

I wanted to practice with leetcode. Resetting the solution wasn't available as short cut key. So created a tampermonkey script to help me reset and redo the problem. Helps me a bit.

After I got fired from twitter in 2015, I was having some remorse, dissatisfaction and sense of failure, opportunity lost. I wrote a browser extension, https://github.com/orsenthil/fortune-browser-extension that will good quotes I had collected and help me focus.

I still go by that maxim. "There are far far better things ahead than any we leave behind. C.S. Lewis" and want to share this with anyone was let go by bad leaders in the tech layoffs.

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

#750

Post by noman-land »

bussyfumes wrote: post #313

When I was a student there was this power-of-two game on my friend's iPhone that I was literally addicted to. I didn't have an iPhone and eventually the game even disappeared from the AppStore. I missed it very much and my friends jokingly mentioned building a copy just for me. They never got around to it but at some point I thought "maybe I should give it a try?". So I gave it a try with no game dev knowledge and th…

Very fun game :)
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