Built it for me, but available to all -- Zillion: a python data modeling and analytics library.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
751–760 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#752I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it. It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/ . Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.
This is cool. How do you calculate the speed of the train?
I'm assuming you are measuring how far a certain feature of the train takes to get from one point of the frame to the other. Similar to how police catch people speeding by measuring how long road markings take to pass in a given frame.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#753Maybe lame by HN standards but I wrote a Chrome extension to tell me if Redfin, Zillow, and Loopnet listings are in a designated HUBZone.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#754I don't know about the most interesting thing I built ever, but I am pleasantly surprised with the utility and usefulness I am getting out of https://jarvis.tel.
I built it to scratch my own itch: I wanted a way to use AI on the go the way I talk to people (via text messages) and wanted a way to quickly show off AI to the uninitiated (friends and family who have never seen or used or understand AI).
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#755@dang regarding pagination // Get the anchor tag element const anchorTag = document.querySelector('.morelink'); // Add a scroll event listener to the window object window.addEventListener('scroll', () => { // Check if the user has scrolled to the bottom of the page if (window.innerHeight + window.scrollY >= document.body.offsetHeight) { // Fetch the content from the URL stored in the anchor tag's href attribute const…
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Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#756Oh, I think I have a good one. I had an HP-25 calculator as old as myself, and couldn't use it. The original battery pack contained two sealed NiCd cells, which obviously failed many years ago. Most people replaced their NiCd cells with new ones, then with NiMh cells, or even alkaline AA batteries. This was always problematic: newer batteries were slightly larger and never fit well. Also, the power consumption of a c…
Li-Po isn't difficult to ship. You just slap a certain sticker on the outside of the box and pay a little extra. Otherwise, it's no more effort.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#757Not sure if it counts as tech, but I created a voiceboard for my mother to help her communicate while in hospice. She had a massive stroke and could no longer speak. I thought of a tablet app, but the stakes were too high, so it wound up as a laminated paper. You can read about my design decisions here: https://voiceboard.org
Amazing work. Of all the great projects on this thread, this is my favourite
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#758I built a device out of a large copper block interfacing with a matrix of water cooled TEC on one side to cool the block and a TEC tower on the other, with the top of the TEC tower opening into an insulated chamber. The chamber has a valve to a CO2 canister. It’s able to make dry ice without any adiabatic cooling. I 3D printed the entire insulated enclosure using Build123D (a parametric python CAD library). I’ve always been fascinating the using non mechanical systems for all sorts of tasks, in this case transferring large amounts of heat. It’s a pretty inefficient way to do things; and I did cheat by having a mechanical pump moving the water cooling into a heat exchanger with fans. The amounts of dry ice are also very small. My favorite bit was the large pure copper block acting as a large efficient thermal mass in the middle of the system.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#759Not 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…
What gratifying interest. to anyone interested in chatting about this, my email address is in my profile, so drop me a line
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#760My grandmother has dementia. About twice a day, she calls my parents every 5 minutes, forgetting that she just hung up. The calls are always the same: "You live there now. Yes you have money. We came to visit you yesterday." This can go on for an hour or so.
My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they'll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the house, and the guilt associated with not picking up, is unbearable.
My brother and I built a system where her calls get re-routed to a rotation of relatives to answer her calls, to spread the load. After a call with her, each person gets a 2 hour break (customizable). If no one is available to answer, or if everyone is on break, she gets a voicemail that my dad recorded that explains that we love her, that she lives there, all the usual stuff.
It's working beautifully.