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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#762My 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…
How did you do this
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#763My 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…
That's a fantastic idea.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#764Kirby's Adventure for the NES, one of my favorite games, ignores your controller inputs sometimes. I dove into the ROM, figured out the problem and fixed it: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7595/ I'm currently hacking the SNES mouse into Sim City.
SNES Sim City is one of my fav games to emulate. When your mouse hack works, want a copy of the patch!
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#765Older 1999-2007 model year Ford vehicles don’t come with an aux input audio option and they have a cd changer under the seat instead. I made an Arduino shield that emulates the CD changer and injects my iPhone’s audio pretending to be a CD. The shield also handles intercepting the car headunit’s playback commands when you press the physical radio buttons on your car so it does a second emulation of a earphone clicker…
One of the easiest ways to add an aux audio input to a car is to get a radio antenna bypass box, like the iSimple IS31.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#766For 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…
I was expecting a sad ending after six years. Glad it turns out well.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#767yaycorn.com texts me 2 week warnings for upcoming birthdays. SMS as a CLI is underused IMO
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#768My son is an English language learner in high school, and this is the first year he is in the standard English class instead of English for ELLs. His class is reading Into the Wild and it's a bit beyond his current reading comprehension level, so I used GPT-3.5 to build an annotated version for him to read. Less common English language words can be clicked on to hear the pronunciation and see the definition in Spanish, and every few paragraphs, there is a summary in Spanish. I had GPT-4 do the web design for me.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#769Small scale stuff but I've wanted context sensitive snippets in my editor for a while now and i was able to make it work recently with treesitter and ultisnips in neovim.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#770I spend a lot of time listening to music, so I built my own music player for my large collection of MP3s. I'm not a big fan of streaming and could never find a player that did all the things I wanted, so I figured it'd be best to build my own using Web technologies. It's been fun adding each feature -- automatic playlists with intricate rules, some smart shuffle features, stats, tag management, displaying waveforms, syncing with my phone, etc. -- and I've learned a lot on the way. I've also fine-tuned the UX to my personal preference. It helps when you only have to worry about the exact set of features that you want!