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Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

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Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#791

Post by fgandiya »

0x1d wrote: post #221

https://instafavicon.com/ I created this favicon generator a few weeks ago to generate minimal favicons for my side projects. I'm not good with design tools so it saves me time when I start a new project and want a simple favicon in ICO format. I'm proud of it because it's server-less. I generate the multi-BMP ICO file in binary using ArrayBuffers and Typed Arrays in JavaScript. I use a element to create the images/d…

Hey, I used that a few weeks ago for a personal website. Thanks for making that!

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#792

Post by joeld42 »

I got tired of filling out timecards so I wrote a simple script to print out my timecard for me (I still double-checked and signed it). Word got around and I added some features to default to your hours/billing numbers from the previous week for people other departments. It was really cool walking past the timecard tray every week and seeing it evolve from the pile of yellow cardstock timecards with a few folded white paper ones (printed from my script) to eventually almost entirely printed ones. It was something that just took me a few hours on a slow week, and probably ended up saving the company quite a lot of time.

Now that I'm doing contracting work, I did the same thing again when I got tired of invoicing from a spreadsheet. Not that generating an invoice is all that hard or time consuming, it's just one of those tasks that takes me a lot of inertia to start, so I would put it off. I'll probably clean up and post the invoicing script on github one of these days.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#793

Post by rasz_pl »

nvbn wrote: post #191

thefuck - https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck I just use it every day and I guess a lot of people too.

Did your program show up on Hak5 2111? I saw 'fuck' in Darrens console and it made me go WTF. Now I know what that might of been :).

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#795

Post by Dayshine »

eneve wrote: post #316

FAQr - An ASCII GameFaqs reader for Android - 2k + 5 star reviews - 1k + DAU https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faqr&hl=en Great for retro gaming! *EDIT - Free with no ads

As someone who was desperately trying to use guides for Pokemon games with £4/MB internet abroad, this would have been amazing...

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#796

Post by TheRealPomax »

A React library called "onclickoutside", https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-onclickoutside, for dealing with clicks from outside a DOM node's tree.

Sounds like a simple thing to have, but when I wrote it it just didn't exist. In half a year it's gone from one guy needing a small lib to deal with closing a menu when you click on the page, to a library with loads of optional functionality, fixes and improvements filed by 24 contributor, and over fifteen thousands downloads a day.

It's probably the most successful piece of software I've written to date.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#797

Post by jmbmxer »

i336_ wrote: post #764
jmbmxer wrote: post #363

https://unshorten.link I work in security and have a paranoia of shortened links (bit.ly, t.co). I got frustrated with the options out there that forced me to right click every shortened link or paste it into a site so I made this Chrome extension / web app. It is pretty simple and keeps a list of 300+ shortened link services to check against. If your browser ever visits one it redirects you to the site to expand the…

Relevant PSA to file away: http://goo.gl/zxcvb2+ (toy link, doesn't work) Note the + at the end: it gives you a detailed statistics page that also tells you what the URL points to. (NB, the stats come from JSON that seems easy to fetch; ratelimiting/"that's not a browser"-checking untested.)

This is a great tip. I had no idea this existed.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#798

Post by jmbmxer »

flashman wrote: post #696
jmbmxer wrote: post #363

https://unshorten.link I work in security and have a paranoia of shortened links (bit.ly, t.co). I got frustrated with the options out there that forced me to right click every shortened link or paste it into a site so I made this Chrome extension / web app. It is pretty simple and keeps a list of 300+ shortened link services to check against. If your browser ever visits one it redirects you to the site to expand the…

Does it warn you if someone sends you a link designed to log your IP address and browser? e.g. one generated on http://grabify.link

It'll expand a goo.gl link which would then display the Grabify link. The extension does not support Grabify but will certainly be adding it. I'm not a fan at all of these IP trackers.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#799

Post by lcall »

lcall wrote: post #773
augustflanagan wrote: post #113

I built https://cronitor.io after having an important cron job fail silently for several days. When I mentioned this problem to a friend his first response was "we just had a major issue with cron failing silently at my work too". We decided to hack on it together, and we've since grown Cronitor from a tool built for our own needs into a small business with a couple hundred paying customers.

I found where I used to work that cron jobs usually failed because they weren't adequately tested, so I tried using MAILTO but it didn't do what I wanted, so started putting something like (it's been a while): 45 5 * * * /bin/bash -eux -C /path/to/real/cmd >> /var/log/somefile 2&>1 | mail -S "/path/to/real/cmd... at 10.2.3.4 failed with details in /var/log/somefile" to-address ...then test failures to make sure the e…

In case anyone ever reads that, too late for me to edit but: file 2&>1 | mail -S ...should be: file 2&>1 || mail -S ...or more likely the wrapped "if" mentioned.

Re: Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

#800

Post by tomascot »

garysieling wrote: post #334

I built https://www.findlectures.com , which is categorized list of lectures and speakers, inspired by the faceted search on Newegg and Amazon, which I wish Youtube had. It's been a fun project, because I've had to build tools to come up with a lot of quality measures for the dataset.

Gary, great work! You could add a bot to post links to lectures in social networks, at least Twitter.

Like one random lecture each day, or the most "active" during the week.

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