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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?

#81

Post by Traubenfuchs »

I built an image viewer application in winforms that allows

- infinitely big or small resizing

- has no visible borders

- has a close all button

- windows size enforces image aspect ratio

- taskbar item thumbnail is the image

- can be moved by clicking and pulling it anywhere (besides resize borders)

- can be moved beyond the edges of the screen (no kind of snapping, like pushing windows below the top border)

I used it for more effeciently using and managing my screen space during masturbation to images and it was a testiment to my almost complete mastery over winforms and p/invoke and the low level windows window api at the time.

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

#82

Post by ghoshbishakh »

I built https://pinggy.io for myself initially. But after some years I thought others might also find it useful.

It gives me "instant" public URLs to localhost without any downloads/configs. I use to to quickly send files, share and check frontend on my mobile device.

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

#83

Post by shib71 »

I wanted a Markdown notes app that I could access over the internet, and stored files in a files-on-s3 structure that would makes sense if I accessed it directly and would be stupidly simple to backup/restore.

Ended up with an Amplify app that had basic login, file upload with image thumnbnails, indexing of frontmatter, some query macros to list pages matching specific criteria, autocomplete for frontmatter and macros, and ability to make specific pages public if I want to. Apart from login, it only uses direct S3 calls, so I'm effectively only paying for S3 storage costs.

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

#86

Post by npsomaratna »

paws wrote: post #71

I don't know if it qualifies as the "most interesting" but as a travel bug I wrote a little airfare scraper that I got plenty of value out of. Basically it's a script that scrapes several places for flight deals and "mistake fares" and notifies my phone if it matches with my city. No searching like other flight apps, you basically just set it up and wait, and various places will pop up. Helps if you're in a hub city…

You still got this? I'd love to use it myself.

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

#87

Post by crowdhailer »

I've built my own small embeddable functional language with structural record unions and effect types. By focusing on making the language tiny I have been able to embed it in arduino, web and server projects. The aim is to eventually use it for every side project I make. https://petersaxton.uk/log/

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

#88

Post by tshaddox »

modeless wrote: post #69

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box. I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone.…

That sounds neat. When you say everyone got their own code, do you mean that each person had a separate code for the call box, and the call box would call one of many separate Twilio phone numbers? Or did the call box always call the same Twilio number, and you instructed each person to then input their special code via the call box? My apartments have always just asked me for a single phone number which they program into the call box, so I’m guessing the latter, although it never occurred to me that the guest might be able to press more buttons after the phone call has been connected.

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

#89

Post by tuckerconnelly »

Machine-learning predictions for Draft Kings (NBA) :)

It scraped basically every single player's performance in every single NBA game ever. I tried XGBoost and Keras, and the Keras model outperformed the XGBoost model. Was about to incorporate real-time injury data, so if a player was injured or out that game it would not select them.

In the end it didn't perform too well. I think the limitation was my lack of domain knowledge, and not really knowing what features to select that would predict a players performance. Also data. I hear MLB is more consistent than NBA because there's just more data.

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

#90

Post by john_shafthair »

headline wrote: post #4

I suppose this counts: Although not that interesting, I have one of those AC units in my apartment that sits on the floor with an outlet tube terminating at a window to pipe out hot air. The internal reservoir for this unit is quite small so I hacked together a float valve that triggers a pump to offload the condensation water to a larger bin, that way I don't have to empty the reservoir as often. Pretty simple, but…

Why not just have it drain into an ordinary condensate pump which is built for this purpose? Those roll around ACs usually have a spigot to attach a hose you can run into a drain.
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