I wrote a set of python scripts to pull down economic and stock market data. It pulls down several different data sets mostly from the Fred API service at the Federal Reserve. Using Jinja templates and Matplotlib for graphs, it builds a set of latex files and spits out a PDF that I can review. That way I don't have to look at 4 or 5 different sites to get the overall market picture I want. Essentially my own newsletter... to myself... okay, is that healthy?
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
91–100 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#92Dozens, at least. Everything from: NAS apps that download television Electronic Programme Guides and automatically schedule recordings; to personal radio stations that integrate text-to-speech, calendar entries, local news headlines and the family Slack channel with the music on my home server. Utilities for managing the books I read and videos I watch, utilities to randomly insert quotes in my email signatures. And that's before we look at any of the work-related software.
Mostly these are written in Object Pascal via Lazarus and compiled natively for the target platforms, or they're web apps written in javascript and/or PHP. Many use SQLite for data storage; some just use an .ini file if the data is simple and not too volatile; a few are written against a MySQL back end.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#93The most simple one, but so useful that time:
This car cheap autoradio has no random nor memory. Everytime the engine start, the music restart from the beginning.
Just coded at a stop a little python script for Nokia to randomize the name of the music files of the usb stick.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#94A webapp which helps with freestyling into rap beats. It throws rhymes at you which u can use to keep it "flowing".
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#95I switched from Lightroom to Darktable and with Lightroom it stored the images in folders "year/year-month-day/", so I made a little script that copies the .jpg/.cr2 files from my camera to the right directory based on their metadata. And then in Darktable just re-import this current years directory.
I also created a very hacky script that uses the python paramiko library to ssh to different hosts and spawn a python interpreter which runs a python function remotely for things like grabbing uptimes.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#96I made myself a Chrome extension called Headlamp that puts a red dot by each link, button, text box, etc., and clears them as I click or type while I’m testing a web app. When I hand off a build to a client, if all the red dots are gone, I know I’ve at least TOUCHED everything. If I’m working with another engineer, we can both see the dots in our browser and collaborate to clear them all while we test.
Nice! Can you share it?
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#97Yes
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#98i spent many hours as a kid writing programs for my own use on a trs-80 that we owned exactly zero software for. turn it on and start writing code because that's literally all you could do lol
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#99Last utility I wrote draws a calendar in the terminal, and highlights the current date and also the date of the next full moon. The full moon calculation is not accurate but good enough for me. I run this daily.
https://uguu.org/src_aoba_pl.html
I did that because `cal(1)` broke for some reason, and I felt like making some ASCII art.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#100I don't know that I'd consider most of them "programs", but I've written hundreds of small helper scripts of various sorts over the years. Most of them aren't even published anywhere, not out of a desire to keep them from the light, but more because I write them, use them, and forget about them until they are rediscovered years (decades?) later.
One of the simpler scripts I wrote that I actually published is a little helper to output WiFi signal strength on Macs into printable glyphs so that you can include it in your prompts on the terminal.