One sentence summary of each top level comment here: https://github.com/afiodorov/notebooks/blob/main/2023_04_30_...
I wanted to read all the ideas but it became hard to read.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
941–950 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#942Made a desktop app for homebrew beer recipes. There are plenty of brewing tools out there, but ito data model and workflow they are all basically descendants of ProMash. I wanted something that approached home brewing with a focus on process instead of ingredients. My data model of a "recipe" is a DAG of typed process steps each of which can have ingredients attached. Liquid volumes move through the DAG and are modif…
Got a link you could share?
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#943A few years back I made a smart smoke detector for a total of 12 euros to closely monitor the battery of drones during storage, saving at least 40 euros from the cheapest option available online at the time: https://medium.com/dev-jam/build-a-smart-smoke-detector-in-3...
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#944I 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.
these pics look great. like some big model trail set catalog.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#945Turns out that "I can see the sun" is not good enough for deciding whether you're able to absorb Vitamin D. I had a deficiency (living in Nordics, not very surprising). So I built a small calculator that calculates during what periods you can absorb Vitamin D from the sun. Very fun to learn about calculating positions of the sun.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#946I wish I made something advanced, but anyways. This thing helped me a lot, so I'll share it. I hacked a Behringer X32 Rack mixer board to have physical controls. The idea is it is controllable by OSC, and there is unofficial documentation. So, I made a patch in Pure Data that converted MIDI from Launch Control XL to OSC to control the board. Pure Data was running in headless mode on Raspberry PI and was the only thing running. It was close to a consumer-level product; it loaded up in seconds on power failure and just worked.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#947Smart RSS reader that, right now, ingests about 1000 articles a day and picks out 300 for me to skim. Since I helped write this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0312018 I was always asking "Why is RSS failing? Why do failing RSS readers keep using the same failing interface that keeps failing?" and thought that text classification was ready in 2004 for content-based recommendation, then I wrote https://ontology2.com/es…
https://github.com/piqoni/matcha can summarize feed articles with gpt3.5 , but not categorize yet
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#948I infrequently commute into Boston for work, I live beyond the subway system but there is a rail network (Commuter Rail). With childcare and other family logistics I might be doing errands in a different town before parking and hopping on a train, I had trouble doing a 'radius' search of stations (which might span lines) to plan a round-trip into the city. I built a site[1] to query the MBTA API[2] for stations and schedules, then custom js + leaflet.js[3] (an amazing product) to render a map. I have a /demo[4] resource which includes some hard-coded addresses for test purposes. A limitation is it only plots round-trips to the terminal stop (South Station) in Boston.
It's been a work-in-progress for a while. It vastly helps with my weekly plans. And as a side project to up-skill, what I'm still working on:
- UIUX and 'user flow', usability
- hosting + CICD
- integrations, optimization, caching
[1]http://cr2southstation.com/
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#949My 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…
If you love her so much why don't you let her live by your side.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#950I live on the flight path of a busy airport (Toronto) and have always wondered what type of aircrafts they are as they fly above me. So, I made a "Plane Above Me" app that listens to airplane sound. Once detected, it polls data from flight APIs and read out the flight info and aircraft data. In other words, it's my little "Flight Announcer". https://evergreen-labs.com/PlaneAboveMe.html
British Airways had a famous advertising campaign that did something similar. If I remember correctly they used a digital billboard somewhere in London that showed a little boy pointing to the sky. The text refreshed throughout the day to display the details of the flight passing overhead.