Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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?
#2I wrote http://idaweather.com to get a better understanding of the local weather where I have a hobby farm.
It's mostly a toy but it has given me great insight into local weather patterns.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#3Not all that interesting but I recently built a server for 2FA.
It mainly consists of a simple CLI utility that generates TOTP codes using an AES encrypted lookup table of secrets.
I piggybacked access to this off an unrelated web site and it is now readily available from any device if you can provide the decrypt and lookup key and know the URL.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#4I 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 saves lots of time and I don't have to worry about the air conditioner turning off in the middle of the night due to it's internal reservoir becoming full.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#5My family is super into games, and as the resident programmer, they often ask me to build things related to them. Favorite two to build were
- an Unolingo solver that we used to figure out if there could ever by more than one solution to the puzzle (there can be!)
- a "killer" solitaire simulator that determined the optimal number of players for a max win rate. IDK if this is even a real game, but my family plays multi-player competitive solitaire with up to 8 people at a time. IIRC the optimal number for win rates is like 5-6(?) according to my simulation
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#6Way back in the day before space was a non-issue I bought a used pioneer 720 disk DVD changer. Wrote a frontend to control it and mount the DVDs over iscsi for my media center.
Also many years back when I was traveling all the time I created a thing based off the what 3 words data where I could geo drop messages at a location. My friends and I used it for a while but then just forgot about it.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#7broca, a chatgpt powered dictionary + vocabulary book I'm working on.
https://github.com/shi-yan/broca
on each of the computers I use, I have a open sublime text tab documenting words I don't know.
they are scattering around, unorganized, get lost when the file tab is closed.
I want to synchronize my vocabulary on different devices using git.
broca saves to plain files that are git friendly. And using ChatGPT as a dictionary allows me to search for idioms/slang/phases with unlimited example sentences.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#8After getting an EV many years ago (not a Tesla) which had a truly terrible phone app for checking charge status, starting charging and turning on the heater remotely, I reverse engineered the API and wrote my own web-based tool to control the car. It worked great until 3G was disabled last year.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#9I wrote an app for reviewing and highlighting websites and most computer documents. I can drag the highlights into a built-in outliner and organize and comment them there. I can drag relevant highlights into a built-in report outliner where I can write the corresponding section of the final report. I knew I wanted it. I thought others would too. I was wrong on that. Sigh! I guess I built it just for myself after all.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#10Smart 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/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/
a few years ago, after Twitter went south I felt like I had to do something, so I did. Even though my old logistic regression classifier works well, I have one based on MiniLM that outperforms it, and the same embedding makes short work of classification be it "cluster together articles about Ukraine, sports, deep learning, etc." over the last four months or "cluster together the four articles written about the same event in the last four days".
I am looking towards applying it to: images, sorting 5000+ search results on a topic, workflow systems (would this article be interesting to my wife, my son, hacker news?), and commercially interesting problems (is this person a good sales prospect?)