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Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#111
I upgraded my 3D printer's X and Z axes to MGN12 linear rails in order to stiffen up the extruder significantly. I also switched the hot bed from glass to a magnetic pad.

I finished a PID toaster oven project from a few years ago. I've been using it to dry out filament. I also made a nice filament dry box to battle oozing.

I thought I was having anxiety over the last couple months, but it just turned out to be all the nerves in my heart electrically failing for no reason. Now I have a pacemaker. I ordered some electronics to capture my own ECG traces so I can detect the pacemaker pulses for fun.

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#112
I was producing a podcast with a close friend and realized that there wasn’t really a way to share and gather feedback for my podcast so I built an app for it. Plug an RSS feed, send an invite out and you’ve got yourself a community :)

Would love your feedback: https://withohana.com

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#113
I've written SAAS called Docula (document generator that doesn't suck).

I've been programming professionaly for close to 20 years and no matter what I always ended up writing PDF generator for one case or another. This time I've had to write another PDF export again and I've decided to do it right this time.

Having some unexpected extra time I've decided to create WYSIWYG editor in similar fashion to Figma or Zeplin where you set your components and then you just call API endpoint with json data (variables, collections...) and you've got your pdf file

Stack is quite simple: Rails app for all the book keeping, visual editor is written in vanila JS and the generator itself which takes variables and template data (both json) is written in Go.

I am just getting ready to launch it, so if you are interested you can sign up at http://docula.app and I will send first batch of invites in month or so.

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#114
Made a new release of PJON: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON

PJON® (Padded Jittering Operative Network) is an arduino-compatible, multi-master, multi-media network protocol. It proposes a new Open Standard, it is designed as a framework and implements a totally software-defined network protocol stack that can be easily cross-compiled on many MCUs and architectures like ATtiny, ATmega, SAMD, ESP8266, ESP32, STM32, Teensy, Raspberry Pi, Linux, Windows x86, Apple and Android. PJON operates on a wide range of media and protocols like TCP, UDP, MQTT, ESPNOW, USB, Serial, RS485, LoRa, PJDL, PJDLR and PJDLS.

Re: Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

#117

I've been contributing to the Andorid port of Anki (HTML based flashcards + spaced repetition) for the past few months. https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android https://github.com/david-allison-1 Knowing that I've actively been impacting students (particularly medical students) from around the world has been really good for the soul.

I rely heavily on Anki for work and study. Thank you! The android version already seems to work great. Is there a roadmap somewhere? I'm curious what's being worked on.

Thanks!!

No official roadmap (such is Open Source), but:

* Rust Conversion (got a proof of concept, need to productionise it) - Anki Desktop has moved to Rust. We can unify all of the platform, and remove most of our backend code and maintenance burden. * Android 11 has made significant changes to how applications store files on the device (Scoped Storage). I expect this will be a nightmare to deal with: https://developer.android.com/preview/privacy/storage * Visual HTML Editor (probably 2.13) - currently editing and adding formatting could do with a ton of love. Typing HTML by hand isn't a great experience for non-technical users. * User onboarding & UX - We get tons of bad reviews: "All my cards have been deleted" - this is because we fail to explain how Anki/Spaced Repetition works and that we take control of scheduling. People download AnkiDroid expecting flashcards, and we can do much better in this area. * Performance improvements with larger collections - we're fast, but there's still lots of low-hanging fruit regarding multithreading. * Background media sync - Medical Students have multi-gigabyte collections (just fixed a bug where some Android systems wouldn't open zips >= 2^31-1 bytes). We're tied to the AnkiWeb protocol for syncing, but it'd be a much better UX if we moved this to the background.

Personal Goals (some point in the future)

* CI/CD improvements - both speeding up build times, adding more styles of testing to the pipeline and adding more auto-linting. * Accessibility - our TTS doesn't play well with Android talkback; this hurts me to type. * Better gamepad support

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