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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?

#171

Post by lefstathiou »

DrMonkey wrote: post #67

I've started to scratch my own itch, trying to improve the audiobooks streaming experience. https://bookcamp.app I've got enough validation to think there's a market for it, especially in the Plex community. So for the MVP, the server acts only as a layer between Plex and the client. This allows me to build a great audiobook player and add features on top that Plex is not capable of.

Hey DrMonkey, happy to hear someone is working on a better Audio book Player. I will try this out though I’ve never used Plex. I love audio books and have a few hundred on my Audible. I wanted to throw out some feature requests (feel free to ignore them) based on my audible experience:

1) note taking should not require having the book downloaded.

2) notes should be exportable

3) I’m constantly looking things up while I listen to non fiction. I think a visual stream of images tied to pronouns could be amazing. For example, when I listen to the history of ancient Egypt and it mentions Ramses II or all these tombs and tablets, it would be great to see thumbnails based on recently listened to content.

Anyway good luck!

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

#174

Post by option »

blhack wrote: post #94
arpa wrote: post #35

Nothing of any importance. Managed to screw myself up to the point of having constant generalized anxiety, so yeah, things are really working out here.

If you're having a panic attack, run up a flight of stairs, or hop on a bike and do a sprint around the block. Get your heart pumping. It sounds really counter intuitive but it works.

this is a vey sound advice. A pandemic project which can’t go wrong is exercising more (even indoors). Start small, then make it a habbit.

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

#176

Post by sputr »

farcaster wrote: post #127

I went from knowing nothing of French to reading 20 thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne in French (the original language) It's not that big of an achievement since I'm Brazilian and I already speak Italian, the romance languages are somewhat similar. But I'm happy and I want to keep learning new languages because that proved to be a rewarding experience all steps of the way. I've used Lingq and Memrise, if…

I do envy you. Been busting my brain with French for years as its always been my dream to speak it. But coming from Slovenian (slavic) and not having an ear for languages does not help.

So, congrats!

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

#177

Post by yoz »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #153

I'm in Florida so lockdown is still a thing, or will be again soon. I'm creating a coding language for UI designers. It's kind of like pseudo code in that it's not tied to any one implementation (platform). The basic idea is that designers will have a platform-agnostic language to describe the visual behavior of applications using the same terminology and mental models that they're familiar with.

That sounds fantastic! Got a link? Even if there's nothing demo-able yet, I'd like to star your repo (assuming it's on Github) so I get release updates.

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

#178

Post by alextheparrot »

myroon5 wrote: post #162
jstanley wrote: post #147

I made an automatic chess board that allows you to play with another person over the Internet (using lichess), but with a physical board. It has been described as "very lockdown chic". Each chess piece has a magnet in the bottom. The board senses your moves by looking at where magnets disappear and appear, and it plays your opponent's moves by dragging them with an electromagnet underneath the board moved by a pair o…

How does it handle moves where pieces might accidentally hit each other like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling and knight moves?

In the video you can see it slightly moving a piece in the way to let the knight through

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

#179

Post by blhack »

progre wrote: post #137
blhack wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're having a panic attack, run up a flight of stairs, or hop on a bike and do a sprint around the block. Get your heart pumping. It sounds really counter intuitive but it works.

I agree, kind of. I have also suffered from panic attacks and the problem with this is that I'm thinking that I'm about to have a heart attack. The mere thought of running makes it worse. Breathing exercises (this has to be practised in advance) helps for me.

Yeah that makes it hard to motivate yourself to do it.

For me it's the stubbornness/trying to diagnose my hardware approach of:

well I'm either having a heart attack or this is just anxiety - so I can force the condition by doing this bike sprint and that will give me valuable information.

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

#180

Post by tunesmith »

I resuscitated a 20-year-old-website that was somewhat popular back in the day called storysprawl.com. It's private now, but I have friends join me on Sunday nights to write chapters together - we join Zoom, we write, we read them to each other. It's kind of like choose-your-own-adventure combined with round-robin fiction: Read chapter one, there are choices at the bottom, make a choice. If the next chapter is written, keep going, and if it's not, you can write the next chapter yourself and create choice labels at the bottom (if it's not The End) for other authors to follow up on in the future. It's stupid fun - our main story is now 128 chapters with an average story length of 11 chapters. I'm able to do math to project that this particular story will probably end up around 600 chapters and 1000 pages before all the storylines are completed.

I'm keeping the site private for now because I can't be bothered to see a lawyer and get my legal policies/checkboxes in place, but on Friday I did host a live event where I read chapter one aloud, had viewers vote for what choice to take, and continued until we hit an ending. It worked well, it was just a facebook event for friends, and eight people showed up out of my 200 friends which is pretty good. I'll probably do it again and open the event up to the Public. I'm hoping I'll attract more interested authors, I can always slowly give them access to the site.

(If anyone here likes the idea of contributing silly creative writing - third person, past tense - feel free to message me.)

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