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Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

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191–200 of 556 posts

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

#191
post #131

I learned the basics of Houdini to turn Lidar data into visualizations [1], as well as take a point cloud scan of my wife to drive a particle animation [2]. On the non-tech side of things, our garden has been a real source of happiness. We planted everything from seeds with the kids and grew pollinator flowers, vegetables, etc. [3] One of my favorite projects was finally making a sourdough starter and taking my pizza…

Great work! Reminds me of Woodkid's photogrammetry experiments : https://youtu.be/RWMMdX6KYGM?t=70

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

#193

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?

Check out the video in the post they linked. Moves the piece slightly out of the way. Honestly incredible!

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

#194

I created a simple manual budgeting app with flutter called Go Budget, which is primarily optimized for entering purchases as easily as possible, but also provides income and bill tracking/reminders and a savings goal tracker. It is currently in beta but I hope to launch in the next two weeks. https://gobudget.io Edit: iOS beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/4IMtFylH Android: closed beta - email support@gobudget.…

A closed beta? No way to see it now?

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

#195
Person sends picture, and this gets the location info from picture. It auto-responds the info. Am making a chat-like responder to request various things like a URL to mapping, and maybe OCR any words.

Send picture, with GPS enabled, to (+1) 408-471-5200.

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

#196
post #185
post #157

I started writing HTTP status code guides for my SaaS business: https://tryhexadecimal.com/guides/http/ A lot of guides on the Internets concerning HTTP status codes are regurgitations or outright ripoffs of RFCs (2616 or 7231). Or light on details. I want(ed) to go one step further and explain when each code is appropriate (from the website operator's perspective), how to work around some of the errors (mostly for 4…

Hexadecimal looks cool. I'm particularly fascinated to hear the reason behind the 16-day tri... ooohhhhhh. slaps forehead

[deleted]

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

#198
I've always loved Nintendo's handheld hardware, and in the last couple years have enjoyed playing around with the Pico 8 virtual console[1]. The two seemed like a great match, so with a couple other emulator implementations as a reference I made a Pico 8 emulator for Nintendo 3ds and Switch homebrew. Its far from complete, but it now works with Pico 8 Png carts, many of which are available on the Pico 8 BBS[2].

It was much different from anything I've built previously, and it was a fun learning experience that I plan to keep working on for a few hours a week.

Github repo: https://github.com/jtothebell/fake-08

[1]https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php [2]https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&carts_tab=1#mode=carts...

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

#199

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.

When did you get to the point where you were confident enough to hop on some opensource shenanigans?

(new account, hit the HN anti-procrastination timer)

I hadn't contributed to Open Source before, had never wrote Java professionally, and my Android knowledge was pretty much non-existent, but I was aware of the project and how it operated. The catalyst was encountering a frustrating bug, and downloading the source to fix it.

The best thing about working on an application rather than a library is that you're dogfooding your own changes, and you have a good intuition for what the end result will be. You can always tell yourself: "Even if this isn't accepted, I find it useful and can use it".

I started out with small issues that I wanted improving, gradually moved on to getting access to crash reports, and fixing most of them (I think we're down from around 12 to 0.05 crashes per 1000 users). Confidence with larger issues comes from experience: documentation helps to some extent, but sitting down and reading the source code is always useful, as is looking to the source of the port as a source of truth.

Most projects would benefit from more volunteers (I just helped put out an ad for contributors on Stack Overflow). For confidence: accept that you're going to make mistakes as you start out, but the value that you bring to a project will overwhelmingly be net-positive as long as you stick with it.

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