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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?

#311

Post by annoyingnoob »

holler wrote: post #288
annoyingnoob wrote: post #231

Does a hobby produce a product? Seems all about 'products'. I'm working on an electric Go Kart for the kids, almost done. Its going to kick ass. Its not a product, it doesn't have a web site, I didn't write a single line of code, but I took an old gas powered go kart and turned into an electric one.

that sounds pretty cool! and not just for the kids :) how fast does it go?

I need about 1 more week to find out. I finally got the rotor and caliper for the disc brake conversion (thank you covid), I'll have that mount for that welded tomorrow and then its final assembly time. Should go around 30mph, we'll see how long it takes to get there. I went with sla/agm batteries, which is adding more weight than I'd like - but the way my kids are it needs a deep cycle capability.

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

#312

Post by minerjoe »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #261

I built htmx[1]: a no-dependencies and cleaned up successor to intercooler.js that lets you use AJAX, Web Sockets and Server Sent Events directly from HTML. I began work on hyperscript[2]: a language designed to embed well in HTML, inspired by HyperTalk (the programming language from HyperCard). I hope to develop it into a general purpose programming language for the Javascript runtime. [1] - https://htmx.org [2] - h…

Big sky. Montana? Heads up that on your website the "contact" links is an anchor href when, I believe, it should be a mailto.

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

#313

Post by Pxtl »

I've caught the Single Board Computer bug. So I've made 2 Lakka boxes and one RetroPie as gifts for family. In hindsight: Lakka on a Pi is awful, avoid it at all costs.

Also a pi4 running a MineTest and Mumble server. Basically tought me the ins and outs of adminning a linux box.

My adventures in computing are on my blog: https://www.pxtl.ca - haven't blogged my retrogaming stuff yet, but have blogged the server stuff.

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

#315

Post by jesalg »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #247
jesalg wrote: post #225

I recently built a online text editor which lets you generate shareable documents with complex charts, graphs, mathematics, and more using the simplicity of Markdown. https://quickviz.app/ It's built on top of the Pandoc, Graphviz, and MathJax

Great work. That will be very useful!

Thanks!

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

#316

Post by nchelluri »

I wrote a simple "disaster-ready[1]" site for physical distancing, called the virtual bulletin board system. It is currently in operation in my city but nobody uses it. I tried to get it off the ground but I'm not really sure how to do it.

Basically, I think of it as a "geowiki" - a wiki where each entry has an address and a lat/lng associated with it. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/RiCiuDi.png

I went on the radio on a call-in show, I advertised it on the local city Reddit and their discord server, but it didn't catch on - at all. Except for a couple of vandals who deleted all the entries :)

It was fun, but it would have been a lot more fun if people had actually used it. I still might try to get it off the ground again, but I don't know how off the top of my head.

[1] What does disaster ready mean? It means that the site uses very little resources for the browsing operation. It is all static HTML/JS/CSS and uses cgi-bin (!) for the admin side/adding a new listing.

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

#318

Post by jstanley »

julianeon wrote: post #205
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…

Have you considered Kickstarting this? Your pitch could be: "like Regium, except it's not vaporware and actually works." I mean that company had nothing and they were well on their way to raising 50k, before they were stopped. You have a real product. That $50,000 should've been yours. https://thehustle.co/03092020-chess-kickstarter-regium/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/fcfcpi/the_regium_eb... https://www.k…

Thanks, but it's really not a consumer-quality product, and I don't think I have the engineering chops to turn it into one. The frame is made by hand out of plywood. A lot of the wires inside are just taped in place. The Raspberry Pi takes several minutes to boot up to the game screen, during which time you can't interact with the board in any way, and you just get a load of Linux nonsense on the touchscreen.

It's also extremely time-consuming to assemble because of all the wiring required for the magnet sensors, and if you short one of the power connections, there's quite a lot of binary-searching over possible joints before you work out which one needs fixing. I would not like to make another one :).

If you want to buy a commercial one you should check out https://squareoffnow.com/ - it has the advantage that it is actually a product you can buy, but the disadvantages that it has no clock display, no button to confirm your move inputs, doesn't support lichess, and requires use of their smartphone app.

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

#319

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

The thing about panic is that your brain associates the physical symptoms with that unpleasant state, such that feeling those physical symptoms in a different context might cause you to panic.

Had a bout with anxiety in the past, and an elevated heart rate from exercise would sometimes trigger it later.

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