Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

I needed to hire a Ruby on Rails engineer a few years back, and didn't have much experience with Rails. So took a weekend to scratch an itch and created a web app where I could input a URL to a YouTube video, and the app would then pull the audio from the file and add it to a podcast RSS feed so that I could listen later on my iPhone in Overcast.

It was super useful for a while, and never turned it into anything more. Was handy for just listening to conference talks and other content where the video wasn't very important.

I have written some programs...

An old IRC channel I was on migrated to Slack, so I wrote a Python script that logs it in an IRC log-like format, like I use to do on the IRC channel.

I wrote an Android app that tracks my movements if I am moving, and sends it to a server. I wrote it all in about a week in 2018. Have not had time to update it but it works well enough. Have not done much with the data yet, but it has been useful when I am trying to remember when I went somewhere and for things like that.

I use other things, but they're mostly open source programs that I modified slightly for my purposes.

I have a couple but the first that comes to mind is a tiny little mac app I wrote that "jumps" my mouse between monitors. I use it because I have 2 monitors in vertical orientation, one in horizontal between them, and another smaller monitor above the center monitor. Here is some ascii art of it:

                     +----------------+
                     |                |
    +------------+   |                |   +------------+
    |          ! |   | !             !|   | !          |
    |          ! |   | !             !|   | !          |
    |          ! |   +----------------+   |            |
    |            | +-+----------------+-+ |            |
    |            | |                    | |            |
    |            | |                    | |            |
    |            | |                    | |            |
    |            | |                    | |            |
    |            | |                    | |            |
    |            | +--------------------+ |            |
    |          ! |                        | !          |
    |          ! |                        | !          |
    |          ! |                        | !          |
    +------------+                        +------------+

    ! = Where my mouse would get stuck

My little app helps to keep my cursor from getting "caught" on the 2 vertical monitors. By default macOS treats the parts of my vertical monitors that go above/below the middle monitor as hard stops/walls so it's annoying if my mouse is too low/high that I have to stop what I'm doing, drag my cursor up/down, then continue moving across the monitors. Likewise, the only way to get to the top monitor is to first go to the center monitor then go up. I hated feeling like my mouse was running into walls constantly so I wrote this app. If my cursor hits any of the old "walls" then my app moves the cursor up/down until it lines up with the bottom/top edge of the center monitor. Also if I'm hitting a wall at the top of the vertical monitors it will jump me over the "gap" to the to top-center monitor.

I looked for (and paid for) a couple of apps out there that claim to do this or something similar but none of them worked for me. I had never really written any Swift code but I was able to cobble together enough code to make it work and in around 200 lines of code I got exactly what I wanted. I wrote this over 2 years ago and I haven't had to touch it since. In fact the first time I rebooted I got confused at why my mouse was getting stuck because I had grown so used to it (added my little "app" to login items and everything has been smooth sailing ever since).

EDIT: Added "!" to the diagram to show all the places my mouse would get "stuck" previously. I left out the ones on the center monitor since they are harder to explain where I'd get stuck going up (the edges since the bottom monitor is higher resolution that the top one).

I made a video player for studying languages (Chinese in my case) its fully keyboard driven and allows marking areas of the video to be looped, so I can play through the video and efficiently mark all the areas with speech, then loop through those and navigate between them. I can also write a note for each marked area, which I use to transcribe and translate the video content.

I'll make it public in the near future.

Sounds like NewPipe