Define "program"! I suspect you mean "a persistent thing saved to disk that gets re-used", but a bash one-liner is its own program in a sense.
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
101–110 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#102I wrote a mapping program that could display maps, my location on them, time estimates to a down-road position, etc.
"Why not Google Maps?"
Several reasons: Google Maps requires a cell connection. (They have offline maps now — they didn't at the time I built the tool — but my offline maps are far more controllable in what data I pull down. And if I need data I haven't got, and I have a cell signal, I can fetch it on the fly and add it to the offline cache.)
Google maps was much worse at the time about finding rest areas. They're better marginally better now, but it's still pretty tedious to do on mobile. (There's no general search for it; you can search rest areas and usually get rest areas + junk, but you also really want to also search at the same time for, e.g., Flying Js, Loves. Contextual knowledge about the road would be good too, in case I'm on a turnpike. Also, still waiting for it to realize that, if I'm looking for gas, food, etc. … I want it downroad.) Admittedly my own implementation could have been better here, but I also lack the nice datasets that Google has…
OSM's map data is, in my opinion, better.
The GPS device I have can acquire a signal pretty much instantly. The phone … cannot. Useful in situations where we needed a quick answer, b/c things are happening at 60mph.
Though, we did end up supplementing the program with the phone. (On-the-fly routing is better in Maps, b/c it's a really tough problem, and I didn't build an interface into OpenRoute or whatever its called.)
OpenLayers is an amazing library, too.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#103I've wrote a few, more like scripts to do something repetitive.
Wrote a script to scrape pictures off an old website from the Wayback Machine.
Wrote another program that scraped some data from a posted Apple Music playlist then used the data to generate a Spotify playlist with the same songs.
I've written several other smaller things related to Arduino and lighting but nothing too special.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#104I made myself a Chrome extension called Headlamp that puts a red dot by each link, button, text box, etc., and clears them as I click or type while I’m testing a web app. When I hand off a build to a client, if all the red dots are gone, I know I’ve at least TOUCHED everything. If I’m working with another engineer, we can both see the dots in our browser and collaborate to clear them all while we test.
Nice! Can you share it?
Sure! It’s not really bulletproof yet and could use some more features, but I’d love to get your feedback and bug reports. I’m thinking about turning it into real product…
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#105Lots of small little scripts lying around in bin/, some of them for extracting information or downloading stuff from certain websites, some for small admin tasks.
Possibly the most useful for others is a small wrapper around pdftk that splits a PDF file into smaller ones based on the "bookmarks" (the chapter annotations that many PDF readers show as outlines in a side bar).
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#106Heck yes, all the time. While it seems like the major computer/OS vendors these days are trying to turn computers into limited purpose appliances, I was first exposed to computers as a child in the late 70's, when it was expected that anyone who owned a computer would also want to program it for their own purposes. My own personal projects tend not to be very large in scope, but can be quite handy. Some examples incl…
For DPI I like this site: https://dpi.lv/
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#107I’m building MoneyHabitsHQ.com out of a desire to use it myself. I felt like the existing budget apps were way too complicated.
(That said, it’s going to be made more widely available eventually, so idk if that counts to OP.)
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#108I was addicted to refreshing websites - twitter, reddit, etc etc. So I wrote an extension to essentially pull new posts for me every 10 minutes - its actually saved so much of my time.
https://github.com/neriymus/Fetcher if anyone's interested
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#109Oh, sure. All the time. Sometimes if you need some solution to a problem you need to invent it yourself.
Back in the day when I had a Windows phone, I used Microsoft’s Zune player to sync it - but I used iTunes for my actual library management. This was a problem because all my playlists and ratings were in iTunes and there was no clear migration path. I’m pretty obsessive about organizing and cataloging my media files so this was something I couldn’t let stand. Unfortunately while iTunes had a decent SDK, Zune had none (at least not a public one).
I basically had to reverse engineer Zune’s APIs to figure out how to synchronize things like playlists and star ratings between the two platforms. It was all a big ugly hack — on the one side using iTunes’ documented but limited COM APIs, and on the other using Zune’s completely undocumented but thankfully also COM-based APIs so I could at least try to infer some functionality behind them via reflection. It was a precarious hack as well. When it worked, it worked well enough, but any time the Zune client software updated, parts of their API would change or break and I’d have to try to figure out how to hack around them again.
All these years later, iTunes still has a COM SDK but it hasn’t been updated since 2004 so it’s stuck only supporting some of the most basic iTunes features for automation.
I can still use it for some CLI tools that I have where I can use keyboard shortcuts to set star ratings on songs without having to manually go in iTunes while using it. That way if I have a playlist going in the background I can just press one of a set of programmable keys to launch this little CLI tool to rate a song on the fly without otherwise interrupting what I’m doing. Sadly the SDK doesn’t support the newer heart ratings, or things like checking/unchecking songs from playlists.
I guess what I’m discovering from writing this post is I seem to spend a lot of time trying to automate all my weird scenarios around media management.
Lately I’ve been working on a project in my spare time to control a BLE-based robotic cat toy. The company that made it stopped supporting it and delisted their applications. This was a very expensive toy that I didn’t want to stop working because of the whims of the company. It was a big challenge - I had to reverse engineer their protocols, reverse engineer their applications, and write something new to replicate the functionality. Just to amp up the difficulty I also decided to build a standalone ESP32-based device that I can use to control the robot without even needing a phone. It’s been a big challenge working with lots of unfamiliar technology but it’s also been a lot of fun learning and experimenting with these new (to me) things.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#110I created a program that outputs one of my kid's name if the day of year is even, the other kid's name if it's odd. I use it to determine who's turn it is to take a shower first. They'll argue with me and each other all day long but for some reason they will not argue with the computer.
I do that too! One of my kids was born on an odd year, month, and day, while the other was born on an even year, month, and day. They know who is who and they don't argue with the calendar. (We do it by day of month and we find another way to decide if we need to on the 31st.)