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

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

#131
>Curious to know if anyone has written programs for their own, regular, & personal use. And if so what they are?

I wrote an algorithmic trading bot in Common Lisp. Basically it uses statistical arbitrage to buy low and sell high.

It runs continuously so I'm not sure if that fits the spirit of your question.

Aside from various random shell scripts, I also wrote a python script that would alert me via push notifications when my plants need watering.

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

#132

Tracking Finances I originally wrote a web app to track my finances in 2003 using classic ASP and T-SQL. In early 2017, I rewrote it from scratch, still using T-SQL, but with C#.NET and jQuery. Lets me review my budget, ensure my net worth is heading in the direction I want, make sure all my payments get made, and ensure my account balances never get too low (with a light forecasting element.) Ideally I'd open source…

How do you ingest the transactions? I’d love to be able to replace Mint!

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

#133
post #60

I 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.

Install a second shower-head and make them shower together. Parallel processing is your friend here.

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

#135
I created two web apps to help when playing the boardgame Gloomhaven. Both were coded in Elm and were done partly because I had a need for them but mainly just for the joy of coding in Elm. I'll link the github repos of both, the demo is linked in the README for each.

The first app is Battle Objectives [0] which I made so that my group could play with some "enhanced battle objectives" I found online. The fan-made enhanced battle objectives are freely available on Boardgame Geek but I didn't want to print out and cut out all the cards so I coded them into an app. I linked this app on BGG but didn't think it was getting any use from anyone outside my personal Gloomhaven group. But I also found out while writing this post that someone forked Battle Objectives to translate it to German so I guess someone was using it! [1]

The second one is Hitdeck [2] which I made to automate the tedium of reshuffling my hitdeck and of rebuilding it to add and remove cards as the game went on.

Edit: I almost forgot I coded a complete emulation of a solo card game called Friday [3] [4]. I enjoyed the card game a lot but it's well suited to many fast paced rounds and I got tired of having to shuffle all the cards so I made an app to emulate all of that. It's unfortunately just for me because I never got around to adding a tutorial or anything so unless you already know the rules of Friday you'll be pretty lost trying to play.

[0] https://github.com/tristanpendergrass/battle-objectives

[1] https://github.com/ToM-Korn/kampfziele

[2] https://github.com/tristanpendergrass/hitdeck

[3] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/43570/friday

[4] https://github.com/tristanpendergrass/legendary-barnacle

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

#138
I have repetitive strain injury in my hands which made it difficult to play online poker (it's a lot of mouse moving and clicking i.e. folding)

So I created a script which took a screenshot every 100ms, it scanned the image and checked the cards I had.

If the cards were bad (e.g 2h7s), it clicked "fold" for me automatically

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

#139
Here are two things I use often that I pieced together using code made by people who can actually write good code:

1. HTML Form to File.txt, to quickly create a post for publishing with a static website generator like Hugo or Jekyll: https://www.simongriffee.com/work/form-to-txt/

2. Pasta Clock, for cooking pasta al dente, not al mush: https://www.simongriffee.com/pastaclock/

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

#140
Yes. And it’s a strange one.

I made a program to gender swap any text you put into it and then got a book deal to rewrite and illustrate Fairy Tales. It’s been published around the world.

https://genderswappedfairytales.com

The idea is to shine a light on the original versions but it also creates a lot of never-written-before characters. A lot of brave princesses and lady-beasts, but also men desperately wanting children and being rewarded for kindness.

I wrote the gender swap algorithm in Swift. It seemed like it would just be a simple auto replace type thing when I started but there’s some weird things in English, for example with his/him/her/hers where they don’t swap back and forth sensibly and you have to understand the context.

It was his > it was hers.

It was his sword > it was her sword

So I ended up down this rabbit hole of natural language processing to break up each sentence into verbs, nouns etc to work out the correct words to use. Even tried training an AI to do it based on the finished swapped text but a whole bunch of rules worked more reliably.

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