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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?

#261

Post by yellowapple »

When I bought my "new" truck a few months ago, I wanted to load some songs for it to play over USB, but its stereo system only supports artists and albums (via ID3), entirely ignoring playlists or whatever folder structure there is (it just recursively traverses every folder looking for songs). I ended up writing a script[1] which churns through the myriad songs I downloaded via youtube-dl and sets their artist/album/title tags based on the folder and file names (i.e. $ARTIST/$ALBUM/$SONG.mp3). In hindsight I probably could've done this as part of the youtube-dl download process somehow, but it works well enough.

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[1]: https://gist.github.com/YellowApple/7b9cc54cf6fbc20bf79cf240...

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

#262

Post by deanmoriarty »

I wrote a scraper for various dating websites that would automatically generate activity on my behalf according to several empirical criteria (very simple stuff, no ML!), so that I could minimize the amount of time spent manually fishing.

It worked amazingly well, it got me hundreds (yes, 100+) of dates, incredible dating stories and a lifetime of memories, all in a semi-automated way without me requiring to “swipe right” or similar. As a matter of fact, my current girlfriend (of 5 years) was found through the software. She knows it and laughs about it.

Clearly the software didn’t do anything magical, I would have likely gotten the same results had I spent the time to individually message and interact with the 100s of women the software did in a semi-automated way, but it was really nice to save my time.

One day I should write a blog post.

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

#263

Post by BeatQuestGames »

Absolutely.

Working on a music visualizer in Unity right now, half the fun is creating it.

The other half is creating music to showcase. Outside of this I'd argue all of my side projects have been created for my personal use.

https://youtu.be/2dv2cjJIh2s

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

#265

Post by rozab »

lobocinza wrote: post #253
edpenz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

Sometimes I use passages from books. Easy to remember a >60 char password, can always check the book and it brings back to memory a book that I enjoyed each time I use it. For PINs I like to use a long sequence of digits of a physical/mathematical constant.

From books? Having anything that's natural language will kill your entropy, way way below correct horse battery staple. Moreso if it's indexed by Google Ngrams.

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

#266

Post by PenguinCoder »

Yes of course. Multiple programs in various languages. I find it helps to learn a language or concept by coding up a personal project to achieve the goal I set. I've written web applications and desktop applications, working on writing a few mobile apps too.

Static blog generator from markdown to HTML - Golang

Selfhosted HTML LAN dashboard - PHP

GPIO garage door opener on a PI - Golang

CLI Geoip lookup from mmdb to stdout - C

SNMP client - C

Various web sites - python/flask, bare HTML/JS, Golang

User login 'guardian' daemon (time frame for kids login / tracking) - Golang

Spotify listener - Golang

Web scrapping bots - python

Reverse regular expression (regex pattern to strings that should math) - Golang

CTF score keeping/flag tracker - Golang

And many other small snippets in Perl, Python, C, shell, etc just for one offs or scripting needs.

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

#267

Post by pserwylo »

I write Android apps for my baby-now-toddler.

At a few months old I created BabyDots [0] as she loved this YouTube video of dancing dots [1] which really settled her when she was upset as a young baby.

At over a year old I added BabyPhone [2] to let her talk to family and have them “talk back” to her even when they were not available. I missed the timing on this and she didn’t enjoy it at all until literally this week when she started talking back to the little baby on the other end of the phone.

At 18 months old I made a book-building app [3] that takes titles of pages on Simple English Wikipedia, and creates pages for a book that can then be exported as a PDF and printed (or viewed on the phone). It also has a website [4] on a free heroku dyno which definitely won’t take much traffic. This was because when she gets interested in, e.g. planets, I don’t want to have to order a book on planets, I want to print one out 5 minutes later to keep her interested.

One of my proudest moments was at my new job where a team member said during our first standup “I have your baby dots app installed and although we don’t do screen time, the music really sooths our kid during nap time!”.

[0] - https://github.com/babydots/babydots [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DILz54aYFU [2] - https://github.com/babydots/babyphone [3] - https://github.com/babydots/babybook [4] - http://book.serwylo.com/

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

#268

Post by noobermin »

I'm a scientific programmer so almost all my software is for my own personal use.

I'm just kidding, I'm assuming these are not for fun projects (because in that case, idk dozens to idk how many at this point) but general programs for my use as utilities beyond just the fun for programming, and I'm guessing scripts don't count, well once upon a time I made a notes app but that has fallen into disuse unfortunately.

Looking at the comment section, uh, scripts that are just wrappers for various tools (rsync, ffmpeg, others) are a dime-a-dozen I guess, I have so many in my ~/bin directory that I've forgotten what some of them do at this point.

Oh yeah, once upon a time I made a background changing app that just changes my desktop background based on the time so I would have backgrounds that matched the time of day, I did it in CL just because I loved learning CL but I have no real reason to use it in my work. I was going to make it automatically change the timestops based on the season, so evening photos etc change as the length of day changes, and make it based on the sunrise equation[0], but I sort of dropped it a few years ago and haven't really touched it since. You know I might do that again, just for an excuse to learn Lisp again.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_equation

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

#269

Post by lucb1e »

stirfish wrote: post #216
edpenz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

Something like cat /usr/share/dict | shuf -n 4 | tr '\n' '-' (inb4 unnecessary use of `cat`)

I posted some advice in a sibling thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31021503>, that applies here as well:

> Please don't use $RANDOM or $((RANDOM)) or standard `shuf` for password generation. These RNGs are not cryptographically secure. Use input from /dev/urandom instead.

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

#270

Post by MicroSplit »

For our sisters birthday, my brother created an iPhone app called kat in a kan. Just like a vintage toy called cow in a can. When you tipped the can upside down, it would make a moo sound. Ours made four different animal sounds. I drew child quality pictures of animals such as pig, moose, chicken hawk, and wildcat. Select an animal and tip your phone and it made the animal sound. Our sister loved it.
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