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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?

#301

Post by lobocinza »

rozab wrote: post #265
lobocinza wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theoretically, maybe. But I'm tempted to believe that for all practical purposes it's a 60+ chars password.

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

#302

Post by xur17 »

soren1 wrote: post #152

I've been liberally trading cryptocurrencies for the past several years and ended up with a bit of tax nightmare, with thousands of trades across many exchanges. I found my self with little choice but to write my own capital gains calculator. At the time I needed it, I couldn't find a suitable open source solution, and I have privacy concerns about paid services. It's no longer just for "personal use", as I've recent…

I'm very curious to take a look at this. Built something similar a few years ago because none of the tax software sufficient accomplished what I needed. Mine takes a list of transactions + transfers, and allows me to audit the balance in each wallet (to spot check and make sure I didn't miss anything). It creates csv exports that I feed into bitcoin.tax and use for tax lot selection.

I'd like to update it to handle optimized tax lot selection, so I'm curious to see how you built that part. Longer term I'd like it to automatically import transactions for me, but haven't made it that far.

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

#303

Post by KMag »

netsharc wrote: post #231
jonplackett wrote: post #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 chil…

The Inclusive Coding Bot (a stupid Github bot that went around Github making pull requests replacing "he" with "they") guy should've talked to you... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877930

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat medireview mistakes.

(I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo's attempt at preventing cross-site scripting, blindly replacing eval with review, resulted in such shenanigans as "Please reviewuate my CV for Professor of Medireview History". Some of the corruptions persisted outside of Yahoo mail when people emailed text to themselves as a form of file transfer. Yes, this went into production in one of the two largest email providers at the time.)

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

#304

Post by lobocinza »

lucb1e wrote: post #259
lobocinza wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alias genpwd="tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%*()[]{}' < /dev/urandom | fold -w 16 | head -n 1 | xclip -sel clip"

I always find those annoying to copy (we use a lot of shared credentials, like when the customer gives us 3 accounts with different permission levels to pentest an application with) and it also simplifies the command to not have to specify all those symbols. You can also avoid the whole `fold` thing by just telling `head` to give you a certain number of -c instead of a certain number of -n. (Then again, you were prop…

They are annoying, specially when it's the wifi password and you have to enter it using a TV remote.

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

#305

Post by schappim »

I made macOCR[1], it is an app that I used for years to make office work easier.

It is a command line app that enables you to turn any text on your screen into text on your clipboard. When you envoke the ocr command, a "screen capture" like cursor is shown. Any text within the bounds will be converted to text.

You could invoke the app using the likes of Alfred.app, LaunchBar, Hammerspoon, Quicksilver, Raycast etc.

I only released it to the world when I swapped the backend out from being Google Vision to Apple's built-in OCR APIs.

I also made a "life management" app marcusOS [2], that does all the usual things you'd expect.

[1] https://github.com/schappim/macOCR

[2] https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/cdn.amplifier.app/Sh...

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

#306

Post by xur17 »

My most useful ones are honestly just spreadsheets. I made a "family debts" google sheet that we can input expenses into, and split amongst ourselves, and then use to optimally resolve debts between each other. It gets a ton of use, and allows us to just settle up every few months.

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

#307

Post by lobocinza »

lucb1e wrote: post #259
lobocinza wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alias genpwd="tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%*()[]{}' < /dev/urandom | fold -w 16 | head -n 1 | xclip -sel clip"

I always find those annoying to copy (we use a lot of shared credentials, like when the customer gives us 3 accounts with different permission levels to pentest an application with) and it also simplifies the command to not have to specify all those symbols. You can also avoid the whole `fold` thing by just telling `head` to give you a certain number of -c instead of a certain number of -n. (Then again, you were prop…

Using head -c 16 will show an ugly '%' at the string end when not piped.

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

#308

Post by gotaquestion »

vax425 wrote: post #71

I 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.

That's really smart.

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

#309

Post by bgroat »

swores wrote: post #145
vax425 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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… https://headlamptest.com

Cool product, it's something I'd personally be interested in if free or one-off license, but as someone who just dabbles now and then (but including sometimes for business stuff) it's nowhere near worth the monthly cost for me. $50 one-off would frankly be possibly more than the value I'd get, but I'd definitely buy it in the hope it would be useful. (Appreciate, I'm not everybody and just because that's where I fit…

I'm not saying the above poster is wrong, but never ever take pricing advice from devs.

Especially not devs on Hacker News.

If you want to sell this (and you may not), sell into QA or product leaders.

"Are you tired of deployments from your devs with dead links? A yearly license of red light is only $6k for a team of 20"

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

#310

Post by gotaquestion »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #282

Like zillions. I wired up all my house electrical circuits with a TED[1] unit and wrote code to track electrical usage by circuit. I've written scripts the automate the creation of parts like screws that can be imported into 3D CAD tools. I've written code that processes processor data sheets to generate include files for the register definitions. I wrote a simple CMS to manage web pages. I've got a bunch of programs…

> I've written scripts the automate the creation of parts like screws that can be imported into 3D CAD tools.

Cool!

I found a really cool plugin for Inkscape that computes gear parameters (I have access to both laser- and water-jet cutters). That kind of stuff is really useful for non-machinists like myself.

> Libraries for STM32 chips so that I could easily go from idea to something I could test.

I discovered CubeMX about, gosh, at least 10 years ago, and it changed my life. I went from Arduino to STM32 and suddenly i have all kinds of peripherals. Their stuff is awesome.

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