Oh yeah. I was annoyed with ctrl+f and its exact spelling requirement, so I wrote an NLP based ctrl+f replacement that works pretty damn well.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scout/hgljpodblkjj...
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
341–350 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#342[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? I certainly have. Interestingly, one was the same "sanity check" program for my internet connection, because of the same ISP you mention. Amazing coincidence...I don't think. :-)
Add another Comcast outage checker and logger to the pile. Used to call and hassle them for outage refunds regularly.
Hah. I did not realize that was an option. Should have been keeping track of downtime :)
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#344Huh, I've never been asked that. Yes, for over 30 years. I could never list them all. Nearly every thought I have becomes a program. I've written x86 asm game hacks (DOS era), 2D tile games (80's), Windows MIDI composers, game frame languages, ray-tracing renderers, OpenGL visualization, PID controllers, camera controllers, video controllers, circuit simulators, flight controllers, so so so many games, scripts for an…
I wish I could shift my thinking to do this. I've been a web developer for 17 years and love programming. But any time I've tried to build my own projects or products, it's usually a revamp of an existing product or game, and I quickly lose interest.
I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up with something pretty quickly.
Curious if anyone else has this problem, or have found a way out of it?
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * A replacement front-end for "ffmpeg", see above I have one of these too... It's kind of frightening how hard ffmpeg is to use without some kind of custom frontend. I have probably dozens of bash/python scripts to invoke ffmpeg for different common tasks. - One to extract audio - One to extract all the individual streams from a container - A couple different transcoding scripts - One specifically for gifs - One to…
People always say this but... I'm not sure I agree. I think people confuse "hard" with "powerful". With the exception of cropping I can do all of the above from memory. Maybe I just use ffmpeg a lot.
I think this is it. Repetition.
You could threaten to kill me and I wouldn't be able to user ffmpeg from memory. I just don't have to use it often enough. So I created a script w/ the settings I usually want to encode certain things that I need to encode semi-often. It definitely doesn't make it easier to remember ffmpeg command line options because I don't have to use them.
kubectl and our home grown command line tools to interact with our build and deployment? I know most of it by heart of course because I use it daily. I really don't like some of the scripts that we have and do it "by hand" instead because I have to use it all often enough that I want to know what is really going on underneath in case things don't go the way they should (and there's always something). I am able to diagnose and fix or work around all these issues with ease because of it, while lots of other people just run the wrapper scripts and if something doesn't work they very often aren't able to even troubleshoot the simplest problems. I'm that guy w/ ffmpeg ;)
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#346I have just made a little machine learning model to help me go through the 27k photos from my ten years of cell phone cameras (should this go up on the wall? y/n), and am using a Jupyter notebook for the tick tock of data labeling, image classification, data labeling the most ambiguous, reclassification, etc. Hope to write up soon
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#347I love writing personal programs - you get to re-invent the wheel your own way to learn exactly how things work, with no code reviews or people shouting "[BLAH] ALREADY DOES THIS".
Sometimes you just want to code and see if you can recreate BLAH for yourself.
My oddest program was called 'heater' - it variable settings from warm -> hot and would peg the CPU at different rates (at the time I was in an unheated office, and rather than go buy a heater - I did what all programmers do and re-invent the wheel)
Programming is fun!
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Twilio server + interface. I'm my own service provider (thanks to Twilio) What does this mean? You run a pbx that implements twilio's apis and can be accessed via twilio's api endpoints? Or something else?
Twilio is the PBX and gateway for calls + texts. I run a server that lets me receive calls wherever I am (SIP or forwarding, as required) and send messages. Like a self-hosted Google Voice but more flexible and with a greater choice of numbers + forwarding destinations. All my server does is respond to HTTP requests from Twilio and send HTTP requests when I send a message. Somewhere in the Twilio interface, you can d…
Interested in making it open source? Self-hosted Google voice sounds awesome!
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#349The one that I use daily is hackerer.news for showing the day's posts not mixed up with popular posts from yesterday. I first made it so I could see all the titles while in the subway and load stories to read when stopped at stations along the commute to the office. Now I work from home but still use it as it saves so much time and visits. I think it gets some regular visits from others but that wasn't my motivation. If you click the date heading it does load yesterday's stories.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#350Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…
It's cool that you do that, but "Doesn't everyone?" implies to me that you might be a bit out of touch. This is common among a certain type of person and unheard of for everybody else.