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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?

#391

Post by sgc »

nilshauk wrote: post #121

Some weeks ago I wrote a couple of bookmarklets, one of which was this: javascript:(function(){ location.href = ` https://nitter.net${location.pathname} ` })(); You can take this JavaScript snippet and save it as a clickable bookmark (hence the name bookmarklet) in you browser. I've named this "re-open in Nitter". I deleted my Twitter account a while back but sometimes I get handed a Twitter link. This snippet let's…

Useful! There is a nitter add-on at least for firefox, called nitter redirect. All twitter links go there seamlessly.

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

#392

Post by BonoboIO »

I HATE the Spotify podcast player.

It is the worst UI for pretty much anything: music, video, podcast, lyrics ...

I selfhost ... i download the spotify exclusive podcasts and host them myself to use the with overcast. They come as OPUS files, but ffmpeg to the rescue.

I pay for premium ... so i want the best experience. Maybe against their api guidelines.

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

#394

Post by gotaquestion »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #344
gotaquestion wrote: post #258

Huh, 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 wi…

I didn't say everything was finished. ;-)

In fact, I'm not sure how to decide if something actually IS finished. Sometimes I just want to understand something, and when I get to that point, I call it done. I just like to learn.

Like with my FM synths: I made a TX802 clone a long time ago (in software), and once I got to a certain point I was like, "Yep, got it." I just wanted to construct something that could implement the FM algorithms and a filter. That's all. I could have made a fully-fledged MIDI synth, but I just wanted to understand synthesis. Or with ray tracing: once I got spheres, cubes, transparency, and reflections and a simple scene text-file syntax, I was like: I should add NURBS, but that was way too complicated, so I called that "done" because I understood how it worked.

You can ALWAYS keep going. Nothing is ever really done. When you lose interest, that's just your brain saying, "I learned enough, let's do something else!" Think of your brain on hobbies like a Golden Retriever: short attention span but always happy!

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

#395

Post by shampto3 »

I mainly have different cronjob web scrapers that email me results. The latest one is for a local auction site that sells returned items. My scraper does a simple search for items that I’m looking for and then emails me if those items are for sell every day. That way I don’t have to waste time going to the site and looking for it manually, and I’m not tempted by other items that I don’t necessarily need right now.

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

#396

Post by bexsella »

Dozens, one of the more outwardly useful ones notifies me of a certain band's latest LP drop (basically just queries shopify's public-facing JSON for any shop you give it).

I've also got a stupid one: a mouse waggler. My work enforces screen lock times to be 5 minutes, and I have two computers, one on an air gapped network. So when development happened in the air gapped PC, and I inevitably had to look up docs for something, I would always be prompted for my password. So, I made a program that nudged my mouse just slightly every five minutes. That has essentially turned into my Windows API test bed. Someone will ask, how hard will it be to implement X for Windows? I'll try and find a use for it in this waggler, and look how to implement it.

This has also lead to the waggler part being obsoleted by one function call:

   SetThreadExecutionState(ES_CONTINUOUS | ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED);
It's now a full GUI program with all sorts of timers and reminder things, it also happens to keep my screen on.

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

#397

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Yes. Programs that read from stdin, like filters, for making HTTP requests, processing HTML and other marked up forms of text, extracting URLs, encoding/decoding HTML or URLs, extracting binary files from HTTP responses, and so on. The programs I write can be linked together through UNIX pipes and and can do things that programs written for other people, such as curl, cannot do. These programs can in turn be used in scripts that perform more specific tasks, such as the energy consumption monitoring example. I generally do not need any help from browsers or "web APIs" because I have programs to process data/information from the web in any format. All I need are URLs.

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

#398

Post by numbers »

I have some useful ones for everyday things, converting one thing to another. Renaming things. Moving things around.

But the most interesting ones I have are the ones that do illegal things. Like download things from other countries, store them on a remote box, do everything behind a pseudonym not associated with my personal online profiles. A lot of NFT mining stuff, so everything becoming available and its prices (if guessable), some of this stuff I share with a small circle but I am not stupid so I don’t like sharing any of this code and it’s not even on my primary computer. Just sits in a nondescript raspberry pi. One of the more illegal but traceable ones was with crypto trading (where I was inflating the price of a coin by a few percentage points), I had to stop because it could be tied back to me.

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

#399

Post by evan_ »

srcreigh wrote: post #129
chasd00 wrote: 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.

has it been more than a year? How does Jimmy feel about going first on Dec 31 (day 365) and Jan 1 (day 1)?

They don't have to take a shower on New Year's Day.

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

#400

Post by terinjokes »

nilshauk wrote: post #121

Some weeks ago I wrote a couple of bookmarklets, one of which was this: javascript:(function(){ location.href = ` https://nitter.net${location.pathname} ` })(); You can take this JavaScript snippet and save it as a clickable bookmark (hence the name bookmarklet) in you browser. I've named this "re-open in Nitter". I deleted my Twitter account a while back but sometimes I get handed a Twitter link. This snippet let's…

Related, I have a bookmark called "HN Migrate" that let's me redirect an HN comment section to a mirror (currently hackerweb.app).

    javascript:(function(){!function(){var a=new URL(location.href);if("news.ycombinator.com"===a.host){var e=new URLSearchParams(a.search.substr(1));if(e.has("id")){var n=new URL("http://hackerweb.app/");n.hash="#/item/"+e.get("id"),location.href=""+n}}}()})()
At some point I might add support for deep linked comment threads, but in practice it hasn't been enough of an itch.
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