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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?

#401

Post by prox »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #273
lq0000 wrote: post #214

Earlier 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.

It’s the ‘wrong’ way to think about it in the sense of subjectivity : powerful in this context means lots of arguments and config settings you have to learn, memorize or look-up.

That means you have to become an expert level user to become fluent (where the user would call it “easy”)

It’s an UX that would exclude entry level computer user (since entry level here means not even knowing where the shell is for ffmpeg) and would perhaps be a barrier intermediate computer users.

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

#402

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Years ago, I wrote a complicated Perl application designed to address the fairly strange way that my first wife and I thought about finances. We had two orthogonal ways of dividing up our money: purpose and location. So perhaps we had $1000 for some purpose, but it was actually invested in 4 different locations. The Perl script did some early web scraping to get the balances from each of the locations where we had money, then did the math to divide those balances up based on allocations, and finally presented it to us as a "bank statement" broken down by purpose rather than by location.

I haven't used that approach to money in a couple of decades, but it was very useful for a while.

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

#404

Post by BonoboIO »

soco wrote: post #36

A social media client to my and a friend presences: interacting with followers, more with the more important ones, proposing new ones to follow or some to unfollow (and doing that in bulk), and a few other handy shortcuts. It runs serverless crashing maybe once a month for always novel reasons and costs me like 60$ (AWS costs) and a few hours of programming every month.

Do you mind sharing the code?

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

#405

Post by realjhondoe »

max10541 wrote: post #355

I've written many scripts and programs to make my life easier (and just for fun, really). Here are a few of my most used programs: - A service that constantly checks for freelancing/contract jobs that meet my list of criteria, then sends a desktop+phone push notifications for me to take a deeper look. - An automatic backup service that uses Borg and triggers when I connect my external hard drive to my computer. It ha…

If you don't mind me asking, do you run the first one on your local computer or do you use some kind of cloud service like ec2 so it runs constantly without worrying about down time?

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

#407

Post by abeppu »

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…

For anyone else who enjoys this, consider the Jailbreak the Patriarchy browser extension, which does basically this for text on the web.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-patr...

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

#409

Post by amitkgupta84 »

Several, but most recently an app to generate SMART Health Card QR codes to easily put your Covid vaccination info in your Apple Wallet.

App: https://akgupta.ca/smart-health-cards Source: https://github.com/amitkgupta/go-smarthealthcards

I’d be interested in seeing the program that OP’s colleague has to see energy consumption per device. I want this for electricity, gas, and water. The utilities are starting to get into smart metering, but they’re not up to what I’m looking for yet, at least not my providers.

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

#410

Post by TawandaMoyo »

I wrote one to organise the highlights and notes I make on the Kindle paperwhite eReader. It takes in the .txt file with the highlights and outputs a folder with every book as a txt/md file which contains all the highlights from that particular book. I use it every week when I review what I've been reading. It's a really simple JS file but when it worked it felt like magic.
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