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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?

#501

Post by exitnode »

I created a very simple CLI tool for logging amateur radio contacts. There are tons of programs doing this but there was too much clicking, thinking, selecting etc involved or were overloaded with distracting stuff.

I want to play with the radio, not with the tool that should help me with that.

My software simply does the following in the order I want it to do:

* asks me for a call sign

* shows info about the call sign gathered from a API

* shows previous contacts with this station

* asks for date, time, band, report, comment and prefills what it can

* submits this information via an API to an online logbook service

More info and code here: https://qrz.is/qrzlogger/

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

#503

Post by GordonS »

Several over the years, but most were "disposable".

One I made and have used for something like 15 years is a Windows tray app - I click it and the cursor turns to a dropper that let's me select any pixel on screen, then it tells me the RGB, HSL and hex code for the colour of the pixel. I'm colour-blind, so this is frequently useful.

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

#505

Post by planb »

My whole smart home runs on self written software - but only the components that are highly customized, for example the dashboard, the video doorbell (which consists of multiple devices) and presence detection. Everything that can be solved by general purpose software, I don't bother to create my own software for (like your energy consumption report example, grafana does this better then I could ever do). Using mqtt and node-red, it's easy to connect my own software to the 3rd party stuff.

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

#506

Post by isubkhankulov »

probabletrain wrote: post #500

Out of frustration with the built in Mac Notes app, and with the loading times of Notion, I made my own while waiting in airports on the way to and from a holiday: https://notes.probabletrain.com/ It was a handy excuse to try out YJS, as I (for no good reason) wanted it to sync live without conflicts, despite it not really being a multiplayer application. It can be opened across tabs on the same machine with updates…

This is great! I would love to self-host this. Are you planning on releasing the code?

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

#507

Post by tailspin2019 »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #458
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! 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…

I also had tons of these scripts. Since then I found one ScriptKit which might be interesting to you. https://www.scriptkit.com/ I have since ported over most of my common ones to this.

Looks pretty interesting! On my cursory glance it doesn't seem to by obvious what flavours of scripts it supports, other than the JS examples. Is it restricted to just Javascript?

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

#509

Post by tailspin2019 »

conductr wrote: post #242
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…

Sounds like an interesting challenge although I’ll admit on this one I would have just went to fiver and hired someone to edit the existing text. My guess is under and week and a couple hundred bucks at most and you’d be set.

I think this is a case of "chop your wood and it will warm you twice"... ie. the value derived from this exercise was not just from the outcome, but also the journey there!

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

#510

Post by Matumio »

A customized screensaver that displays random static zooms of my art collection. (Modified from one that would only do animated zooms.)

A Python script that grabs a wireless numpad keyboard (using evdev on Linux) to be used as remote control (volume / next / etc.) instead of keyboard.

A command-line tool "t" to translate a single word using my own match heuristics and a textfile-as-dict I got from somewhere (never updated). Wrote it ~15 years ago, still in regular use.

Tons of others (sleep tracker, custom RSS reader) that I used for years, but eventually stopped using.

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