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

- A program for backing up my Master of Orion Save Files - A program for finding the best planet in Master of Orion - A program for calculating my walking pace from time and milage - Many simulations for various games - Several Markov Decision Tree solvers (fairly simple dynamic programming) - Many game strategy solvers - Programs that process my life documentation notes - miles of jogging/walking per month, energy level, wake up time, productivity - Many programs for testing mathematical theories or other math research for fun - Physics or Astro-physics simulations - Investment simulations - CPU Benchmarking programs - Programs for drawing graphics - spirals, mathematical objects, ... - Lots of programs for Project Euler or LeetCode - just for fun. (I probably write around 100 small programs a year for myself, mostly for fun.)

I've built my own RSS feeds reader. Nothing great to write home about and quite simplistic but I use it daily.

https://github.com/msurdi/feedo

One of my first projects was a simple stochiometry calculator library in Common Lisp, for high school chemistry class(for my own use only). It had classes for acids and bases and I could do things like make a 1 liter solution of water and add x moles of some previously defined acid. It would then do the appropriate "reactions" and end up containing the appropriate equilibrium concentration of said acid, its conjugate base, and H3O+. And I could calculate the pH etc. It was very SICP inspired. And it allowed me to check my work during tests. It was also an excellent way of learning to do this type of stochiometry by hand.

I made attempts to extend it to various org-chem concepts, but it quickly became far too difficult in terms of modeling the molecules and reactions at that point and I quickly gave up on it. That taught me a valuable lesson as a budding developer: Some problems are just too hard, and the sooner you realise, the better.

I have created a webapp (very ugly, but it works) to control my bar lighting. It's a wall of 3 rows of ~12 bottles. Each bottle can be highlighted individually, per group, or I have configured a few animations.

It's 3 bands of Adafruit Neopixels, which means I could play with colors as well, and it's driven by a Raspberry Pi 1 (accessible on local network only).

Fun fact: it runs on a computer PSU: the Raspberry is low power enough that it run on the stand-by rail, and the PSU is only turned on (by the Pi) when the lighting is on.

Due to how custom and crude it is, I never considered open-sourcing it. It's a fun party trick when I have guests though.

This is my favourite passtime. So so many little scripts. Some fun ones:

* cli tool to diff changes to a branch since the last revision you looked at when it has been rebased (only if you haven’t git gc’d!!)

* use fzf to choose from pulseaudio sinks/sources, changing the default and applying it to all current audio streams (ex.change mic or to headphones)

* change the default linux webcam by renaming devices, runs as a udev hook.

* various arch tools. Automatically download mirrorlist and enable the fastest 5 sources. Download/extract a package from the aur. Fzf multiselect all of the .pacnew files, vimdiff them, and delete the .pacnew files for files that changed. Also my own install script with choices for ext4 or zfs.

* use mplayer to play a video as the background on all monitors. I downloaded several 10hrs of ocean/forest sounds and alternate between them.

* tool to convert restructured text to html email in mutt

* using xargs to parallelize updating my most common config repos

* index all git repos on disk, then either fzf choose from or choose best match and cd into it. Not my idea, but I love it so much!

* makefile for my i3 config that looks at avail displays and gives me 10 monitors per display with the same hotkeys (like dwm).

* choose from several presets and recompile st with a different colourscheme.

* categorize all of my bank transactions to monitor my spending over time.

* a cli DM with different Xorg configurations and window managers (music keeps playing, fuse mounts retained). Useful for multimonitor games that require different setups.

* wine, proton scripts to manage prefixes and cd to common windows directories within them.

So,so many more.