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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?

#641

Post by remram »

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.

A useful distinction is "complex" versus "difficult".

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

#642

Post by leonhard »

shayan01 wrote: post #161

Like many people of this community I have written multiple scripts and programs for my own use. Recently I was bored with Tinder, so I wrote a small CLI to automate the likes on Tinder. It's totally stupid and just likes everyone, but I found that it's easier to filter out uninteresting candidates afterwards instead of having to swipe manually in the app. Another recent thing (this one is open source, search for "5ha…

What did you use for that Tinder script? Is it just based on the web version of it with some scraping?

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

#643

Post by BrandoElFollito »

A note taking app that does exactly what I need, and I can expand it. I will soon add sharing of notes with my wife.

A home dashboard that gathers information from family calendars, school timetables, weather. All this readable from distance.

A chores app (that also displays on the dash above) with info about whose turn it is to fold the laundry, get out garbage etc. It worked for some time and then we reverted back to everyone yelling at everyone to do it.

All of these already exist but I wrote them to exactly meet my needs, and nothing more. Plus I learned quite a bit about Go, TS and Vue.

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

#644

Post by Theory42 »

maxmunzel wrote: post #443

After a quick burst of manic energy during exam phase, I decided to solve the pigeon problem on my balcony once and for all (and in a humane way). So I bought a cheap electric water gun from Amazon, built in WiFi using an ESP8266 and a relay shield; 3D printed a window mount for my old iPhone (running a webcam app) and hacked together some openCV code in python. After all this was working on my desk, I had the pleasu…

Does this allow you to shoot the water gun, or is it recognizing pigeons in an automated way and firing?

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

#645

Post by shayan01 »

leonhard wrote: post #642
shayan01 wrote: post #161

Like many people of this community I have written multiple scripts and programs for my own use. Recently I was bored with Tinder, so I wrote a small CLI to automate the likes on Tinder. It's totally stupid and just likes everyone, but I found that it's easier to filter out uninteresting candidates afterwards instead of having to swipe manually in the app. Another recent thing (this one is open source, search for "5ha…

What did you use for that Tinder script? Is it just based on the web version of it with some scraping?

I wanted to quickly hack together something and was too lazy to reverse engineer their private API. So I settled for their web app and Playwright (cross browser Puppeteer alternative). The auth stuff for their web app is stored in IndexedDB, so for it to work with Playwright you have to replicate the DB inserts.

It's pretty straight forward because Playwright is easy to use and has good documentation. You just need to have some basic CSS skills to find the correct selectors, but it's really not complex (Instagram and other big sites make it a bit harder).

I could run the script in a cronjob, but I decided to just start it manually whenever I want. So I have it connected to a Telegram bot of mine where I can just tell the bot to like the next n people.

I might write a small blog post about it at some point.

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

#646

Post by leonhard »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #262

I wrote a scraper for various dating websites that would automatically generate activity on my behalf according to several empirical criteria (very simple stuff, no ML!), so that I could minimize the amount of time spent manually fishing. It worked amazingly well, it got me hundreds (yes, 100+) of dates, incredible dating stories and a lifetime of memories, all in a semi-automated way without me requiring to “swipe r…

Would be very interested in that blog post or some more detail haha

Did it have some kind of decision making functionality to decide which people to like?

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

#647

Post by sprobertson »

Theory42 wrote: post #644
maxmunzel wrote: post #443

After a quick burst of manic energy during exam phase, I decided to solve the pigeon problem on my balcony once and for all (and in a humane way). So I bought a cheap electric water gun from Amazon, built in WiFi using an ESP8266 and a relay shield; 3D printed a window mount for my old iPhone (running a webcam app) and hacked together some openCV code in python. After all this was working on my desk, I had the pleasu…

Does this allow you to shoot the water gun, or is it recognizing pigeons in an automated way and firing?

I'd guess the latter if there's an OpenCV component

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

#648

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #507
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yup it is only (Type|Java)Script but it has a bunch of global functions which makes translating easy.

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

#649

Post by withinboredom »

mnorris wrote: post #604
withinboredom wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there somewhere we can purchase/play the game? I'd be interested in giving it a shot!

Thanks! It's called Wrds. There's a web app on playwrds.com and Android / iOS versions as well.

The whole family spent the last hour playing classic. It’s a good game!

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

#650

Post by cdaringe »

ralgozino wrote: post #377
mauvehaus wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ginned up a "wait for the internet to come back up" script that repeatedly pinged something with one packet, and used the Mac 'open' command to play an mp3 file once the ping succeeded. Unsexy, but when you can't google up a better solution...

I made something similar but I used macos' `say` command instead :)

I like this idea. Some company that I may or may not work for either does or does not install malware on our computers, extending the boot sequence and something in the network layer that makes it take MINUTES for anything http to be usable, even after the DE is loaded. Would love to add such a script to my login’s boot sequence
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