I created https://www.npmjs.com/package/alpakr-cli for myself but have since made the service public.
I use alpakr a couple times a week for learning about new packages, crates, etc.
Pipe from stdin and output package summaries.
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
651–660 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#652Also lots. One particularly fun one was a script that scraped fund prices for an old (bad) life insurance policy I had. Dump them to an SQLite db, and then later added plotting graphs which it would telegram to me once a week
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#653I took a year to write an app to manage my stock portfolio... Everything from stock selection based on fundamental value analysis to tax loss harvesting and gains capturing. I used the Interactive Brokers API to manage my funds and get data along with a Schwab scraper to sanity check data. I currently track 36,000 stocks from every major market on earth. My portfolio is balanced primarily between Japan, US, Australia, and European markets. I manually blocked China and Russia to due to governmental risks in those countries. I now can just run this program with no supervision. Returns have been 20-40% a year with very low risks as I am looking at companies with very high revenues and profits compared to their market price with no bad years in the last 5-10 years.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at diceware.com for a good way to do that. You can calculate the entropy without "research". I use a simple python script for the purpose, filtering out the words < 7 chars long from /usr/share/dict/words instead of bothering with the official diceware list. Example output: "snored-Hoff-virtue-tab-eroded-Perl's" with estimated 87 bits of entropy. If you write the phrase on a piece of paper and refer to the paper…
Also take a look at the EFF’s wordlists [1] as an alternative to the Diceware list. Quoting from their blog post, here are some issues with the Diceware list that they have resolved: - It contains many rare words such as buret, novo, vacuo - It contains unusual proper names such as della, ervin, eaton, moran - It contains a few strange letter sequences such as aaaa, ll, nbis - It contains some words with punctuation…
Thanks for the link, but it's broken, should be: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...
I think you copy-pasted it from elsewhere on HN, causing the end to be cut off.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#655Dozens, 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 so…
I also made a mouse jiggler because of a former job’s inflexible screen locking policy.
I made mine hardware with a small MCU that plugged into USB and looked exactly like my work-issued mouse (vendor id, device id, etc)
It was hardware because I didn’t want it to show anywhere (we were technically not allowed to install unapproved software even if it meant we couldn’t do our job and it was a selectively enforceable fireable offense)
It worked very well and was shaking 5px left 5px right every minute. It was so little that you wouldn’t notice while actively using the computer.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#656Most of the programs I wrote were for my own needs. I've open-sourced many of them, but some are really just for me and closed-source: - A scraper to get thousands of quiz questions from popular German TV shows and then import them into an Anki deck. - Sync app between Foobar2000 and Plex playlists. - A script to enter Steam giveaways for me. After winning over 1000 Steam games and DLCs, I've turned the script off (m…
> enter Steam giveaways
What are these? Are they run by steam itself or from random people? I got some results searching, but nothing that looked like it’s an “official” thing.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#657- a Python script that turns my loudspeakers off when no audio is played by Windows (by toggling a smart plug over Wifi). Saves quite a bit of energy. - my TV loudspeaker is frequency corrected by a microcontroller (so that the sound is better) and is connected by Bluetooth (using an ESP32)
> microcontroller (so that the sound is better
How do you do it and figure out what frequencies need correction (and by how much)?
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#658Most of the programs I wrote were for my own needs. I've open-sourced many of them, but some are really just for me and closed-source: - A scraper to get thousands of quiz questions from popular German TV shows and then import them into an Anki deck. - Sync app between Foobar2000 and Plex playlists. - A script to enter Steam giveaways for me. After winning over 1000 Steam games and DLCs, I've turned the script off (m…
> enter Steam giveaways What are these? Are they run by steam itself or from random people? I got some results searching, but nothing that looked like it’s an “official” thing.
I was using SteamGifts [0], but there are more. It's not an official Valve platform. The giveaways mostly come from regular people, usually offering leftover keys from game bundles. Some game developers also drop hundreds of keys in a single giveaway - those are listed at the top and provide some visibility/marketing for them. From a user perspective, you are automatically given some "entry points" every time a new giveaway is created (to a max. cap) and you are free to spend them however you want (higher game value = more entry points required). There never was a way to get more "entry points" by paying money. People creating giveaways can set a minimum "user level" to enter the giveaway. You can only get higher levels by creating a giveaway yourself. So the more you contribute, the better games and the less entries you can expect.
In summary, it is just a matter of the number of your giveaway entries to win something. So I've written a bot to enter giveaways automatically, preferring ones with the least entries to get a higher chance of winning. For reference, "I" have entered 289k giveaways and won ~1070 games since 2013 (with a fully automatic bot since ~2016).
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#659Tracking Finances I originally wrote a web app to track my finances in 2003 using classic ASP and T-SQL. In early 2017, I rewrote it from scratch, still using T-SQL, but with C#.NET and jQuery. Lets me review my budget, ensure my net worth is heading in the direction I want, make sure all my payments get made, and ensure my account balances never get too low (with a light forecasting element.) Ideally I'd open source…
How do you ingest the transactions? I’d love to be able to replace Mint!
I use YNAB4 through wine and wrote a little CLI utility to ingest CSV statements and format them to what YNAB expects (with currency conversion at the transactions rate for that day). It works well and is all local.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#660Several, for my work as translator: for example a short autoIt program to create and log translation projects, a short autohotkey program to write different types of smart quotes and n and m dashes in the programs I use to write my translations, a Python program to create and log estimates. Nothing major (all my programs are a few hundred lines of code max.) but they are all programs that I use on a daily basis, in fact they are among the programs I use most frequently.