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Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#41
Here's two of mine:

A while back, I wrote a command-line dice rolling program[1] that handles a bunch of esoteric dice notation syntax, both because I was getting into a D&D game with friends, and because I wanted to practice writing a non-trivial parser. (My D&D group pressured me into buying real dice anyway after I rolled five consecutive 1s in a single session.)

My current keyboard is an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, which I like very much, but the one thing I miss from a more traditional layout is the nav cluster (arrow keys, plus the 6 keys above them). Of course these are accessible via the Mod layer on the UHK, but when I need to do something like Control+Shift+Right to select text, adding Mod into that as well becomes a bit much, so I'd prefer to have dedicated keys for these. So, I recently ordered a keyboard kit that is just the 10 nav cluster keys, and my next small project is to assemble it.

[1]: https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/roll

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#42
post #37

A few years ago I discovered Anki (a spaced repetition app) for helping me learn Japanese. I immediately recognized the power of spaced repetition, but really did not like using Anki (it's pretty clunky and requires a lot of configuration to work right). I started building my own alternative, Mochi [0], which I wanted to kind of be a cross between Anki and Notion. I'm pretty happy with where it's at now and I've been…

Any chance you publish the source code?

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for and couldn’t find anything and was going to just build myself. I’ve been exporting from Notion to Anki and it’s been a pain.

My worry is that the developer will shut down and I’ll lose all my cards.

Edit: beautiful iPhone app, laying in bed playing with it

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#43
My mother refuses to uses computers/smart phones but loves seeing pictures I take. I built PostcardMailer.us to quickly send her/other relatives/friends postcard photos.

I got a bunch of weird Tor signups so I turned off new sign ups. But a handful of family and friends have accounts and we send each other postcards.

It is the most embarrassingly bad Rails codebase I can claim, but it has Just Worked for 4 years. I did a complete rewrite with “best practice” React and learned Golang for the backend. And never launched it because the Rails site works fine.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#44
My current one is https://limnology.co/ , organizing the top 70k educational youtubers in 20 languages. Youtube's channel discovery is pretty bad, and I wanted an easy way to find new channels about the topics I'm interested in. Still a work in progress as the problem turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#45
I made an online sailing navigation simulator (https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/). Originally it was just to "scratch a few itches" at the time, but I've found I keep coming back from time to time to make more changes and add little things here and there whenever I have some ideas: dealing with interesting data sets (geographical, meteorological), different programming languages (I've added some Go and Rust since originally starting), computer performance experiments, and so on. And being able to participate in virtual sailing races with others has also been a nice bonus that I never anticipated when first starting this project.

Some light technical details and links to much of the project's code can be found here: https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/code.html

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#46
A Bluetooth dongle for my Fully standing desk and an accompanying MacOS app to replace the default wired remote for height adjusting. The original remote was pretty large, with a thick cable and I never found a good place to put it where I wouldn’t accidentally bump into it with my chair.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#47
Most recently I hacked together a cat feeder that dispenses food from a hopper by weight. It's built into a nightstand and controlled only with a web interface hosted on an ESP32.

Almost all the parts were lying around (motor+gearbox from a broken neck massager, a small pocket scale, a broken servo), so it leant itself to getting things done 15 minute busts of activity without having to order and wait for alot of parts.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#48
I'm the author and maintainer of `cheat`, which started life (and continues life) as a "scratch your own itch" project:

https://github.com/cheat/cheat

I wrote it because I often forgot the shell commands that I needed to use on a daily basis, and realized that I wasted a lot of time Googling the same thing over and over.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

#49
A made guitar chord-melody arrangement generator that uses jazz leadsheets (melody + chord symbols) as input: https://chordmelody.io/

I always thought the process was tedious but systematic enough to automate, and to some extent I think I was right. Here’s a video of one of the arrangements: https://youtu.be/F3h_yQOM_Jg

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