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Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

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Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#311

Post by trimethylpurine »

richardw wrote: post #99

On Windows: - Created a folder called "shortcuts" - Copy the folder URL into the system path (Control Panel, Environment variables something something) - Create a shortcut of anything I want to hyperlink to and put in there, with descriptive names - In IE, I think the setting was to enable autocomplete. For some reason that was linked to the autocomplete of the run menu item in Windows. - For extra bonus points, add…

I might be missing the why. Right click, pin to start. And then press the win key and start typing the name. It even learns by bumping the shortcut higher in the list as you use it more. Spotlight does the same on Mac. Most Linux DEs, same thing.

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#312

Post by westcort »

My family was always late with holiday cards, and it made the holidays way more stressful, so I made a holiday card maker and batch addresser for the yearly newsletter: https://locserendipity.com/Holiday.html

I also became frustrated with weather and news options, so I made a minimalist weather and news application to play VOA, NPR, and Sky news, along with the weather forecast from weather.gov by zip code: https://www.locserendipity.com/Start.html

I think of both of these as hacks because they are just static pages anyone can download them and use without connecting to my website.

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#313

Post by dusted »

Probably not that proud, but ones I made and use often enough to think others could find them useful:

* dstream (self-hosted music streaming) https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream

* finalkey (hardware device for storing/typing logins) https://github.com/DusteDdk/FinalKey

* justhpscan (scan an image via a web gui, no drivers needed) https://github.com/DusteDdk/justhpscan

* boilerController (automatic startup/shutdown of my wood gasification boiler) https://github.com/DusteDdk/boilerController

* racinggpstracker (generate overlays with speed / track times / map for road-racing from go-pro) https://github.com/DusteDdk/RacingGpsTracker

* chromogen (generate static-html albums for sharing pictures online easy) https://github.com/DusteDdk/chromogen

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#314

Post by jtwaleson »

spaboleo wrote: post #294
jtwaleson wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.waleson.com/2022/03/the-worlds-first-cowboy-key... Source code here: https://github.com/jtwaleson/cowboy-bike-remote-ble I’m currently working on finalizing the PCB version, the first one had some flaws so the battery drained really quickly.

Thank you. I just recently discovered the nRF52 as a potential solution for my own BLE project. To use a keyfob as a housing is brilliant and very 'stealth'. I have no experience with the nRF52 chips, but this will be a very useful resource for me. In your blog post you mention that "switching between 24km/h and 25km/h" is very important. May I ask why? Isn't such a speed difference almost negligible as you easily su…

If you ever get stuck don't hesitate to reach out :)

There is EU regulation to limit the bike to 25km/h. If you look at the code you can see how the switching between 24 and 25 km/h works. The rest I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#315

Post by dbalatero »

rftyuikdjhgvcf wrote: post #175
dbalatero wrote: post #82

I made a CLI tool for quickly starting new branches with draft PRs, asking for reviews, etc: https://github.com/dbalatero/work-cli Made a bunch of Hammerspoon plugins for macOS: - https://github.com/dbalatero/SkyRocket.spoon - mod+click to resize/drag windows - https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon - Vim mode everywhere - https://github.com/dbalatero/HyperKey.spoon - pop-up menu for when you forget your keybinds…

oh I've been down the "I can just fix macOS" road. The sooner you move away the better. so much time wasted on plugins like these. you effort will just be null the second apple change the usability apis enabling hammerspoon, like they did countless times before. I don't even rename the name of the fallen apps before it. instead now I contribute things as long lived proper features on KDE and hopefully advance humanit…

I find it fun, I'm not worried. If the work gets nuked in the future, so be it.

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#316

Post by more_corn »

vagabund wrote: post #10

So certainly not impressive, and morally ambiguous, but when chatGPT first released, I worked with it to create a python script that crawled The New Yorker sitemaps, found articles with embedded audio versions, downloaded the mp3 by reconstructing the file url using the article ID in the page source, and then renamed the file to match the page title and saved it to a well structured Google Drive directory. Now when I…

You might be one of the first of a new generation of programmers who start with no programming skills, bootstrap with chat gpt and reach a high level of capability. Keep hacking!

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#317

Post by brimwats »

charsi wrote: post #295

I wrote a little script to constantly check for open appointments on ICBC (for license and motorcycle driving test slots). Has come in handy a few times already since usually everything is booked up months in advance. With this I usually find something much sooner within a few hours of running the script. https://gitlab.com/charsi/icbc-appointment-checker

oh, bless you. icbc is a nightmare sometimes

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#318

Post by actually_a_dog »

forinti wrote: post #259
jimt1234 wrote: post #127

Honestly, the script/hack/automation I'm still most proud of is from around 1983, when I was 12 years old, for my Commodore 64. Back then, all computer communications were over the phone line, and in my house, we only had one line, so I spent a lot of late nights, dialing into BBSs, often not going to sleep until the sun came up. Then, I would get in trouble at school for falling asleep in class. So I came up with a…

Do tell us more. I suppose you downloaded the games to a floppy; did you have to worry about running out of space?

Xmodem includes a header that specifies the exact file size. So, all you need to do is check that number against the amount of free space on whatever device you're downloading to.

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#319

Post by [deleted] »

forinti wrote: post #259
jimt1234 wrote: post #127

Honestly, the script/hack/automation I'm still most proud of is from around 1983, when I was 12 years old, for my Commodore 64. Back then, all computer communications were over the phone line, and in my house, we only had one line, so I spent a lot of late nights, dialing into BBSs, often not going to sleep until the sun came up. Then, I would get in trouble at school for falling asleep in class. So I came up with a…

Do tell us more. I suppose you downloaded the games to a floppy; did you have to worry about running out of space?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Small scripts, hacks and automations you're proud of?

#320

Post by mackopes »

This is more of a cool alias I have. I am a hobby photographer and I produce a lot of photos. I have them stored on 1. my laptop (all the photos I am editing at the moment), 2. external HDD with archive of my all photos I already edited, and 3. second external HDD serving as a back-up for all the photos, i.e., the combination of what's on my laptop and the first HDD.

I back-up my photos every couple of weeks and I found out that if the laptop and the first HDD have the same directory structure, the rsync can figure out the diff and only copy over photos that are not yet backed up. This also let's me archive photos from my laptop to my first HDD at any time and rsync still picks it up correctly.

It works like this

rsync "$source_dir_laptop" "$source_dir_hdd" "$backup_destination" -ah --info=progress2 --delete-before --backup --backup-dir="$delete_backup_dir"

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