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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#101

Post by donatj »

I have been working on a note taking app with a fully open API since 2008 on and off. I intended to open it to the public around 2010 but SimpleNote popped up and drank my milkshake. I even switched over myself.

Since then however they've closed their formerly open API. This inspired me to pick it back up.

I've got a mobile friendly webapp, an official SDK, a basic cli for scripting. Basically everything I wanted.

The UI of the webapp is pretty spartan as I prefer, so I'm scared it doesn't have mass appeal. It's super fast however.

I have hundreds of notes in it, use it for all my note keeping. I am it's only user. My friends have access, but they don't use regularly.

I want to open up to the public eventually, but these days I'd really want to get e2e encryption working before doing so and just have not found the time.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#102

Post by jpatters »

modeless wrote: post #69

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box. I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone.…

Cool. I did the same thing for my office building except I had Twilio post to our work slack with buttons that we could click to let them in or not. It was a really fun little afternoon project one day.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#103

Post by jmathai »

I founded 2 photo startups (2004 and 2012). My second startup was focused on data portability and was open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trovebox

After failing to integrate the software into Western Digital's MyCloud NAS line of productions, I left and decided to try something different. I created a photo management tool that could feed into other photo programs. It's open source and available on github.

https://getelodie.com

https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

I started off using it with Google Photos. Explained here, https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

I've since switched to using it with Synology Photos.

8 years and counting.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#104

Post by rikschennink »

It’s a tool that helps me generate code examples for multiple JavaScript frameworks.

Input is a JSON string describing the code, out comes code examples in plain JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and jQuery.

Helps me generate extensive docs on my own.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#105

Post by stickperson »

modeless wrote: post #69

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box. I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone.…

How did this work exactly? Twilio would answer the call, listen for a number, and "press" 9 if the number was in an allow list?

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#106

Post by jpatters »

My company has a budget for health and wellness that I use for my GoodLife gym membership. GoodLife doesn’t send receipts and instead makes you go to their website, fill in a bunch of information, and request the receipt be emailed to you. So I made a little app that simply fills in the form automatically every two weeks. I set it up on GitHub actions and now I don’t have this annoyance to deal with. It’s pretty small but made my life better.

Not much for instructions but it’s here is anyone is interested. https://github.com/jpatters/goodlife-receipts

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#107

Post by lemure »

I’ve implemented a Bayesian optimizer for stable diffusion model merging [0]. This is because I do not have patience and/or time to try all different block combinations by hand. It started as a personal thing but now multiple people are working on it and a small community was born.

[0] https://github.com/s1dlx/sd-webui-bayesian-merger

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#108

Post by throwaway874839 »

I always loved listening to music. However, the past few years I started more actively exploring new (old) music around the world and actually listening to whole albums. (I'm always amazed by the vast amount of good music that exists out there, waiting to be discovered and experienced)

I've a few friends that have the same itch and so we were constantly exchanging recommendations via different communication channels (Signal, email, Slack etc.)

So I started building a website that's "like Goodreads, but for music releases". You can mark albums as "want to listen", "listened" and "dig" (loved), organizing your lists with tags and notes and share them with others. You then have a public activity profile and you can add other users as friends and see their own activity.

Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#109

Post by peacefulpond »

paws wrote: post #71

I don't know if it qualifies as the "most interesting" but as a travel bug I wrote a little airfare scraper that I got plenty of value out of. Basically it's a script that scrapes several places for flight deals and "mistake fares" and notifies my phone if it matches with my city. No searching like other flight apps, you basically just set it up and wait, and various places will pop up. Helps if you're in a hub city…

Great idea! Would love to give the script a spin myself..

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#110

Post by cobbzilla »

My mom digitized many many old family videos, and wanted them online for sharing with family (including elderly & not-super-tech-savvy relatives). She asked me “should I just upload them all to a YouTube channel?”

Thankfully it was a phone call so my mom didn’t see my aghast expression. I prefer that big tech not index this stuff! Better to keep “in the family”

Seriously why does big tech deserve this free & super-private window into me & my ancestors lives?

So I wrote something[1] where:

* it’s fully free & open source

* cloud native

* plays on any device, any bandwidth, even if shitty

* yes my 90+yo Aunt Loretta (w00t to you Aunt Lo!) can use it on her phone & computer

* all data can be always encrypted, both source videos and derived/optimized assets

* and there’s more. please have fun

Basically point it at a source bucket on S3 or B2, and get your own private YouTube.

What I’ve built is very limited in functionality atm, but I believe the foundation is solid and plan to extend media support to photos and audio.

This can be a nice alternative to Plex/Google Photos/YT/etc.

It’s for when you don’t care about “building an audience” and in fact prefer that big tech can only see encrypted bytes from you.

Try it out and lmk!

[1] https://github.com/cobbzilla/yuebing

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