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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?

#311

Post by nonoesp »

I wrote a live video/audio marker creator with OpenAI's Whisper.

A Stream Deck XL button runs a Python script that creates a timestamp for ongoing video and audio recordings which I use for live stream and podcast chapters while I'm streaming or recording.

Different buttons on the Stream Deck create markers with different labels, e.g., Introduction, Break, Marker, etc.

But as it's hard to name markers for every section and you have to go back to the recordings to infer what each section was about, I added a dynamic marker script that trims audio around a marker with ffmpeg, locally transcribes it with Whisper, and appends the transcript to the marker, so I can easily guess what the marker title should be without having to scroll and watch the video.

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

#312

Post by actionfromafar »

cobbzilla wrote: post #110

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-pr…

Not saying you shouldn't do this, but by publishing under AGPL plus

If you are an individual person or a not-for-profit organization, and your usage of this software is entirely non-commercial, you may use this software under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, summarized below and reprinted in full thereafter.

you have effectively created a new license and it's not completely clear to me what that new license even means exactly, except that obviously a company should stay far away from it.

With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.

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

#313

Post by bussyfumes »

When I was a student there was this power-of-two game on my friend's iPhone that I was literally addicted to. I didn't have an iPhone and eventually the game even disappeared from the AppStore. I missed it very much and my friends jokingly mentioned building a copy just for me. They never got around to it but at some point I thought "maybe I should give it a try?". So I gave it a try with no game dev knowledge and the second iteration turned out just fine for my needs: https://kiryhas.github.io/memechain/

I've considered rewriting it to make the code better many times but every time I sit down to do that I think to myself "it works just fine, why touch it" and leave this idea for a while :)

BTW the idea of the game is to combine cubes with the same number and color until there are only 4 left.

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

#314

Post by fransje26 »

jo-m wrote: post #254

I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it. It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/ . Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.

Really cool. They look like model trains! :-)

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

#315

Post by stefanv »

Because I work with a lot of currencies and I used to do a lot of multi-currency calculations, I’ve built a convertor (https://4ex.ro) that accepts formulas and displays the results in all selected currencies. The rate is the one offered by the National Bank in Romania (a legal requirement for transactions that happen between companies in Romania - maybe I’ll add different data sources in the future). Oh, and you can add a formula in one field and then continue in another field using the previous result. Something really easy to accomplish, but there was no solution doing this a few years ago. Almost nobody is using it, but I do and this is a sufficient reason to keep it (a)live.

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

#316

Post by Dave_TRS »

In 2010 I was at my first job out of college and frustrated that iTunes took over such a huge amount of resources on my PC. But I loved the UI look and function and the way it had playlists, and didn't like the other options on the market. So I hired a cheap overseas freelancer to build "Litetunes", which I requested look and function exactly like iTunes but be <2MB file with no installation required that would open quickly just like notepad or calculator. I thought of distributing it but ended up using it just for myself, it worked great.

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

#317

Post by ccosmin »

Built my own music player for mac which I use every day. I have a large collection of ripped mp3s and I wanted to control exactly where they are stored, order in which they are played (album order) etc. It just snowballed from there with other features.

https://snowlinesoftware.com/apps/mac/mamusique/index.php

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

#318

Post by dylanowen »

glapworth wrote: post #154

We recently remodelled our kitchen and dining area, and I wanted some art piece on the wall but couldn’t decide what. For months the wall was a little bare and we were having a lot of dinner guests. I realised our WiFi password was too complicated to keep reading out to family and friends so I built a QR code in Lego that automatically connects you to our guest WiFi. It looks good, and it’s Lego so it was a fun proje…

Does this work for iOS yet? Last time I was trying out wifi qr codes only android handled them correctly.

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

#319

Post by danabrams »

Not for me but for my dad. He has a giant vinyl collection from his teenage years at his country cabin in Vermont.

I hooked a raspberry pi zero up to it about 7-8 years ago, and streamed the audio to a custom app on an iPhone, so he could play a record and listen to it anywhere in the house or even outside while cutting wood.

The hard part was making a nice vector animation of a record player that animated based on the state of the playback.

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