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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#331
I once wrote an OS hack to drive a friend crazy.

This was back in the early 1990s when we worked at a company making Macintosh utility software. My friend, another coder, liked to arrange his Finder windows so that they reflected the underlying folder hierarchy and were perfectly aligned. I mean pixel perfect.

So one day I wrote an extension to patch the OS on his machine to randomly nudge a window by just a single pixel. But only rarely, maybe just two or three times a day.

It had the wanted effect. Every once in a while, I'd hear him huff or mumble "what?" to himself. A couple of days later he asked the room, "Have any of you guys been using my machine? I know someone has. They messed up a few of my windows." Everybody professes innocence and manages not to laugh.

A few more days and he's at his wits' end. He finally says he's going to take the morning to wipe his machine and reinstall the OS.

At this point, we can't contain our mirth, and he catches a couple of us trying to hide our laughter. It's over.

I confess. He's pretty pissed and lets me have it. But he's a hacker, and I know deep down he respects it just a little.

After lunch, we're back at our desks. We're working. It's quiet. Then, I hear him chuckling. "Yeah, that was pretty good."

Edited to add: As penance, I ended up modifying my OS hack to help my friend perfectly align his Finder windows. All he had to do was hold down the control key when he opened a folder, and its window would be perfectly snapped to its parent. A bunch of us started using it. I ended up releasing it as freeware under the name WindowStacker: https://info-mac.org/viewtopic.php?t=14300

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#332
I love creative coding. I'm mostly focused on the visual stuff, especially generating vector files for pen-plotting. That said, I'm very proud of Rayven, my small vector 3D engine that mimics hand hatching:

- https://muffinman.io/blog/sneak-peek-of-rayven/

I would say it is 80% done, but it needs to be polished for a public release. I do plan to release it, and I would love to prepare a proper talk about it.

There are also other small tools I created, like Pulsar (micro creative coding playground) and Vertigo (turning raster images to SVGs). Both are open source and available here:

- https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

- https://muffinman.io/vertigo/

If you liked these, you might want to check my other projects: - https://muffinman.io/projects/

That was a lot of shameless self-promotion, but I love these "useless" projects. They really put fun back into programming after being in the industry for a while. Cheers!

Edit: formatting

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#334
Back when I was trying to make a game I wanted to copy a map from an old game, so I made a script that took a photo of a game map (like an old tiled NES game) and converted it to a matrix with an index of unique tile types, basically reversing the process of how tiled maps work.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#335
I wrote intentionally bad sorting algorithms for a while. One worked by making a random interchange, and then checking to see if the list was sorted. I refer to this as the minimal maximally stupid sort.

You to be inventive to get a sorting algorithm worse than this, but it's quite fun.

I considered writing a book of them called "101 stupid sorts".

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#336
I like using neocities for goofy sites like these

- Loading indicator that never finishes loading https://loading.neocities.org/

- Scrolling marquee tribute site https://marquee.neocities.org/

- DVD logo bounce via `` https://dvdmarquee.neocities.org/

- A form that lies about detecting image alterations https://isthisreal.neocities.org

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#337
post #127

Speaking of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" I wrote a version for Prodigy when I worked there in the 1990s, using their proprietary language named PAL: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-PAL-528.html It never appeared publicly on Prodigy, of course, but it was fun to run on my dev computer. Also in the early 1990s I wrote a command-line program to generate anagrams. I spent a ton of time on it, adding all so…

What anagrams does it produce for "Jeremy Irons"?

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#338
post #127

Speaking of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" I wrote a version for Prodigy when I worked there in the 1990s, using their proprietary language named PAL: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-PAL-528.html It never appeared publicly on Prodigy, of course, but it was fun to run on my dev computer. Also in the early 1990s I wrote a command-line program to generate anagrams. I spent a ton of time on it, adding all so…

What anagrams does it produce for "Jeremy Irons"?

You can download the binary and run it in a DOS emulator to find out! Or compile from the source linked to on the page.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#339
I built a IMDB of micro-creators: https://fanzine.world

Haven't have found much use for it yet but it's fun and the people that find it like it. I had some ambitions to build a recommendations engine around it to help people discover new creators but feels like a tarpit.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#340
About 12 years back I wrote a script to draw what I called “prime factorization trees”. I had recently discovered graphviz and it seemed interesting to combine prime factors with graphviz:

https://thebayesianobserver.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/factor-...

It served no purpose at the time.

I recently printed these pictures out to show my kid who has just learnt about primes / prime factors. The gleam in her eyes was priceless :-)

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