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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?

#392

I just wrote a script that uses 2 ultrasonic sensors + 1 raspy to detect if somebody is moving in one direction, so that I can put that in a giant green tunnel at the entrance of a video-game-themed party next week: https://0bin.net/paste/GrfAHJRt#oqVtar1pUzqtdCWWzvEEK71mNlcd... When the person walks in the tunnel, it makes the sound of Mario when entering a pipe. It does nothing else. It's for one night only, and no…

>> the sound is triggered no matter the direction I walk

if you use it in a bathroom, the easy fix would be to only trigger sound on odd detections. Unless you are in the habit of going in a bathroom with company or if there is another way out of the bathroom.

Your projects look like they bring delight into this world!

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

#393
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Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#394

I just wrote a script that uses 2 ultrasonic sensors + 1 raspy to detect if somebody is moving in one direction, so that I can put that in a giant green tunnel at the entrance of a video-game-themed party next week: https://0bin.net/paste/GrfAHJRt#oqVtar1pUzqtdCWWzvEEK71mNlcd... When the person walks in the tunnel, it makes the sound of Mario when entering a pipe. It does nothing else. It's for one night only, and no…

>> the sound is triggered no matter the direction I walk if you use it in a bathroom, the easy fix would be to only trigger sound on odd detections. Unless you are in the habit of going in a bathroom with company or if there is another way out of the bathroom. Your projects look like they bring delight into this world!

In the party, it will be used at the main entrance, but there will be multiple secondary ones so it won't work.

What I need to do is to move my ass and fix the timing.

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

#396

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 a…

That's some very cool art you have there!

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

#397
post #96

When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…

If your timekeeper doesn't perform adequately, there's an impressively overengineered neural net project to read clocks: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09162 "It's About Time: Analog Clock Reading in the Wild".

(Although I don't know how it would compare to the latest generalist vision models... Clocks are pretty well labeled in photographs online, one would expect.)

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

#398
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this. I'm in a somewhat home automation tinker place myself, and have made an open source doorbell camera (kinda) using an esp32 chip, since I didn't trust anything else to not spy. It sends me messages over element of any movement lasting longer than 5 seconds, which usually involves an old lady who walks slowly with her zimmer frame across the front of the house. Other than actual doorbell use, most of the i…

Have you got a write-up or GitHub for your camera? I'd kinda like to do the same, and wouldn't mind a starting point.

I can't without doxxing myself sadly. I really should make a public HN account

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

#399
oh definitely has to be yummychars for me it's a terminal snake game that uses tmux to capture your terminal content and serve that as food for the snake

there are no scores or anything just gobbling up characters to clear your screen

written in go

https://github.com/willofdaedalus/yummychars

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

#400

I like inserting art, like the header to https://simonsarris.com A village pops up. There is no point to it. You can click to make more houses. You can right-click to drag things around. When I touch it again I think I'll add a sun and moon that track the time of day for wherever the user is located. Actually the footer has art too, each page has a semi-randomly assigned illustration from public-domain (old) art that…

Cute! I wonder how hard it would be, rather than having the houses "bounce" up, to make some kind of CSS animation that would look a bit like they were being sketched, some kind of gradual reveal..
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