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Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

toolbrew.co

31–40 of 65 posts

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#31
post #28

That was my main use case for vibe coding. All the crap I usually googled and had to endure ads but it was never painful enough to write code myself. I could just tell Claude to make me stuff and I can just host it myself.

simonw has also written a bunch of these sorts of tools

Pretty expansive actually:

https://tools.simonwillison.net/

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#33

QR code generator would be good. Many of the online generators don’t link directly where you ask, but through a tracking domain.

a dear friend generated a QR code for his show, used the code on flyers that he printed, made sure that the code worked, and a ~week later discovered that the qr code was now showing an ad and requesting payment to not do that

I had rarely seen him that angry - but I totally, totally got it... qr code freemium gating is such a pettily predatory business "model".

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#34

A way to merge multiple pdfs together/some features of sterlingpdf Yes I know I could self host it but I felt really overwhelmed self hosting it. So much so that I created a golang (LLM generated, funny how I am so AI skeptic when I use it, hey I just don't think its worth it economically no matter what) but yeah, its a simple golang code which just takes some pdfs, merges them. The code is shitty but I didn't write…

The pdftk program makes it super easy to merge PDFs if CLI meets your use case.

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#35

A way to merge multiple pdfs together/some features of sterlingpdf Yes I know I could self host it but I felt really overwhelmed self hosting it. So much so that I created a golang (LLM generated, funny how I am so AI skeptic when I use it, hey I just don't think its worth it economically no matter what) but yeah, its a simple golang code which just takes some pdfs, merges them. The code is shitty but I didn't write…

The pdftk program makes it super easy to merge PDFs if CLI meets your use case.

I had a lot of pdfs and so a single drag and drop of web would've made more sense and in fact initially I thought of some golang tool that is just a simple http wrapper over the cli too.

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#36
post #2

Does The Youtube downloader work? BTW this reminds me of excellent https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

there is also uh, god, I always forget its name whenever I want to use it.... AHHHHH YESS, I FINALLY REMEMBERED IT AFTER 5 minutes of thinking. https://cobalt.tools This has definitely helped me a lot in a lot of times when I didn't have my pc or just in general too, their api was also pretty hackable too actually and they support more than youtube Btw did I mention its open source? Tho the last time I did try to ins…

The instance https://cobalt.meowing.de is currently working for YouTube, which is very useful

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#37
post #2

Does The Youtube downloader work? BTW this reminds me of excellent https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

there is also uh, god, I always forget its name whenever I want to use it.... AHHHHH YESS, I FINALLY REMEMBERED IT AFTER 5 minutes of thinking. https://cobalt.tools This has definitely helped me a lot in a lot of times when I didn't have my pc or just in general too, their api was also pretty hackable too actually and they support more than youtube Btw did I mention its open source? Tho the last time I did try to ins…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, what would you want to see safety-wise? Whole point of it is to make something safe and reliable

How can users be sure that their inputs are not being saved somewhere on the backend? If I paste a bunch of content into these forms, and it inadvertently has some sensitive data in it, such as a credential or key of some kind, how do I know that isn't a data breech?

This is why web tools are typically a last resort for me, after all local options have been exhausted (usually, I can't get them working because an old binary is broken, building the code is borked, the local tool silently fails while offering no feedback, etc).

Re: Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads

#40
post #2

Does The Youtube downloader work? BTW this reminds me of excellent https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Fun story: I had the fun experience of collaborating on an integration with an engineer at JP Morgan Chase who introduced me to this tool, which they use, self-hosted of course, as an alternative to having engineers just pasting things into random online tools that come up when you google “base64 decode” etc.

From our whole interaction, I came away admiring the skill and professionalism of their team.

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