Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

I wrote a Mac utility "app" to display currently playing track notifications using the system notification pop-ups a ways before Spotify or Apple Music had it. People had previously done it with Growl, but I was no longer using that and wanted it to "just work" as part of Mac OS(X).

I wrote a web app in Django to automatically transcribe audio interviews, annotate the transcriptions and extract audio fragments. I started building it to help my wife with her MA thesis, as an alternative to expensive social sciences software like nvivo. Unfortunately, she finished her thesis before I finished the app! I later used it to make a few radio documentaries and I was going to try marketing it but it was too much work to get it slick enough. In fact, even I was put off by its lack of slickness and eventually stopped using it.

I turned a photo gallery thing into an ecommerce site, tied to Paypal, on a Mac maybe 20 years ago. Lot of PHP mucking-about, with little idea what I was doing. No harm or foul, though, other than I could have picked a different gallery app that already did that.

Latest one is written in Kotlin and compiled to a single executable.

While I know many here dislike “crypto,” it’s used to calculate some details on some OpenSea NFTs I’m interested in. The details on each NFT are varied, but two of these NFTs can have their details combined to create a “more powerful” NFT. Don’t think I should bother going into more detail, but the code calculates every permutation of the details for all the NFTs to identify the best combinations. Didn’t take long to write and I did it for fun as I never compiled Kotlin down to a stand-alone executable and I wanted to give it a try.

I have a strange problem with my monitor that I solved with a program.

Basically, I use a USB switch to switch my mouse, keyboard, and webcam between my personal desktop computer and the MacBook I use for work. I tried a full KVM switch at first, but every time I'd switch it to my MacBook, Windows on my PC would flip its shit. With the primary monitor disconnected, it would move everything to the secondary monitor, which was fine, except that when I moved the KVM switch back to my PC, it would move everything back to my primary display, whether or not it was originally on my primary or secondary. Additionally, since my two monitors are different resolutions, all my window sizing was wrong.

I tried to get around this by plugging my PC into my monitor's Display Port and plugging the MacBook into an HDMI port and just telling my monitor to switch inputs, and for the most part it works, but at 1 PM every day, if my monitor is set to HDMI, it drops the DP connection, making Windows think it lost the monitor, putting me back at square one.

So I wrote a simple program in Python that sits in my notification tray. I can tell it to save or restore all my window positions. So if Windows loses the monitor, after it comes back, I can restore everything to where it was.

As a bonus, I also added a "Easy Copy/Paste" menu to quickly copy emojis like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and ಠ_ಠ to my clipboard.