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

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

#211

Post by ggayan »

My main group of friends with whom I play videogames on a daily basis is on Telegram. We use voicechat and stream our gameplay on discord for others to watch/comment in a more private setting (other tools are too public). I wrote a bot that notifies on the telegram group whenever someone starts a stream on discord so others jump in and join the game/stream. Discord shares which game/activity through their API so we know exactly what someone is playing. I also add some personalized randomized spice depending on who is streaming and what they are playing to the telegram bot messages so we can laugh about it.

Whenever the bot has gone down (I turned off the home server or whatever) my friends complain, so I know the bot is fulfilling its purpose :)

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

#212

Post by wiredfool »

edpenz wrote: post #160
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

I gave up on readable.

    with open('/dev/urandom', 'rb') as f:
        return base64.urlsafe_b64encode(f.read(12))

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

#213

Post by alsetmusic »

This probably isn't quite what OP had in mind, but I put together a number of Python and Bash scripts to control my home media center. Then I used the iOS Alfred app to give them a front end on my phone as a remote. I also made them actionable with various flags so I could call them by typing them into the Mac Alfred app.

Power on / off home theater device and set inputs Power projector on / off and set inputs Make calls to both at the same time working together Call AppleScripts to control music playing through the stereo from a connected Mac mini

I also built a tool for a friend in Bash and AppleScript. It watches a list of his favorite streamers and then calls to the Downie video download app to begin recording their streams. He runs it on a headless Mac mini checking each person in the list every two minutes.

Of all the things I've made for myself or others, these are the two that would most resemble a user-facing GUIable end-product.

edit: a letter

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

#214

Post by lq0000 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> * A replacement front-end for "ffmpeg", see above

I have one of these too... It's kind of frightening how hard ffmpeg is to use without some kind of custom frontend. I have probably dozens of bash/python scripts to invoke ffmpeg for different common tasks.

- One to extract audio

- One to extract all the individual streams from a container

- A couple different transcoding scripts

- One specifically for gifs

- One to crop video

- A few that I can't remember the purpose of... and can't tell from reading the source

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

#215

Post by bpye »

I have written these sorts of things, but I do try and put them up on GitHub if I think they’ll be useful to other people. I wrote a tool unimaginatively named wsl-ssh-pageant [0] which I wanted because I use a YubiKey for my SSH key. It has been by far my most popular GitHub project.

I do have other things as well, some on GitHub some not. A scraper to notify me when a local gym booking website changes for a time I’m interested in. A bridge between a BroadLink RM4 and HomeKit for some fans [1] - I wanted to avoid home-assistant. A script to grab my power consumption data. A shim to make gpg-agent compatible with launchd’s socket activation protocol [2].

[0] - https://github.com/benpye/wsl-ssh-pageant

[1] - https://github.com/benpye/hkrm4

[2] - https://github.com/benpye/launchd_shim

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

#216

Post by stirfish »

edpenz wrote: post #160
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

Something like

    cat /usr/share/dict | shuf -n 4 | tr '\n' '-'
(inb4 unnecessary use of `cat`)

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

#217

Post by ta04122022 »

I work in accounting & have automated many parts of my job with Python & Javascript.

My Python CLI tool can read data from different sources & do my job. For example, it can read data from excel using Pandas, & then open Chrome, go to a web site, do login, fill forms, submit payments, etc using Pyautogui. In some cases it uses email & cronjobs to start executing automatically.

In another example, it uses Tesseract OCR to convert PDF to text files, & interactively convert them to CSV files that can be imported to any Accounting software.

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

#218

Post by meichenf »

I have an ESP8266 running a tiny webstack on my local wifi that is wired to a low voltage relay that turns on my hot water heater (tankless). Combined this with a Apple shortcut so I can tell Siri to turn on the device (send a post request to the unit). Basically just a hacked together system to avoid using Homekit. It's been running great for 6 years with no maintenance so no complaints.

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

#220

Post by valcron1000 »

A PWA for splitting bills among friends. When we get a receipt we usually split the cost based on what each of us actually consumed (ex. Bob got 2 beers, Alice 3, etc.). I couldn't find a simple app that could do that, so I wrote my own: https://github.com/emlautarom1/Billy
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