Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use? • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by blunte » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

lq0000 wrote: post #214

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…

Perhaps because ffmpeg and other swiss army knife tools can do so many useful things.

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

#242

Post by conductr » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

jonplackett wrote: post #140

Yes. And it’s a strange one. I made a program to gender swap any text you put into it and then got a book deal to rewrite and illustrate Fairy Tales. It’s been published around the world. https://genderswappedfairytales.com The idea is to shine a light on the original versions but it also creates a lot of never-written-before characters. A lot of brave princesses and lady-beasts, but also men desperately wanting chil…

Sounds like an interesting challenge although I’ll admit on this one I would have just went to fiver and hired someone to edit the existing text. My guess is under and week and a couple hundred bucks at most and you’d be set.

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

#243

Post by oliverjhyde » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

mavci wrote: post #196

Hacker News is part of my daily life. I try to follow the top stories every day when I have the opportunity. In order not to miss important stories on my busy days, I prepared a notification service. It was a very simple, ~40-line PHP script that sends me notifications for stories with over 200 points. I have been using this service for 7 months and I no longer worry about missing important stories. Finally, I made t…

Out of interest why not just use an RSS feed for the top posts?

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

#244

Post by jim_lawless » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

Yes. There are far too many to mention all of them, but here are some that are probably among the more recent.

Windows clipboard capture to file tool. Any new image placed on the clipboard is written to a sequentially-numbered file so that I can just hit various Print-Screen key combinations or I can right click an image in a browser and click Copy to capture it.

Python / PIL scripts to arrange directories of images into seamlessly connected wallpaper images.

Lots of email automation scripts, both sending and receiving. ( Pruning spam, marking all of my unread messages read, sending alerts for blog post updates. )

Scripts to convert filenames to all lowercase in a folder.

Startup scripts that forcibly turn off Windows options that I don't want because Windows update sometimes re-enables these.

Python/Bash + Cheese - Poor man's security system. I used an old netbook with the camera pointed at the inside door of a house I used to own take a picture of the door area and send it to me via email so that I could monitor to see if anyone had been inside while I was gone for an overnight trip.

Custom RSS aggregator scripts ... sends results to me in email so that I keep a record of the articles by day.

...etc., ...etc.

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

#245

Post by primitivesuave » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

tdhz77 wrote: post #177

primitivesuave wrote: post #128

I created a program that prints QR codes onto sheets of peel-and-stick labels. When someone scans the code, they are directed to a simple web app that manages food sharing with my four roommates. We noticed that we buy a lot of the same things (bananas, avocados, eggs, etc), so we implemented a system where anyone can stick a QR code onto something they want to share, and anyone else can scan it to record what they t…

It’s like Web 3.0 for your fridge… make a market for anything. A roommate taking 3 eggs from me doesn’t bother me. Firing off a text, “Hey, I took 3 eggs” is all I need. We really just don’t like to share these days. That’s the problem we are now solving it appears.

Long-term sharing breaks down when one person feels they are contributing more than another. For low-price household items like toilet paper, soap, etc, and common kitchen items like olive oil, flour, etc, we all still pitch in to a fixed "house fund" since it takes more time to split it evenly. But for everyday quantity-based items, it has helped us all stop over-purchasing and throwing out as much fresh produce, and any roommate can opt-in to share as much/as little as they want.

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

#246

Post by lobocinza » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

wiredfool wrote: post #212

edpenz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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))

alias genpwd="tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%*()[]{}' < /dev/urandom | fold -w 16 | head -n 1 | xclip -sel clip"

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

#247

Post by analog31 » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

I'm a so called "scientific" programmer, meaning that I use programming as a problem solving tool, and not to create software for others to use. Programming is a lot easier when you're the only user. Here are some items:

* A ransomware detector based on accessing my home network file server via an all-Linux chain that stores file hashes and watches for changes.

* Converting PayPal transaction history from PDF to the numbers needed for my tax return, and some similar tax related scripts.

* Anything involving measurement or data logging, such as temperature, etc. During one episode, I sorted out whether my home furnace was operating intermittently.

I won't count hobby related stuff, which is innumerable.

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

#248

Post by robacarp » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

Neat question, I've enjoyed the replies so far.

I've built tons. Most of them don't stick for long. One that has is a file-cabinet organization tool - https://github.com/robacarp/place

- it moves files into place within my filing system - renames the file so that even if it's moved _from_ the filing system I can see where it came from (eg sent in an email) - uses a custom TUI engine I built for this specific task https://github.com/robacarp/keimeno

----------------------

Another is a clean, bare bones, web-extension mode "picture on a new tab" extension. When I came back to firefox a few years ago I couldn't find one amongst the clutter on AMO so I put together https://github.com/robacarp/photographic_start

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

#249

Post by healthysurf » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

Yep. To filter out negativity on Reddit, in YouTube comments, and a couple other places. Needs a lot of work and completely lacks personalization options right now, but haven't had anyone show any interest in it. I don't really market it at all though.

http://healthy.surf

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

#250

Post by robotnikman » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 11:11 PM UTC

A bunch of random things here and there that I needed. The 2 ones that stick out to me:

-A script for downloading and organizing videos from my Youtube Playlists since videos tend to get randomly deleted

-An old Minecraft server plugin which generates custom made structures throughout the world based on .schematic files you provide it and configurable spawning criteria.