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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?

#351

Post by anotherevan »

A few that I've written to scratch my own itch or fill a need. Some of which I ended up sprucing up a bit and publishing publicly.

sitesync - Program that could sync files and folders on local file system and remote (FTP or SFTP). Mainly used to help maintain a web site that other people were also modifying. It allowed me to develop on my local copy and push changes without clobbering anything someone else had changed. (Unpublished)

erudite - [0] - Pull articles from Instapaper or Pocket and add to your ebook library (including Hacker News integration that includes URLs for corresponding posts!)

bday - [1] - The super simple birthday and anniversary reminder program. Wrote for myself but several family members also like it. Originally on Windows and then ported to Linux as well.

moviesschedule - [2] - Tracks Australian movie release dates and can even maintain a Google calendar of the movies you are interested in.

coffeegrinder - Java program to help fold automation of coffeescript compilation to javascript. Included optional GUI for viewing javascript version updates whenever the .coffee file was saved. (Unpublished)

bom - A little web-site and FTP scraper to retrieve local weather info from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. (Unpublished)

bgdicecalc - Little GUI program to easily figure out probabilities for various dice rolls in Backgammon. Want to convert this to a web-page some time. (Unpublished)

feedme - Web-site scraper to create RSS feeds of various comic strips (e.g. Dilbert) with the image directly in the feed. (Unpublished)

[0] https://github.com/evmcl/erudite

[1] https://github.com/evmcl/bday

[2] https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule

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

#353

Post by u2077 »

iamscout wrote: post #341

Oh yeah. I was annoyed with ctrl+f and its exact spelling requirement, so I wrote an NLP based ctrl+f replacement that works pretty damn well. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scout/hgljpodblkjj...

Thank you! I currently use https://github.com/victor-savinov/regex which is also nice.

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

#354

Post by ryanchants »

jffry wrote: post #329

Most of my light bulbs are color-temperature-adjustable. So I wrote a small program which varies the color temperature throughout the day and night. I started by matching it to the solar elevation, but ultimately I like it more just on a fixed schedule. I've also programmed it to make a more dramatic warm shift near bedtime, and to fade up a bedroom light when it's time to wake up. Due to the inevitability of scope c…

I've been wanting to build something like your light system. What smart lights do you use?

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

#355

Post by max10541 »

I've written many scripts and programs to make my life easier (and just for fun, really). Here are a few of my most used programs: - A service that constantly checks for freelancing/contract jobs that meet my list of criteria, then sends a desktop+phone push notifications for me to take a deeper look. - An automatic backup service that uses Borg and triggers when I connect my external hard drive to my computer. It handles all kinds of failures and knows how to organize my stuff too. - A savings and spending tracking and reporting dashboard, because I just couldn't find one that "clicks" with me.

I think most of my programs are just automating things I use regularly, but isn't that the point of software, really?

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

#357

Post by westoncb »

anotherevan wrote: post #340
westoncb wrote: post #333

I'd been dealing with an RSI issue for about six years and had largely given up programming because of it, seeing no way around—then had an idea for a new kind of code editor that would let me program with motion sensors instead of seated with mouse + keyboard: http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext Once I was far enough in I saw the tech could be generalized beyond my own personal use case (it is vaporware though,…

You may also be interested in Desktop Linux, without a keyboard, mouse or desk [0] presented by Shervin Emami at Linux.conf.au in 2020. I can't remember if that spoke directly to programming entirely by voice control, or it led me down the rabbit warren of other videos and resources. [0] https://youtu.be/3aQfwS5pyrg 43 mins

I didn't go the voice route because I'd read stories about people messing up their vocal chords that way—but it's something that could be looked into more closely for sure.

(This was also 2006 - 2012; the voice packages I tried then were rough, surely improved now. Then again, my RSI issues area nearly absent now :)

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

#358

Post by ahmedalsudani »

u2077 wrote: post #348
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twilio is the PBX and gateway for calls + texts. I run a server that lets me receive calls wherever I am (SIP or forwarding, as required) and send messages. Like a self-hosted Google Voice but more flexible and with a greater choice of numbers + forwarding destinations. All my server does is respond to HTTP requests from Twilio and send HTTP requests when I send a message. Somewhere in the Twilio interface, you can d…

Interested in making it open source? Self-hosted Google voice sounds awesome!

It's ugly and not user-friendly but I encourage you to play with Twilio! They make everything super easy.

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

#359

Post by brosciencecode »

kragen wrote: post #294
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'm confident that http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords.... produces passwords with precisely the expected entropy, and it's secure under Kerckhoffs's principle, so I don't mind sharing it. For the ones that consist of words, the wordlist I use is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/wordlist , the frequencies of the words that occur 5 times or more in the British National Corpus.…

Wouldn't a generator like this significantly increase risk of succumbing to dictionary attacks? I probably just don't understand part of what it's doing, but I'm curious.
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