Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn't always update the website regularly, and we'd find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we'd even seen them.

I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint and upsert the cat data into the database. Any new records would get posted to a twitter account (a free way to get notifications on my phone).

It worked beautifully, and when a black cat called "Fluff" popped up, we both knew he was the right one, and we were able to phone them and arrange a meeting before anyone else. Fast forward five years, and he's sitting next to me on the sofa right now, purring away.

https://github.com/alexpovel/srgn

It grew out of a niche, almost historical need: using a QWERTY keyboard, but needing access to German Umlauts (ä, ö, ü, as well as ß). Switching keyboard layouts is possible but exhausting (it's much more pleasant sticking to one); using modifier keys is similarly tedious, and custom setups break and aren't portable.

So this tool can do:

    $ echo 'Gruess Gott, Poeten und Abenteuergruetze!' | srgn --german
    Grüß Gott, Poeten und Abenteuergrütze!

A niche need I haven't yet come across someone else having as well! (just the amount of text explaining what it's all about is saying a lot in terms of specificity...)

The tool now grew into a tree-sitter based (== language grammar-aware) text manipulation thing, mostly for fun. The bizarre German core is still there however.

[0]: https://github.com/alexpovel/betterletter/blob/c19245bf90589...

I mostly code my own games with a target group of 1, my favourites are

http://lalo.li/lsd/

https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/

https://spinner.franzai.com/

https://dance.franzai.com/ (basically a lava lamp you can interact with)

from the app side i like

https://qrpwd.franzai.com/

coded to save my 2 factor backup codes qr encoded and encrypted in my photo stream

and

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/thisismy

a command line trim&copy&paste tool for files and webpages

Like every programmer before me, I created a to-do list app of course! However, as a programmer, I prefer trees to lists so I made a to-do tree app. I have been using it religiously every day since to manage all aspects of my life in a way that I couldn't previously with tools like Wunderlist (RIP) or didn't have the time to make work in this way like Notion.

Shockingly there aren't many other options out there for tree-based to-dos so when I posted it to my personal Twitter some people really liked it and started paying for it which turned my weekend project into more of a full-time side project.

As of today, I've been working on it for almost a year on and off and in fact yesterday I submitted my first iOS app to the app store for approval (a quick rejection but easily solvable!).

I think everyone should build their own to-do list app not least because it encourages you to actually use a to-do list app but also because I've learned so many interesting lessons from it along the way. Through this project, I've learned Svelte, iOS development with SwiftUI, lots of things about PWAs, and much more that is not easy to convey about engineering solutions.

You can find it at https://tatask.com if you're interested.

I've built a few apps which started out as tools for my own use and later polished + released for public.

- Cone: This started out as a small tool to help me identify the name of the colors of objects around me (i am a red-green colorblind). Now it's a full fledged color picker app with a Pantone license - https://cone.app

- CBVision: This is another small tool for colorblind people which shifts the problematic colors to a visible hue for easy differentiation - https://cbvisionapp.com/

- Unwind: I made this to help me with box-breathing - https://unwind.to

- LookAway: This is the latest app that I've created to help me with digital eye strain. - https://lookaway.app

I have something of an obsession with being able to search my digital history. To this end I've created a few projects which I still use almost daily:

- full text tabs forever [1]: chrome extension to provide full text search over web pages I've visited

- browser-gopher [2] (formerly browser parrot): collect browsing history from all browsers

- prompta [3]: a ChatGPT UI with full text search and some other niceties

[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/full-text-tabs-fore...

[2]: https://github.com/iansinnott/browser-gopher

[3]: https://github.com/iansinnott/prompta

edit: formatting

I've written a podcast ad blocker. I'm not based in the US but listen to a few podcasts from large US-based networks. They don't have any ad inventory to sell so instead they fill the slots with ads for other shows on their network and I end up hearing 7 copies of the same ad for the same true crime sludge in each podcast episode.

It works by fetching the XML feed, downloading the file and applying an open-source audio fingerprinting library to identify timestamps of the same segment repeated multiple times, using ffmpeg to delete all instances of repeated segments, and republishing a new XML feed that I then consume with a standard podcast app. It works surprisingly well.

I created several. The most recent: an Android app that lets you navigate any map, e.g. the one you just make a picture of: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.vanderplank...

I use this one myself: we like to take walks, and not always are the routes marked that clearly. Still only a handful of users, but usefull I guess for anyone that wished that e.g. Google maps made it possible to upload a picture to be laid upon the background map.

Earlier apps: 1 - the UNofficial Prezi Player app. Used in 56 countries, it relied upon a hack to be able to play a prezi on an Android phone or tablet. Was quite succesfull, untill of course Prezi made an official Android app of their own. (Actually: demonstrated it to Prezi and they asked nicely to make sure no one would think it was official)

2 - a ‘fixer’ of Prezi’s. This was in the time that Prezi’s could become ‘corrupt’ as one of the elements was to small such that the code would give a ‘divided by zero’ problem. I fixed a lot of these errors by hand, before I made a (paid) service, and before that a java program that fixed this by going into an XML file, finding the smallest item, and enlarging it. (Am very happy with Prezi by the way, was invited (but declined in the end) to join them for a hackathon in Budapest, was made their first ‘prezi champion of the month’, and they gifted me a life long licence for their software).

3 - I do have another app - LetsDoThis - but this one is different: it did not scratch one of my own itches, but that of my eldest daughter: she wanted to ‘swipe’ away choices like one can on Tinder. This app never really went of (my daughter did not come through on her promise to market it among her fellow students;-0

(Edit: added ‘1’ ‘2’ etc)

I've created a Mac OS app that shows a progress bar 5 pixels tall and 100% the with of the screen when complete, it's always on top of any window.

It's a menu bar app, so you click on the icon and there are a few options.

- You can choose how long will take for the bar to complete, 1, 5, 10... ( I have hardcoded all minutes in intervals of 5 minutes up to 1h :D ).

- Choose a color. - Choose the sound it will make at the end, the options are the standard mac sounds.

Additionally:

- Choose screen to video capture your work.

The idea is to have a pomodoro app that helps with time blindness and time perception, having a constant reminder, it's a bit video game like if you can image.

The video capture feature it's a kind of self accountability and documentation. It's also useful to resume work where you left.

I was annoyed by Wikipedia's noisy design choices, so I built a very scaled down read-friendly mirror of Wikipedia that presents the text as though it was a book, doing away with inline links. It's desktop-first as I don't really use mobile browsers, my fingers are too big.

https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Hacker_News

I created adult entertainment apps to organize and have fun with images and videos:

- RuGiVi: https://github.com/pronopython/rugivi - Browse your collection of images on an endless screen. Tested with more than 700.000 images at once!

- Fapel System: https://github.com/pronopython/fapel-system - Organize your adult images and videos by just using hardlinks and directories.

- TopZemen: https://github.com/pronopython/topzemen - Let the images float on your screen or rain down next to your browser window.

- Fplyr: https://github.com/pronopython/fplyr - An audio player to play moaning sounds in the background.

Everything for Ubuntu Linux and in parts also for Windows!

Sioyek: a PDF viewer optimized for reading research papers and textbooks. https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek

It has a lot of niche features, but my favorite is the ability to preview or jump to references even when they are not linked in the PDF file.

I wrote something on Android a few years back called Reward-o-matic. Basically every time one of the kids did something really good, you pressed a button next to their name and a counter went up by £0.50. At the end of the month that got added to their pocket money as a bonus.

Both the app and the idea worked pretty well.

The chore wheel [1], which my wife and I used to run on an old iPad to track evening chores. It uses local storage for recurring chores and one-off reminders. We tried a bunch of other tools but they were all too full featured or slow to ooperate. It replaced a paper list.

When debugging network issues I realized I was going back and forth between my computer, router, and cables under the desk. I created an audible network check [2] so I could just listen to hear the status.

[1] https://alexsci.com/chore-wheel/

[2] https://alexsci.com/web-audible-ping/

https://font2png.com to browse font-icons and export them as PNG, with background/foreground color. Usually you want SVG, but sometimes a PNG is better. I use it mostly to generate quick favicons. It was also fun to make it work completely client side with canvas.

https://github.com/combatwombat/rmdb imports the IMDb database (at least the limited .tsv files they provide) into MySQL so you can query it. List the highest rated horror movies of the 90s, genre distribution by year etc. I made that mostly to c̶h̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶ help with https://www.reddit.com/r/GuessTheMovie, with limited success. Still fun though to SQL-query over all movies ever made.

An algorithmic trading platform. I ran it successfully for a couple years with my own capital alone before opening it up to others (https://grizzlybulls.com). It's been quite successful compared to the S&P 500 since launching publicly in Jan 2022. Performance of our various models vs. the benchmark below:

SPX (benchmark): -3.31%

VIX TA Macro MP Extreme: +29.91%

VIX TA Macro Advanced: +23.08%

VIX TA Advanced: +3.42%

VIX Advanced: -0.67%

Vix: -4.18%

TA MR: +10.12%

TA T: +2.3%

I created https://a.foo a while ago which just summarizes URLs for me. Like, if I don't have time to read an article or something, I just pop 'a.foo' in front of the URI and it gives me a quick rundown. EDIT: semi worried it'll go down now that I've posted it here but meh.

I couldn't find an app that has clean UI and also doesn't collect any data for FIRE calculation, therefore I developed my own app and also put it into the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firecalc-early-retirement-age/...

Also, developed another app to reduce my Twitter usage. The reason why I created this one is that even though there a lot of Safari Extensions out there, they can access to your Safari history but the app that I've developed can't because it is just a content blocker: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/not-for-me/id6451205605

GDO: Garage door Opener, a passkey enabled web interface to trigger opening my garage door. It's basically just a 2 button website, 1 button opens and closes the door with a delay, the other just opens/closes the door. It uses a passkey auth proxy which allows me to toggle user access.

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

Infinite clipboard history. Want to remember something? just copy to clipboard. I compress the logs yearly.

https://littlerbooks.com is where I summarize popular nonfiction books into bullet points so I can remember what I learned better.

https://rate.house is a user generated media database. It's like IMDb but also has music, literature, video games, and podcasts.

https://newsasfacts.com provides the most important news around the world concisely.

https://wordhoot.com is a word guessing game inspired by Wordle featuring multiplayer, unlimited plays, and detailed playing history/stats.

I like using my E-Reader to read things, and often "things" will be articles on the web.

But I also like making annotations and like the reading app I use (KOReader) quite a lot, so firing up a browser would hurt the experience.

So I made a script that turns websites into cleaned-up epub files that get synced over to my E-Reader:

https://github.com/solarkraft/webpub

It's deliberately engineered just far enough to be good enough for my use case :-)

I was annoyed at how parasitic recruiters started contacting me about jobs in crypto, so i spent the last year building a fully automated job board that ingests all job data automatically and structures it using openai, while also enriching it with relevant company financials to combat information asymmetry. I’m now using it to find my next job :)

Check it out at: https://jobstash.xyz

I didn’t like the unwieldiness of existing planning poker apps so I’ve built one for my team over the weekend - https://estim8.pro/ Built on Elixir Phoenix LiveView, was a great little side project.

Fun topic! These days I build everything for myself, then publish and see if someone else is interested (mostly not :-)

First thing I built, when I started doing full-stack stuff: https://pushdata.io It's a super simple time series data storage. You don't even have to register an account, just do "curl -X POST https://pushdata.io/youremail@yourdomain.com/temperature/47" and you've stored your first value. I use it a lot to log various stats about all the things I've built, like user signups or whatnot.

Then I wanted to create simple crosswords with image clues to help my kids learn to read. That resulted in a crossword generator backend and a simple game: https://puzzlepirate.net

Puzzle pirate is great, but I wanted to print the crosswords on paper also, so I slapped together https://crosswordcomputer.com. The UI is rather ugly (like Pushdata) but you can create pretty cool crosswords for kids with it.

Then I wanted to create more flexible shields.io so I created https://supershields.io - basically a shields.io but with programmable (in Lua) logic for the shields you create. I'm not using it myself anymore though so not maintaining it very well and it seems there is something funny with the Lua execution right now. It is using AWS Lambda servers to run Lua scripts, perhaps they're not firing as they should or something. If someone wants to use it, get in touch and I'll see if I can get the Lua execution operational again :)

I also wanted to backup private photos and videos from household phones to a USB memory on a local storage server (Raspberry Pi) and then have that server automatically back everything to the public cloud but encrypted (as I don't trust public cloud providers to keep my data safe forever). I couldn't find a good solution for this, so I wrote some shell scripts that do the trick: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/savethepictures

My daughter was playing Minecraft too much, on our own server, and I created a small Python program to enforce "screen time" in Minecraft: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/mctimer

I once needed to simulate broken DHCP clients and couldn't find a good tool to do so, so I wrote "dhcptool": https://github.com/ragnarlonn/dhcptool

All of these taught me a lot, especially the later forays into full-stack development after having been pretty much clueless about frontend stuff for a long time (still clueless but at least I can create ugly UIs now).

My son's school has a spelling bee (spelling competition) next month. I made a simple web app to make it easy to practice spelling the 450 words on the 'study list':

Version with all 450 words: https://simplespell.netlify.app/

Version with the easy words removed: https://dev2--simplespell.netlify.app/

I got an idea for game mechanic I wanted to test and ended up learning bit of Godot to try it out.

https://flopblock.com/

I moved to Berlin for the art scene. When trying to research galleries to visit or catch up on new exhibits, the number of bad websites was overwhelming. Over 300 sites to slog through. It took a long time just to navigate all the GDPR consents, newsletter asks, splash videos, and broken links. They also don't post their own address in many cases. So, I built a list of galleries from 3 different directories and came up with a master list of 353 art gallery websites. I created a Puppeteer script that snapshots every site on Sunday morning and then an enrichment script gathers current metadata from the Google Maps API. There were some growing pains and problems with encodings that nuked Puppeteer. Also, some CDNs were aggressive and blocked the requests. Over a few months I worked through all the issues as a small side project after work. Now it works perfectly. It's an easy way to see the vibe of the Berlin art scene in a single page app.

https://berlinartgalleries.de/

I have a litany of scripts and programs but those that reached moderate complexity are:

1. A script to canonicalize the name of PDF statements from financial institutions and sort them into a directory structure

2. A CLI (not TUI, actual CLI with custom command syntax and read line integration) for a 3rd party todo service with 2 way sync that gets synchronized with the app on ny iPhone.

3. A web app that I self host that allows me to estimate availability of bicycles at the bike share stations near where I live or where I am and availability of docks in the places that I want to go or I typically go, because I could not deal with a crowded slow loading map in the app.

Nothing public, but I’ve moved from tech into driving trucks, and I wrote a small website I use daily to track my working hours, rest, payslips, mileage and weight - so far it’s been about 3 months since I’ve had to make any code changes

I made a couple of things for myself recently.

I’d been unwillingly paying for LA fitness for around 6 months but the only way to cancel was to send certified mail so I released bye bye fitness last week to do it from home and was my own first customer https://byebyefitness.com

Last year I made stream switcher because I use Apple Music and my girlfriend uses Spotify. We send songs back and forth a lot and she couldn’t easily listen to the links I’d share. My app is an iMessage extension that shows your recently played Apple Music songs and allows you to search for and send Spotify links within the messages app https://kevindiem.com/stream-switcher

I built a website for box breathing: https://box-breathing.com

It is basically a timer for your breathing exercises, as the idea is that you inhale and exhale slowly, hold your breath in between, each step lasting 4 seconds.

I tried to make it as simple as possible, and to make it usable with old devices as well.

I always send myself messages as bookmarks, notrs, and general "here's an idea I might want to come back to later". It's an awful system when it comes to discoverability (I do it in Messenger so search is... bad), but I still do it as it's the most convinient option at the moment when I need to store that something somewhere.

So I built a simple Telegram bot which automatically stores anything I send as a text embedding into a vector database, and allows me to search over it in that same chat (same process that powers the AI Q&A assistants these days).

If I post a link, it automatically scrapes it and stores text as chunks for better search, extracts text from youtube videos (still wip), turns images into text with the visual models, etc.

One thing I'm unhappy about is not being able to easily edit any notes I search for later, but it's miles ahead of my previous "system". Hopefully I can open source this when I clean it up - if anyone is interested, let me know.

Slightly ashamed to admit that I built an online exam cheating tool using pytesseract/tkinter/ChatGPT and ShareX.

I won't go into complete detail but it works like this.

-> Define area to be screenshotted using ShareX

-> Set ShareX auto-capture feature to screenshot defined area every 30sec (in my case, the area where the question and answer choices will be)

-> Using pytesseract, parse the image and retrieve the parsed text.

-> Make API call to ChatGPT using the parsed text with the temperature param set as low as possible along with instructions for it to return the correct answer as a series of dot(s)

A = .

B = ..

C = ...

D = ....

This is done in order for it to appear as inconspicuous as possible and not draw any attention from the exam proctor.

This is also done along with setting the tool ui and text to be almost exactly the same color as the exam progress bar so that I can hide the response within the bar. (the tool window is absolutely tiny)

There's more that goes into it but I'm only using this tool since I'm busy trying to get a degree to better my chances of getting another software job with all these insane layoffs and only 2 YoE (got laid off months ago)

I created a note-taking app which works in every* browser, with and without JS and CSS, has bookmarklets for clipping, PKI-backed user accounts, completely portable data format, threaded conversations, completely auditable data structure, labeling, queryable with SQLite, web of trust for the user identities, and support for adding and running code.

* Mosaic has issues, and I have not tested on many pre-Mosaic browsers. I've never tested with WorldWideWeb. I've done extensive testing with Netscape and IE. Older versions of Chrome are extremely flaky for some reason, and often don't even run. Most old and retro browsers work, however, including sessions, posting, voting, etc.

I created this website (https://unexploredhq.com/) to find unexplored places for travel with my SO. Instead of going to cliched places like Paris in France, I can input an area or region and then select attributes of this place (eg Sunny, Beach, Mountains) .. and see the list of places which satisfy my constraints. In future, I plan to integrate a Flight API so that I can add a constraint of finding places within a budget.

I am a ML researcher/engineer at heart, so building out the attributes by scraping the web was straightforward (have over 26000 locations indexed). But learn React as a hobby (with help from ChatGPT) to build this :)

https://stockevents.app

I created it originally for myself. By now it has a few hundred thousand users.

GUI: Long ago, wrote a HN app for linux users that lived in the system tray (https://github.com/captn3m0/hackertray) because I thought that might be faster.

WEB: I wrote a news app (plain-text website) that provides byte-sized news and optimizes for skimmability (https://news.tatooine.club/).

API: I needed to import indian mutual fund data into beancount, so I wrote up an API (https://mf.captnemo.in/) and wrote a small beancount plugin for that uses it.

CLI: I wanted to download songs from youtube, but they were often stitched as complete albums - so I wrote a youtube-cue generator that generates cuesheets that can then be used to split and tag the yt-dlp downloaded audio file. (https://github.com/captn3m0/youtube-cue)

Calcula - https://calcula.cubicle6.com/ - simple spreedsheet and JavaScript REPL mashup.

FFuzion CAD - https://ffuzion-cad.cubicle6.com/ - small CSG (constructive solid geometry) CAD app that uses a Lisp variant for defining geometries. Can export to STL for 3D printing.

StationKeeper - https://station-keeper.cubicle6.com/ - a space station construction toy inspired by Townscaper.

Send - https://send.cubicle6.com/ - a rough-around-the-edges web-based alternative to AirDrop for getting files from a Windows machine to my iPhone.

Studium - https://studium.cubicle6.com/luke/1 - a minimal web-based Bible reader that uses GPT to extract place from the current chapter and render them on a map. Just started working on this one, so it lacks polish.

"pw" a simple perl script that prints a random password. default length is 16 chars but if I do "pw 8" it will return an 8 char password

I use it all the time, at least a few times a week.

I wrote it because the secure passwords generated by iOS and various password managers are overkill for most purposes and extremely hard to type out by hand to an airgapped destination

Many of them!

I've blocked reddit and now rely on getting the top updates from the niche communities I care about: https://redditletter.com

There were no "declarative" sourdough bread recipe calculator, so I built one: https://breadfriend.com. All other recipe generators are based on entering the amount of flour and water -- but what you're (usually) caring about is the ratio % and total dough size.

I was curious when I could get Vitamin D from the sun where I live, and started fiddling with sun angles and created: https://whencanigetvitamind.com.

I created an app for tracking buses in Wellington NZ - I use it every day and I love it. I always meant to publicise it widely, but to be honest it works perfectly for me and I can't be bothered dealing with issues specific to other people.

I created an open source library that turns structured text data (YAML) in a Git repository on the fly into a GraphQL API with CRUD queries / mutations.

All that is needed in the repository is a plain text GraphQL schema file that defines what the data structures look like. The Git repository itself can be located on GitHub, GitLab, or in the local filesystem.

https://github.com/commitspark/graphql-api

A Pomodoro timer because I figured for such a simple app I could make one myself that I can adjust to what I want it to be.

CheckYourList.app for routine checklists.

A now discontinued Woolworths (Aussie grocery store) price alert per product when I used to bulk buy for my online chocolate business.

A personal note taking app, focused on capturing hashtagged notes quickly into markdown files which I may release publicly one day.

Beeptestwatch.com to do beep tests without sound from my Apple Watch

Autounsubscribe.me to clean up my inbox.

Getfive.app as an attempt to limit my infinite todo lists.

Some of these apps I released as products, but they all start as an app I built for myself.

Recently I have started started working on an offline Traditional Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese dictionary software for the desktop. I have been studying Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese for a few years now, two years of those in Taiwan at a language center and it has always bugged me that most Chinese dictionary software is

1. mainly focused on Simplified Chinese as it is spoken in Mainland China and Traditional Chinese/the Taiwanese variant is just an afterthought

2. mobile-/tablet-only

3. a website which requires access to the internet/doesn't integrate well with a traditional desktop-first workflow, or

4. only has Chinese to English, but no monolingual definitions which are preferable for advanced learners

Thus I have decided to take things into my own hands and started developing the Traditional Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese dictionary I have always wished for that caters perfectly to my way of studying and my personal workflow. I've been dog-fooding it for a few weeks now and it feels great to finally have a tool that makes my studying routine more enjoyable and smoother!

Link to the dictionary source code: https://github.com/HalfAnAvocado/willow

These are the things I've created, some mostly for my own use, and others just for fun:

1. https://gptgames.io - A gaming platform using OpenAI. It came from a silly idea for another project I have, and I ended up putting it together in 1 month.

2. https://creepyface.io - I wanted to animate my face on my resume, and I decided to allow everyone else to do the same.

3. https://react-guitar.com - I wanted to learn guitar theory and tell me a better way to do it than coding a react component :D

4. https://github.com/4lejandrito/fetchbook - I wanted to organize my http requests at work without depending on postman or anything else.

5. https://github.com/4lejandrito/next-plausible - Since I started using Plausible analytics on all my sites, I found the need of reusing some code.

I hope you find any of these interesting!

I made WebRelay as an alternative to Ngrok. It supports TCP, HTTPs tunnels and allows the user to create a lightweight overlay network to access remote services using local ports. https://docs.webrelay.dev/

I built my own Replit-like web app called Dock'n'Roll powered by Docker to write quick web apps in any language and quickly host them in isolated containers on a subdomain of my domain (*.varunbiniwale.com)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nITIMrND0Z0

Using it, I can quickly build up tiny apps and have them online reliably, eg. I use https://yourip.varunbiniwale.com/ while looking for vulnerabilities.

I protected the admin panel for `dockn` with my own nginx auth proxy (https://auth.varun.ch), which lets me control user account access and rate limiting for all my self hosted websites in a central place.

I created a small template manager that really simplified my work in 1st/2nd line IT support.

I originally intended it to be much more and planned to add API integrations for the variables, but I changed jobs pretty soon after deploying the current version and didn't find much use for it.

https://github.com/tcalik/temper

https://temperhelper.surge.sh/

The Logfile Navigator (https://lnav.org) - A logfile viewer for the terminal. Have used it just about every work day for the past decade and a half.

For our first child in 2011, we were struggling to agree on a name, so I created a baby names app that tried to learn the kinds of names you liked, based on sounds, meanings, origins etc. It was my first real attempt at any sort of machine learning, and while we eventually reverted to the much simpler algorithm of my wife putting her foot down, I decided to package it up and launch it on the Mac app store. It was briefly the number one lifestyle app in the UK, and could more or less pay for its own Google Ads, but I killed it off when sandboxing started to make NSDocument based apps break. Some screenshots survive:

https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-1.png

https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-2.png

https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-3.png

https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-4.png

https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-5.png

I’ve built hyperfocus.health to fit all my needs while coding: unskippable eye breaks, CSV time-tracking and micro-tasking.

It’s available on macOS in the App Store. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperfocus-2/id1621523525?mt=1...

Built Pgweb (Postgres GUI) some time ago since I could not find a good minimalistic database explorer.

https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb

The app is super simple, made with Go + jQuery and I still use it almost every day, and has brought it to every single company I've been with.

I was actively trading cryptocurrencies a few years ago. All the fun died at tax time. Thousands of transactions across several exchanges and currencies, manual calculation of capital gains was out of the question.

At the time, I recall finding one or two tools on GH, none of which seemed suitable. There was also a 3rd party service for calculating tax which integrated with exchanges, but it didn't sit well with me for privacy reasons.

Eventually I felt I had no choice but to build a tool to calculate capital gains from an input CSV of transactions. I wanted to keep it simple, so it puts the burden on the user to download transactions from exchanges and get them in the correct format, which it then processes.

I finally submitted some very late tax returns, and the tax office was kind enough to withdraw the late interest penalty after I explained the effort involved.

https://github.com/dleber/capitalg

A lot of the YouTube channels I watch fit perfectly into the audio-only podcast format.

So I made a little script using youtube-dl that turns YouTube channels or playlists into RSS feeds for consumption in podcast apps. It gets rid of so much of the noise that makes consuming media on the platform itself a pain.

It's more or less deliberately crappy because I spent just enough work on it for it to be useful to me and intentionally avoided over-engineering so that I'd just get it done. The plan is to make it nicer, but I haven't gotten around to it so far.

https://github.com/solarkraft/ytdl-podcast

1. https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space Space Nerds in Space, a multiplayer starship bridge simulator for linux

2. Gneutronica, a MIDI drum machine program https://github.com/smcameron/gneutronica

3. gaseous-giganticus a program to generate textures for gas giant planets https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus

4. explodomatica, a program to generate "explosion noises" by filtering white noise https://github.com/smcameron/explodomatica

5. note-driller a simple program to drill guitar fretboard notes and chord shapes https://github.com/smcameron/note-driller

6. wordwarvi a side-scrolling shoot-em-up similar to Defender, Stargate, and Scramble https://github.com/smcameron/wordwarvi

7. cosmic-space-boxinator a program (in the Processing language) to create sky-boxes for my space game, Space nerds in space https://github.com/smcameron/cosmic-space-boxinator

I don't like having my 2FA codes on my phone and I don't want to trust any cloud 2FA managers or closed-source solutions. I couldn't find anything open source so I made a simple CLI tool that utilises a popular Go OTP library. In combination with pass, which maintains the state (ie. the 2FA secret key), I now have an open source solution I can trust:

https://github.com/sirodoht/frank

When it became clear many major email providers were going to require OAuth for IMAP/POP/SMTP access, I was pretty frustrated that I’d have to stop using clients/scripts that didn’t support this method.

Rather than spending lots of effort on migration, or switching clients entirely, I made a local proxy so that any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client can be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether it supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy. No need for your client to know about OAuth at all.

I made wirehub.org[1] because I needed a way to setup a WireGuard VPN without giving out my private keys to anyone. Yeah I could self host an open source solution, but where's the fun in that? :p

[1] https://wirehub.org

https://gorby.app - Just a word counting/text analyzing app. It started as a potential porfolio project and at some point I decided to turn it into something others could use too. I don't think it has any features that can't be found elsewhere, but I'd say it turned out pretty decent. I'm aware that it could look a bit better on mobile, so I plan to improve that.

If anyone would like to try "pro" features, please feel free to send me an email and I'll give you a code. Feedback is more than welcome! :)

I have a reactive dog. She used to be a street dog so she doesn't take kindly to other dogs -- but get this -- only when on the street; in the park she's perfectly fine.

We have been doing months and months of training and she has improved a lot but occasionally regresses. If I could record the data I could potentially see some trends.

I've been recording each dog interaction in a spreadsheet but that quickly got cumbersome and required me to remember each interaction first and then remember to log it at a later point. This lead(s) to a lot of missed data.

So I'm putting together a simple app that will allow me to log the entry on my phone with a couple of taps and eventually generate charts, etc.

https://microphonestudio.app

I’ve built an app that connects multiple phones together wirelessly and records audio with all of their microphones simultaneously. Once you finish recording all the recorded audio tracks are immediately available on all the phones for full-mix playback.

If you aim for the best, studio quality, you can attach any professional microphone to the phone, too.

Should be a nice tool for musicians/bands, podcasters, filmmakers. I’ve created it because I wanted to be able to record my band rehearsals. Handheld recording devices or single mobile phone did not cut it and studio space or equipment was not available or too expensive.

Recording with multiple microphones (multi-track recording) is how you typically record in a recording studio to achieve best quality. The app allows you to do just that but without expensive studio equipment (mixing console, audio interfaces, DAWs, computer, etc.). Also the time to get the full mix that you can play and share is cut almost to zero.

A browser based controller for the LEGO Duplo train using the Web Bluetooth API. It works best on mobiles in portrait mode and you can find it here: https://legotrain.netlify.app/

The source is a single HTML file that also contains the JS. Just view source and modify if you're interested in taking this further. What's cool is that the protocol allows you to receive readings from the train and not just send commands. Also, it allows you to drive the train faster than you can via the official mobile app.

I've created a mobile proxy pool for a personal project of web scraping real estate data: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Then, I expanded the infrastructure and built a web scraping API on top of it: https://scrapingfish.com

20+ years ago I created a pretty famous news aggregator called Popurls with the intention to simply clean up my RSS reader. Fast forward I'm still doing with, now with Mark Cuban as investor (https://biztoc.com)

I got fed up with using loads of different apps to keep track of my flights while doing long term traveling trips so made a simple site to track them using the AirLabs free API.

GitHub: https://github.com/PaulSinghDev/personal-flight-tracker

Public site: https://personal-flight-tracker.vercel.app/no-key

https://github.com/m5r/shellphone.app

I was halfway across the world when I needed to make a lot of phone calls to my bank back home. So I pulled up Twilio's docs and built this app to make phone calls and send SMS from anywhere.

I tried monetizing it by selling it to digital nomads but this kind of problem is not recurring enough or painful enough to justify them paying for it So I ended up open sourcing it

I started to learn to swim and one of my main issue is breathing.

Well it is easy for everyone who learned it as a kid, but for me that was the hardest part.

So I wrote an app to practice breathing daily. Actually, it is not finished, but still WIP. I write a daily log about it: [0]

If you want to try it out or are in the same boat: [1]

[0] https://kiru.io/blog/posts/2023/advent-of-app/ [1] https://testflight.apple.com/join/p4YTTKZY

Tool for easily transferring files between my devices. https://filepush.kevincox.ca/. Blog post about the implementation: https://kevincox.ca/2022/11/02/decentralized-via-webpush/

RSS-to-Email service https://feedmail.org/

Tool for identifying grids in D&D map images https://gridfinder.kevincox.ca/

A solver for the Ricochet Robots board game https://ricochetrobots.kevincox.ca/

A tool for quickly picking a first player when playing board games: https://playerone.kevincox.ca/

I made a guitar tuner iOS app!

I didn't particularly like existing options and it was a fun way to learn some Swift/SwiftUI/AudioKit, all of which are outside the typical programming I do for work (Julia). It was also a great experience to "launch" a product. I sell a few units per month so it also nets me a hilariously small passive income.

https://oneclicktuner.com

I built a micro-journaling app many years ago to help me get better at being emotionally honest with myself and I think I answered "How do I feel?" and "what's happening?" maybe 4,000 times over a 4 year period. I didn't maintain it and so it fell apart (but might want to revitalize it) but the demo still works: www.ifeelio.com

I also started recording audio reflection drills to help me get better at saying how I felt and dealing with emotional conflict. Those are available at www.emoko.fit

I'm sharing these mostly in case others find benefit in them as well. And if you do, I'd love to hear about it :-)

A couple of them:

Quick access for Fastmail Masked Emails (I use both, iCloud' Hide My Mail and Fastmail's Masked Email, so I needed something for Fastmail as well): https://apps.apple.com/lt/app/secret-inbox/id6462335670

Too Many Records: returns 3 records from my Discogs collections: https://apps.apple.com/lt/app/too-many-records/id6449257927

Using https://wwebjs.dev/ to read my whatsapp messages, redis for storage/interop, and a script written for https://github.com/matryer/xbar for a "GUI", instead of running WhatsApp Desktop / WhatsApp Web on my machine (very bad for my attention), I have a status bar icon saying when did I last get a message from my wife, and the text of the last few messages.

I made my own reverse proxy server that is auto configured by clients calling the API instead of editing a config file. I guess I didn't feel like learning nginx configs.

It's cool I've been using it a couple years now and one of my friends uses it too https://github.com/fsmv/daemon

Here's a couple of web audio things I have worked on and not really shared with anyone. They will both work best in Chrome.

https://303-gen-06a668.netlify.app - A tool to generate randomised 303 acid loops (Chrome only)

https://metronic-studio-0d0680.netlify.app - Unfinished web daw project started a few years ago

I did several small projects for me and my family:

- https://consumebefore.jose.gr/ to keep track of when the food expires once opened

- https://markdowntable.jose.gr/ generates markdown tables with a link to edit the table

- https://mazes.jose.gr is a simple maze generator. It never got traction inside my family, so I didn't invest much time in adding features.

- https://bookmarklet.jose.gr/ a bookmarklet generator

- https://docmati.com/ I did this for a friend and tried to productize it without much success

- https://keepthis.site/ is just for me but open to everyone. It would be cool if it gets some traction, but I know there are several alternatives, and it lacks some basic features.

I made a tool to generate command line clients from OpenAPI definitions out of pure frustration from trying to stitch together incantations of curl commands to work with APIs.

I haven't revisited it in a while, and the docs could probably do with some love, but I use it every day.

[1] https://github.com/bcoughlan/openapi-commander

A Kanban board - https://nullboard.io/preview

A GIF screen recorder - https://iobureau.com/ugiffer

A calorie/food tracker - https://i.imgur.com/bSFBFcE.png

It was easier to write exactly what I needed than to try and adapt to existing options.

substrackr.com - track subscriptions

xpensetrackr.com - track expenses

https://fullcalendar-test.vercel.app/ - minimal journal to log my exercises

I'm making Snapress[0] as a way to stay connected with family & friends in my upcoming travels. It instantly prints a picture on my family and friends' printers as soon as I take it. Just need a raspberry pi or spare computer to run it.

I like to think about it as a Polaroid where the camera and printer are on opposite ends of the world.

[0] https://snapress.com

A really simple keyboard driven reminder tool for macOS:

https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember

I’ve been using it every single day since I wrote it.

Pretty early on in my time writing software, I built a screenshot hosting web app and a tool for deploying static websites on subdomains of my site from the command line. I still use them very regularly, and they were excellent projects for learning full stack web dev.

I can run `atu file.png` and have a link to it copied to my clipboard a second later. I added options for creating secret URLs, auto-deleting after time or after views, and other features like that.

For the subdomain hoster (I named it phost), I can run `phost create subdomain directory` and the directory will be uploaded and served on `subdomain.mysite.com`. I have commands for updating and deleting as well, and versioning built in.

It's extremely useful for quickly deploying little demos or one-off projects without having to commit to set anything up on a cloud console or edit NGINX config files.

I was inspired by Hey.com’s screener feature but I didn’t want to move my existing Gmail accounts, so I created one for myself: https://app.inboxhero.org/

The idea is first-time senders will be moved out of your inbox and you will get a screener to manually whitelist/blacklist them.

Am now trying to productize it, my thesis is emails will becoming even spammier now that LLMs can pass the Turing test, so a feature like this will be key to restore sanity to your inbox.

I built a tool to generate fake data in various formats to help with testing pipelines at previous gig, nowadays I use it when trying out ideas. It was originally CLI only, but I added a Web interface running at: https://zefaker.labs.zikani.me/

I also created a library to help me fill in (random, again!) data on web forms: https://github.com/zikani03/ika

I wanted a better dashboard for my Tesla solar/battery system: https://www.netzeroapp.io/

I've created Mikochi (https://github.com/zer0tonin/Mikochi) for myself. It's a file manager for your personal server / NAS, that also allows you to stream files to VLC/MPV.

Before creating Mikochi, I used to access my collection of movies through Jellyfin. Jellyfin has a really nice UI and does a ton of things like adding metadata, but I didn't use those things. I also didn't use their in-browser video player because it didn't work with H265. In addition to that, I wanted to easily manage the files without having to switch to sftp. Mikochi lets me easily create, delete, rename, download, and upload files (or whole directories).

As a bonus, it only requires 26MB of RAM to run on my server.

I've just published https://zekefinance.com, it started as a personal app to handle investments, dividends and taxes, for the Brazilian Stock Market (B3), for myself and family members.

It supports company shares, real state funds, BDRs (Brazilian Depository Receipts) and day-trade with future contracts.

The main motivation was the taxes management (annual income taxes and 'darfs') as this things can be complicated considering the rules of swing-trade, day-trade, profit, losses and excemptions around here.

It was also a personal learning experience in Android development(Kotlin and Jetpack Compose) and Supabase (big fan of it).

In the end, it took me 2 years doing it on my spare time and as I was kept adding features, I decided to published it as well, since I don't know good alternatives (most people don't know how to do taxes in Brazil).

Any feedbacks are much appreciated.

I created https://inthenexthouriwill.vercel.app/ to keep myself accountable on school assignments!

I initially created Npkill (https://npkill.js.org) for my own use because as a web developer I was always running out of disk space. When we launched it quickly became popular because it seems that not only we had that problem and today it is the most popular tool for that purpose.

Another one I launched was Pill Reminder (https://zaldih.github.io/pill-reminder/). If you are taking something for a cold or medical treatment it allows you to easily swipe and note down when you have taken your medication and lets you know when you are due to take it next.

ScrollTabs (https://github.com/zaldih/scrolltabs-extension) was born so soon after I migrated from chrome to firefox years ago and I missed being able to switch between tabs with the mouse scroll.

+ many others that I would like to prepare and make public for the future.

I built BeHabit! for me and my family. It's a simple 7x7 habit-tracking board.

https://behabit.xyz

For my little girls I built https://www.howdoyousayit.rodeo to practice English vocabulary.

In the past, I built Pegao.co, a bookmark to share public lists of links, but I've shut it down.

I wrote a simple Kubernetes operator for renewing AWS container registry (ECR) credentials in several namespaces. The credentials expire every 12h, and the Kubernetes secret for pulling the images from ECR need to be renewed whenever a workload is to be created/updated. The operator takes care of renewing the Kubernetes secret every 12h in all the configured namespaces: https://github.com/zak905/kube-ecr-secrets-operator

TLDR: https://github.com/ja-he/dayplan is a TUI calendar planning/time tracking tool I made.

Early in my University time I always felt most productive when sketching out my day in Google calendar, then keeping up with that plan and if necessary, adjusting it. For a long time I was envisioning something that would allow me to follow that workflow but without the browser window or telling Google my plans, ideally in the terminal, ideallyer something as nice to use as Vim.

When I sat down to learn Go I decided to make that my project and, although messy, it's become my longest-running (though sporadically developed) personal project.

Realistically, I wouldn't suggest anybody use this except to try it, but for myself it is really useful and a fun project to tinker with sometimes.

The outgrowth of an overburdened spreadsheet, I made a task management system in Elm specifically designed for recurring, non-urgent tasks: https://www.lunartasks.com

Cppaper: https://github.com/Yrds/cppaper

A static site/blog generator written in c++.

I initially made it with markdown support for my blog but latter I've added also templates based on json for another project.

Fed up with copying and pasting information between different sources (spreadsheets, word processor documents, PDFs), and loathe to put on the straitjacket of an ERP, I created the following web apps and APIs that we use daily:

1) Product data management system that generates 7-digit product codes based on the product category hierarchy and in a way that minimizes the probability of typos leading to picking the wrong product items, plus bundling of items. Data managed in NocoDB and exported into CSV and ODS.

2) Product information view and search system using FastAPI and HTMX (for live search), with an async file watcher that triggers a re-loading of the data in the CSV from (1) whenever it's written anew, and provides simple views, tables, and GET endpoints for querying, as well as a parameter "xml=True" to make the data loadable using LibreOffice's FILTERXML(WEBSERVICE(...)) functions. Also, it calculates bundle prices, displays stock quantities from (3), and fetches relevant invoice lines from (4).

3) Inventory view and search system in the same vein as (2), but the data store is an ODS spreadsheet we edit by hand whenever stock quantities change (up or down, either way). Also provides GET endpoints, just like (2)

4) Invoice view and search system in the same vein as (3), in that the data store is an ODS spreadsheet in which we store invoice and invoice position information (together with pivot-table sheets). Again, it also provides GET endpoints.

5) Company information system that polls the EU VIES database and my country's SOAP API for company information, stores it together with the NACE codes as JSON in an SQLite database, plus provides fields such as notes, customer number, etc., all editable using HTMX. Also provides GET endpoints and the ability to filter the set of companies by criteria such as NACE code, location, company age, etc.

6) Quotation generation tool that provides a GET endpoint and uses (1) and (5) to generate print-to-PDF-ready quotations styled with Bootstrap5, plus generate a downloadable ODT file (using relatorio), and in any case generates/embeds a QR code with an order-tracking URL on the bottom-right corner of every page of the quotation, whether printed or ODT-ed.

7) Order status tracking/display frontend in FastAPI that uses the ULID-based URL of quotations generated with (6) and pulls order status data from a Django backend (I used Django-admin to save time on building web UI). Example: https://track.tectra.gr/01H0-WAR-Y2W

8) (WIP) Automatic pricing recommendation API that uses information from some of the above to generate quotation price recommendation based on historical price levels per customer and segment, customer engagement patterns from invoices, etc.

Other than that:

9) A python script that takes my photos from 2001, and uses darknet-yolov3 to generate a list of detected objects, the HERE Maps Reverse Geolocation API to link the GPS coordinates to landmarks, and then writes that information to the photo's database on Emby using Emby's API (which makes all my photos searchable at a good-enough state).

10) (WIP) Currently developing a Phoenix LiveView web app that downloads Linux kernel ChangeLogs, parses them into commits, extracts structured information and will eventually make them searchable by keyword, contributor, etc. Mainly a learning opportunity, but I'll eventually self-host it publicly. https://github.com/waseigo/Changelogrex

11) A Go program that runs a NextJS app and responds to Gitlab's push-event webhook requests with a rebuild and restart of the web app https://github.com/waseigo/webhook-gitlab-nextjs-runner

A bill-splitting Telegram bot: https://github.com/crash-g/bottino

There are many apps that do this already but my friends mostly use Telegram and it was easier to not having to install another app for such a simple task.

plzat.me: browser extension to track important conversations on HN.

zettel.cards: browser extension+ Android app using LLMs to easily create high quality zettel cards (still a work in progress).

svekyll-cli (https://svekyll.com) and extrastatic.com: svelte based static blogging tools

- https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl... - Lately, I'm having a go at building a privacy-focused plain-text-based iOS journaling app. I started building it for someone important in my life but now also using it myself.

- https://flathabits.com - After reading Atomic Habits, I wanted a habit tracker but most had more friction than I wanted, required accounts, had distractions, lock-in etc. so I built a privacy-focused app, with little friction and no-lock-in (saves to plain text).

- https://plainorg.com - There are a gazillion markdown apps on the App Store, but hardly any supporting org markup, so I built one.

- https://xenodium.com/scratch-a-minimal-scratch-area - I wanted a surface where I could just dump text with as few taps as possible.

- https://github.com/xenodium/macosrec - I wanted to take either screenshots or videos of macOS apps from the command line, so I could integrate anywhere.

- https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell - I'm far down the Emacs rabbit hole, so I prefer Emacs-integrated tools. Built a ChatGPT Emacs shell to see what the hype was all about ;) tl;dr it really does help.

- https://github.com/xenodium/dwim-shell-command - A way to manage and easily apply the gazillion one-liners (and more complex scripts) I've come across. I got close to 100 utils check-in now.

- https://github.com/xenodium/ob-swiftui - Play around with SwiftUI layouts from the comfort of my preferd editor.

- https://github.com/xenodium/company-org-block - Org block completion.

- https://xenodium.com - I tend to scratch own itches and post my solutions here.

I wanted a program to fill out a lottery ticket (the kind where you have to select 6 random check-boxes in a matrix of 37 cells). In my vision the lottery ticket had to have at least _all_ the numbers from 1 to 37, scattered randomly among 8 matrices. I have a nice little C program to generate those tickets.

I built Shortcut Keeper (https://shortcutkeeper.com), a desktop app that lets you save keyboard shortcuts.

It was mainly born out of my need to re-learn a lot of hotkeys when switching from using Windows to macOS. I wanted an easy way to record and keep all the new shortcuts I learned every day in one place.

https://www.microfeed.org/

Private podcasting / photo albums for family members, using Cloudflare Pages, R2, D1.

Does a library count? I wrote a background task queue in Python and TypeScript for my own use:

https://github.com/wakatime/wakaq

https://github.com/wakatime/wakaq-ts

Over the years I created several released and unreleased tools to scratch my own itches.

Software: Swift library to read and modify ZIP archives: https://peakstep.com/claquette/ Screen recording/video/GIF creation app for macOS: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation A small CMS to maintain my websites (unreleased)

Hardware: A Time Machine compatible NAS based on a Raspberry PI (PoE powered, 3D printed mountable enclosure)

Earlier this year I wanted to practice my JS skills and needed to send some F*ck cards to my friends. So I built https://thefuck.cards

It's a little web app where you make the crd to your taste, address it and once generated, you can share it with anyone.

https://playlist.kanna.in/ https://memes.kanna.in/ https://radio.kanna.in/

A font-viewer for a specific phrase, with my own chosen list of fonts. Mostly for seeing how hebrew looks in different fonts for family name signs.

https://avimar.github.io/fonts-hebrew/demo.html?text=%D7%97%...

I have been working on a universal calendar app, named, Clendar.

My goal is to learn SwiftUI and explore new technologies.

The app is now open source on GitHub as well, it's my way to give back to the community as I was learning it.

---

[1] Download link: https://apps.apple.com/app/clendar-a-calendar-app/id15481020...

[2] Landing page: https://vinhnx.github.io/clendar-site

[3] GitHub: https://github.com/vinhnx/Clendar

More than I can count, but here are the big ones:

http://moros.cc - A hobby operating system, with a shell, an editor, a lisp interpreter, and many other little things

https://geodate.org - A lunisolar calendar with decimal time (centidays and dimidays)

https://github.com/vinc/geodate - An implementation of the calendar + time

https://github.com/vinc/geocal - A tool to visualize the calendar + time

https://github.com/vinc/littlewing - A chess engine written in Rust (and another one before that in C++)

https://vinc.cc/software/ - A more complete list, on my personal website

I'm good at scratching my own itches but less good at finding projects that could be useful to other people.

The answers to this question will be a great source of (n=1) validated ideas.

I got into programming when I was 14 because I wanted to write addons (in Lua) for World of Warcraft. I've written many things since then (including addons -- my personal Lua repo has around 145k lines of code).

I did make one app public last year: AutoPTT [1]. It's a Windows desktop app that gives you advanced control on how your mic activates and deactivates in voice chat. It's written in C. I'd used it as a CLI for a long time myself but then a few others asked if they could use it too, so I added a GUI and released it.

At the moment, I'm working on a desktop image/comic viewer (in Rust, of course :) because I'm not happy with CDisplayEx.

[1] https://autoptt.com/

I'm a software engineer and I'm trying to get into selling HTML templates. I wanted to do some competitor research to see what's selling a lot on Themeforest and what people are complaining about, to find gaps in the market.

So I made an app with Laravel that scrapes Themeforest and uses OpenAI APIs to summarise all the bad reviews.

The app is not publicly available but the result of my first scrape (circa 10 days ago) is on Gumroad https://albertofort.gumroad.com/l/themeforest-templates-ai-d...

Just this week

https://tz.primozic.org

useful and quick GUI to see the time across the world.

on phone:

touch & swipe to pan the map / highlight timezone (upper clock)

tap to select a timezone (lower clocks)

swipe left/right the line below the clock above to change the time

Annoyed with iTunes and Apple Music, I made two mp3 players. One for iOS, one for macOS, both are free and quite minimal but work fine for me and a few fans.

https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player/ https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/

I use the projects to improve my development skills - both started as Objective-C programs, later rewritten to Swift and the iOS one now uses SwiftUI 100%. Fun!

https://github.com/tommie/webmultimeter - A web interface using WebBluetooth to read from UM25C USB multimeters

https://github.com/tommie/btinhibitor - keeping my laptop unlocked while near a BLE beacon (and a configuration utility for JDY-25M modules: https://github.com/tommie/jdy25m-py)

https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter - constantly checking my ISPs connection (running in Docker on all machines) and https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p running on a server to do speed tests

https://github.com/tommie/pygalaxybuds - CLI/library for configuring the Galaxy Buds, without their app

1. https://github.com/tnodir/fort - Fort Firewall for Windows 7+.

I needed:

- app groups to easily enable/disable group of programs - wildcards in program path names - efficient IP addresses blocking, as in PeerBlock - speed limiting - auto-apply program's rules to its child processes - control SvcHost services by service names - traffic statistics history

2. https://github.com/tnodir/luaplsql - LuaPlSql is a Lua Plug-In framework for PL/SQL Developer IDE.

I used it 10 years ago to write scripts in IDE for Oracle DB.

What is an app? You can make shortcut to any script inside Termux. So I have dozens. Handiest one is an "app" that repeats my phone number aloud, because when needed I never remember it.

    while true; do
      termux-tts-speak -l fi "5 5 5 1 2 3 4"
      sleep 1
    done

- I've created a shopping/recipe app.

An app that supports a database of nutrients, recipe ingredients, supermarket shopping links. Something like "give me 10 balanced[1] meals, give me the shopping list with no duplicates and links to supermarket X" Nothing new, but all other apps I've tried are always missing something I want.

- Started creating a repo of NuShell scripts to scratch my own itch

I added things organically (when I needed something I tried to break the action into smaller functions). By the end I had quite nice library that dealt from Kubernetes deployments to Linux hardening.

[1] According to my own criteria...

If you mean mobile apps, none, though I have gotten interested in writing some. CLI and very simple web apps (local cgi's), quite a few. GUI: nothing for real practical personal use, but a few to practice with the toolkits, and I've done commercial work with them.

I'm sad about the mobile app world. Lots of ridiculous bloated apps to do the same things that a very simple CLI or CGI script could do.

A simple CMS. I became frustrated at actually being able to install Drupal - where a framework must be installed to install a framework to actually install... the framework, and Wordpress's new incarnation where a blog post ends up as a header and the footer ends up in the contact form didn't impress me.

It was easier to DIY my own thing over a year than deal with these 'tools' that once did what they said on the tin.

And I get to have joined the annoying HTMX crowd!

Pretty much all my Raycast extensions to open VS Code projects, set Slack status, etc.

Being a co-founder, I often have to wear lots of different hats and needed a way to better manage multiple identities in my browser. I tried Chrome profiles and Firefox containers, but both felt messy. Instead, I wrote my own browser called Wavebox. It started as an Electron app but after quickly finding all the limitations, dropped Electron and built directly on top of Chromium. We're now approaching Wavebox's 7th birthday and going from strength to strength!

https://wavebox.io

A lot of them:

- wisecash - a cash-flow forecast SaaS app (which I used for my own financial piloting)

- Kiba ETL - not an app but a framework to build data processing pipelines with Ruby (using it for a lot of automated tasks, including VAT management, at the moment)

- a tool to automate the selling of books on Amazon via barcode scanning (I sold hundreds of old books like this at some point)

- a CLI tool to help my sons learn multiplication tables and also languages (vocabulary) in Spanish and English

- hackerbooks.com (retired) - a book aggregator based on what is shared on HN

- learnivore (retired) - a developer screencast aggregator

I made an app for text and reverse image search. I’m a radiologist.

https://raddex.ai

- With a friend we created SongStitch (https://songstitch.art/) because I wasn't satisfied with the performance and optimisations of existing last.fm collage generators. I embed a last.fm collage on my website, and previous generators didn't resizing, didn't compress well, and were slow causing me to be kicked out of the 250kb club—so it was good enough motivation to build SongStitch (https://github.com/nkoehring/250kb-club/issues/337). We also developed it as open source from the start https://github.com/SongStitch/song-stitch

- I created `gcopy` (https://github.com/TheDen/gcopy) because I wanted to extend `pbcopy` to copy nontext data from the terminal to the clipboard, so I could quickly paste such data in Slack (or as email attachments)—I got tried to having to find it the specific file in Finder to copy or drag it to an app. I've since aliased `pbcopy` to `gcopy` since it's a drop-in replacement.

- Also created `galvani` (https://theden.mmm.page/galvani) to show and change the the power mode status on MacOS from the menubar

https://thaumasiotes.github.io/cryptogram/

(Paste substitution ciphertext into the textarea on the left.)

Doesn't work so well for actual "cryptograms" because they're too short, but fun for substitution ciphers with longer texts.

trydeepwork.com. i created it for my own use, but thousand others joined me :)

Two apps that fulfill convenience functions for two niche interests of mine:

- https://ramdass-search.net - Full-text search in videos of talks by Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert, a former Harvard professor of Psychology who became a well-known spiritual teacher in the 60s and 70s.

- https://rtfcal.de - Get the dates of amateur cycling events (Gran Fondos) as an .ics file so I can import them to my calendar. The app submits the search to the cycling association's site, parses the resulting HTML and creates an .ics file.

pb1n.de

A platform that enables most UAVs/UGVs to fly/drive over the internet, and using a game joystick, cellular or not, although some drones especially small consumer ones aren’t supported

A small simple hacker news client for Android built with Jetpack Compose.

Using Kotlin to code, Soup to do the web scraping and that's pretty much it.

I built a local server environment, alternative to MAMP: https://www.servbay.dev It is an integrated local web development environment management tool designed to simplify the setup and management of various services and development environments for web developers locally.

I created a Postman/Insomnia and a note app for my own use because I do not trust third-party cloud solutions.

I also created a music player because I dislike the shuffle algorithm in Spotify.

And I have created a travel app for my family to provide public transport route suggestions, offline maps and reminders.

My Postman/Insomnia alternative is open-source for the public now: https://github.com/sunny-chung/hello-http

I'm currently building a music composition tool / MIDI sequencer that is very chord and music theory driven. You write melodies in terms of the degrees of the scale, which are relative to each bar's chord. So instead of writing an "F" it might be a "3" for the third degree of a D minor chord.

It's been a couple of weeks of work, but it's at the point where it's actually fun and pretty quick to blast out a little tune and experiment with different chord progressions.

A chrome extension to manage my canned replies, not in a bad way. I had to write the same things over and over for my job, so I created this tool to help me save text templates that I can customize later whenever needed. Don't hate me, I'm not a customer support agent. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/my-canned-responses...

I’m midway thru building a grocery store price comparison app that then ocr’s the receipts. I’m hoping to save money on groceries. I may extend it to include an inventory, recipes and meal planning to fully close the loop.

I have an entire suite of python based CLI tools for data processing and RF/network/packet analysis with various ML and reporting scripts to assist with anomaly detection, OSINT, and mapping. Started out as a side project years ago, is now part of my consulting tool kit. Been working on a v2, so I maybe open source the current set.

https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/LookupChatGPT/ a chrome plugin to ask ChatGPT about selected text (fully customizable). Came out of need to understand random jargon.

I've developed a GPT named commitCRAFT, designed to generate commit messages based on the output of the 'git diff' command. So far, it has proven to be quite useful.

I built a simple meal plan / shopping list builder app. Certainly not revolutionary, but my wife and I use it everyday.

https://thisweekinfood.ca

vim plugins: file browser, comment toggle, paren / brackets pairing, status line, buffer line, plugin manager, etc

https://github.com/slmjkdbtl/rc/tree/master/vim/autoload

The first original and complete (by which I mean not just hacking or prototyping) ‘app’ I wrote was a poker timer and blinds tracker that ran on a Windows CE HP ipaq. It was written in Compact .net. I wish I still had the source to look back at it. It was used by my group of friends for the next maybe 6 years regularly. It must have been around 2003.

never ever finished anything useful. but i made a lot of utilities that are specific and single use for my one perpetual never ending project :')... i like making tools but i never know what for, so i make them for my OS prpject. currently making a system in rust which builds a bootloader and 2 disk images from a config file to save editing scripts. once thats finished its another totally useless tool to add to my list :D.

https://leaderboardhq.com. My family needed a simple scorekeeper that included the ability to score individual rounds within a set and track set winners.

A small website to tell me when football games are on the radio/TV.

https://wirelessfootball.co.uk/

All the existing feeds were either per channel or overwhelmed with ads.

Many. Everything i create which is not specific to my own I.T. infrastructure gets posted at <https://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/r/>.

I wrote pq [1] (protobuf parser cli) at a company where I was told to "just use the tool another engineer wrote" which was in C++, in a really uncompileable/abandoned/unusable state

I wrote goat [2] (EBS disk attacher) at the same company on a solo project where I needed to create a "Kafka-cluster-IaC" recipe in Terraform and wanted us to be able to replace EC2 broker instances dynamically but preserve their data on the EBS volume

In both cases, existing tools weren't helping me and I wrote these to help myself immediately (and they became general/popular a bit later)

[1] https://github.com/sevagh/pq

[2] https://github.com/sevagh/goat

A daily digest email for HN, and ArsTechnica (two separate projects, same idea).

It gathers top 50 stories from HN (and all articles in case of Ars) for the previous day and sends me an email with the links (along the number of points/comments for HN and the blurb for Ars).

Each morning I have an overview of the tech news from the two sites I read the most, and have completely removed my compulsion to check them every now and them.

(I've just found this Ask HN thread by clicking on the link in the digest email for yesterday which is why I'm 20ish hours late to the party :)

I'm currently creating one. I needed it and I wanted to practice Ruby on Rails with Hotwire and Stimulus. Bought the domain yesterday :)

When modems ruled the world I made Delphi application that sat in a tray and with a click of a button would connect me to the internet and launch mail client to get mail, launch GetRight to continue my downloads and browser because that's probably the reason I wanted to connect to the internet. It could also disconnect me and close everything. Computers were weak and minute of connection was expensive.

Most recent thing I wrote for myself is not really an application, just a piece of JS to pull the entire history of a chat with a specific person on tinder to keep archive of especially weird humans I encountered. Oh, how low have I fallen...

- A tool for extracting ingredients and steps from recipes [1]

- A tool to transform paragraphs from a single Notion page into a microblog (html + rss) [2]

Both are done with Clojure because they seemed like a good opportunity to try something new.

[1] https://pretty-recip.es

[2] https://franz.hamburg/atoms/

I made a Music app for iOS that is geared towards offline libraries and has features like visualizer, EQ, sleep timer that I couldn't find anywhere else.

https://sakunlabs.com/muziqi

My co-founder and I launched https://www.togetherletters.com a few years ago because we never felt like we saw updates from friends on social media. We now use TogetherLetters for our own groups and see updates from them, knowing the updates will never be on the web. In the last few months (with no marketing from us), usage has taken off. We're starting to spend more time on improving it and figuring out what all these new users want/need.

I created a few audio tinkering utilities, e.g.

- m4b-tool[1], an audio book utility

- tone[2], an audio tagger

mainly for myself because the existing tools did not fit my needs or weren't FOSS. I did never think so many people would be interested. By the end of the year I plan to make my first donation of my github sponsoring income to a charity project.

Currently I'm working on `pure-todo`, a todo list with sqlite, REST API and JWT based user management. The first approach was to publish it with a single index.php file without ANY dependency, but this is something I have to think over again. Maintenance will be a nightmare :-)

Next FOSS project I will work on is `Tone Audio Player`, a fully cross platform (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, WASM) audio player app, that fully supports background playback without stuttering. But C# / Avalonia UI is just not there yet, I'm currently switching to flutter.

[1]: https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool [2]: https://github.com/sandreas/tone

https://www.breadcrumb.live/ - i use it as a visual diary of sorts throughout my day

just a small webapp - https://uplowder.com/

I need to transfer photos of receipts/invoices (taken with my phone) to accounting software on my laptop. Google Pictures/Drive is too cumbersome

1. open url on laptop

2. scan QR code with phone

3. choose files/take a picture of receipt on phone

4. appears on laptop

Files are E2E encrypted, as I used it as an excuse to play around with the JavaScript "SubtleCrypto" API

Quite a few!

Some examples:

- Enso: https://enso.sonnet.io — a stream-of-consciousness writing I use for my daily notes and a bunch of other things. Here's how I use it every day: https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N...

- Sit.: https://sit.sonnet.io – I meditate with it daily

Why I built Sit: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

Projects and apps I built for my own well-being: https://untested.sonnet.io/Projects+and+apps+I+built+for+my+...

A Wishlist of things I want to build or see made: https://untested.sonnet.io/Things+to+support+my+own+well-bei...

Currently working on Midnight: https://midnight.sonnet.io

I needed a weekly report for my contracting clients to prove their web host sucked to the point where it was costing them significant money.

They were paying for cheapest tier WordPress hosting at the time, and didn't believe me when I said random 5 min blocks of downtime throughout the day were adding up.

I built a dirt-simple form that takes a URL and sends a notification when the site goes down/up, with a weekly summary email.

Then, I kept adding features every day, 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor.

That app was OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com).

Since then I also added status pages, like https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/

As well as cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.

* A preprocessor that writes C++ header files for you, so you can write things more like you would in Java or Rust, i.e. just once. I use this for most of my C++ code now, and sometimes I forget it's not how C++ really is.

* A board game server for playing Scrabble over the internet, without either having to change it enough to not get sued, or withstand whatever crap the licensed apps do. Can't be released for obvious reasons.

* A server that runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to my digital piano via MIDI, recording a MIDI file of everything that ever gets played. No more "drat, I wasn't recording".

https://sourcemap.tools/

It helps decipher JS error stack traces by applying source maps to them. In my previous company, we struggled to configure Sentry to work with source maps, and every error message was cryptic due to minification. First, I created a little command line utility and later made it a web app.

https://github.com/rmuratov/hledger-tools

Just some charts to summarize my monthly finance activity based on hldger journal.

I was a Korean language major in college. A lot of the spaced repetition apps for memorizing vocabulary were missing features that are now possible because of LLMs. so far I am the only user of the app but I use it every day to help me prepare for a standardized Korean language assessment that I plan to take again next year:

https://github.com/rickcarlino/koalasrs

A script to arrange 2 pages of a PDF side-by-side.

Another bunch takes care of creating invoices, gathering bank statements, and paying using the bank account.

Finally, a temperature limiting daemon because thermald doesn't seem to work.

I created a home bar app for organising my bottles and drink recipes. Now other people use it too, but I still sometimes struggle with prioritising features for myself instead of building for others.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noflair/id1550567225

I made RSS client, or link aggregator, or youtube filter. Everything at once. I am running 3 instances of my software for link management.

[1] https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/rsshistory - news

[2] https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/places - domains & places

[3] https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/catalog - music elements

Software project: [4] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

If above does not work, do not worry. These are exported then to github repositories:

[5] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - bookmarks

[6] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - 2023 year news headlines

[7] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - all known to me domains, and RSS feeds

When i was still playing diablo 4 i made a swiftui app where i would take a picture of two items up for comparison and would use gpt-4 to determine what was the better choice. I found that apple's OCR through Vision kit or whatever its called is really good.

I would front-load the prompt with a dictionary of stats i cared most about in a 1-5 ranking system for that character, this setup via through another screen's ui.

When I was a student I made a site that would parse our registrar's course listing and find all the currently empty rooms in your building. Together with its map you could use it to find a place to chill nearby you. If you were in a more curious mood it was a good way to find an interesting lecture to sneak into the back of as well.

android app to replace the wallpaper with an AI generated image every couple hours. Google refused to let me publish it because it could generate nudity. SHOCKED TONE

https://gettjalerts.com to help me find a job. I found my job, now I hope others can too!

I am subscribed to a lot of newsletters, hence I created a newsletter collector/reader to keep all the newsletters away from my inbox.

https://lttrs.email

I bought one of those consoles with Android that works great for emulating games. I created the app called Beacon which is an Android launcher that helps organizing all the retro games in a nice interface. I got quite a few people that bought it and are fans of it and even the biggest YouTuber in this space with 400k subscribers showed my app in one of his videos. Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.radikal.ga...

During the pandemic I got back to an old hobby, creating Half-Life levels. I found that certain things involved a lot of repetitive work, so I started working on some automation tools.

For textures and sprites, I made WadMaker and SpriteMaker, which can convert a directory full of images (including Photoshop and Krita files) to the specific formats that HL uses: https://github.com/pwitvoet/wadmaker/

For creating levels, I made an automation tool named MESS (Macro Entity Scripting System) that can do things like covering terrain with props, simplifying level scripting and automatically applying workarounds for known bugs: https://pwitvoet.github.io/mess/

It's been very educational (and fun), learning about color, geometry and making programming languages.

gpt with context of my entire financial history in real time, to discuss financial decisions with it

Building my app BeatSceatch taught me a TON about jazz piano!

https://beatscratch.io

Not sure if this qualifies as an "app", but I wrote this little powershell script to test for an active internet connection. Beeps when connected. I use it almost every day, because my cable modem takes a variable length of time to boot up, and I got tired of checking manually

  $connected = $false
  while($true)
  {
   if (-not $connected)
   {
    $connected = Test-Connection www.google.com -Quiet
   }
   else
   {
    Write-Host "Connected"
    [console]::beep(1000, 500)
   }
   Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
  }

https://github.com/sansyrox/macsimus

A code editor that I have been using for the past 4 years. It is a neovim distro based upon the ideology of emacs.

https://remindself.com

This is a sms based reminder tool that I made for myself and use quite heavily due to its convenience. (No additional apps/website and other requirement)

25 years ago I needed an app that would transliterate my writing in English to my native language (Nepali), as I did not know how to type in my native language (which I still don't). So I made a 1 person use transliterater. The fonts used for my native language then were mostly ascii fonts with typefaces changed to characters of Nepali. When unicode became more common, then an app that would change from those ascii fonts to unicode. Then I needed units converter as Nepal uses different units of measurement compared to metric as local levels. Hence unit converter for myself. Few more applications on the way, but most have been replaced by Google. In the last 4 years I have moved away from programming to being a full time farmer. Here I needed simple app that would take market data from past years to figure out when I would get the best price for a crop. Hence I made one for myself that would aid me make my crop calendar. Now working on a simple 1 person app for a crop calendar.

1. I made a nice unixy clipboard manager for linux.

https://github.com/porridgewithraisins/coffee-pesto

Should get around to publishing it to the aur, but haven't yet.

It has support for all types of data, and you can put any custom information you want programmatically into the search index for the search feature. By default you can search by content, application name or datetime. Has a gui in gtk, but it's pretty modular so you can write your own simple rofi script for it if you wanted. It just stores stuff in a single folder so you can sync it by syncing the folder.

2. I made a simple tool that turns markdown into html+css in the exact way github does it with darkmode and everything. It uses the github web api to convert the markdown, and then uses the exact css as well (courtesy sindre sorhus' package)

https://github.com/porridgewithraisins/scripts/blob/master/g...

3. I made a simple colorpicker using gtk that copies the color to clipboard directly. https://github.com/porridgewithraisins/scripts/blob/master/c...

4. I made a GUI image batch resizing script that uses yad for the gui and imagemagick for the resizing internally. It is designed to be used as a thunar/other file manager custom action. But of course it works it you just pass all the filenames in args.

https://github.com/porridgewithraisins/scripts/blob/master/r...

I made https://trackmysupplement.com (and currently working to productize it)

I've built a tool for musicians using modular gear.

This is a tool for synth people. What is cool about my tool is that I show the signal flow with a graph. Drag and drop planner.

https://patcher.xyz/

I created a super simple web app (using Phoenix LiveView) to track spending and budgets. I found all the options to be overly complicated. My wife and I have monthly recurring spends (rent, healthcare, subscriptions, etc.) that we share and we each want to know what our daily spending limit is.

I couldn't find a simple app that would automatically read our transactions reliably and generate this daily spending limit.

My app does 2 things: Shows transactions: https://imgur.com/a/aJ9G02q Shows limit overviews: https://imgur.com/a/ugnmnFq

Stack: - Phoenix LiveView - Postgres - Plaid

I have been golfing in a weekly league for 10+ years and was frustrated by the complex spreadsheet our league manager built to track everything. I Figured there must be an app we could replace it with... While there were plenty, most were severely outdated or simply did not do what we needed. So I created https://golfsheet.app

I wrote a tiny applescript to make a ping sound every 5 minutes just so I have a rough sense of how long things are taking

Flavor

A flavor pairing app, inspired by The Flavor Bible and similar books

https://theflavor.app/

https://testflight.apple.com/join/gyNuC43k

I working on a habit tracker connected to Chat GPT (via a custom "GPTs"), I can use natural language to log habits and to create new ones, which has been quite useful since I'm not a good ui designer :D

I built an app that sends me my old (popular) tweets in order to reflect upon, and retweet for another bout of exposure.

I always learned new languages & frameworks by solving a pretty simple but not too simple problem: a recipe manager with persistence and the ability to organize recipes in a calendar and generate a weekly shopping list, sorting the items by supermarket aisle and in the last release I even did a task manager integration to share it with my wife (I think it was with Todoist). I did it with C#, Python+GTK, PHP and Rails.

Now I'm using Paprika and the need is forever solved, but as an exercise in terms of managing general UI, database persistence and relationships, and calendar & dates is hard enough without being overwhelming.

Other people create binary file editors, this is my problem of choice ;)

Wrote a small shell script tracking "time since last break". (tested on Ubuntu, would like to support others) https://github.com/svandragt/break-aware

I've got tired of logging my working hours in Excel sheets, hence created a simple CLI app that stores data in an SQLite database and can generate the timesheet if needed: https://github.com/oroszgy/hours

A simple Webserver with GUI for Windows. You navigate to the folder you want to serve and just click "Start".

I use it all the time when I need to serve up some data in JSON for example. I can specify IP and Port to bind to, it has directory listing enabled and it always sets the headers "Access-Control-Allow-Headers: " and "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: " for easier quick testing.

I just threw together some components in Delphi. ;)

I wanted to see property price history on Rightmove (a property listing website in the UK) so built a Chrome extension to see when owners change their prices: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/property-track/ahkn...

Being a programmer, I created a todo list in the form of a text editor. Many, many shortcuts: links to files, outlook folders, azure, shortcuts, connection to the company VPN, basic text formatting. 6 months of excited coding. It looks great. I honestly don't know what I would do without him. Some integration with tampermonkey and I have authentication on all the sites I use. Data is stored in pure files, indexed by sqllite. My notes are typing-free. Images are turned into links and stored locally. Dates are identified and placed on a calendar. Desktop, made in C#, practical to the maximum.

I have created a data platform built on Pulsar, Neo4J and Clickhouse for managing timeseries. It has become so valuable for me that I am now trying to build a company building on this foundation to make it a lot easier to manage timeseries for everyone.

https://github.com/obynio/anki-japanese-furigana

I created an Anki plugin to learn Japanese. All the plugin I knew back then were bloated with unnecessary features, so I created my own.

I like it KISS, simple things that works well.

I created Alas - the most powerful tool to plan your life and work - with a single text file - https://www.hackberry.dev/alas/.

Custom daily/weekly email digests for Reddit, HN and RSS: https://www.bulletyn.co

A few of them.

1. https://github.com/hamon-in/invoice/ was a command line invoicing program that I wrote and used for 2 years before moving to something SasS based.

2. https://github.com/nibrahim/Calligraphic-Rulings is a command line (and later web based - http://calligraffiti.in/rulings) tool I wrote and use regularly while to practise calligraphy

3. https://github.com/nibrahim/Hyde And emacs mode to manage Jekyll/Octopress blogs which I use for my personal site

A bunch of smaller scripts for daily work (e.g. mini pomodoro timer, Emacs scripts to manage client conversations etc.)

I created an internal tool to convert images to pdf (using wasm) so I don't have to install any programs. Then a friend wanted to use it too, so I got a url ( https://privateconvert.com ) and then got carried a little bit away adding more conversions.

Some pretty giant weird stuff. Some of them were things I imagined would be startups, and built at scale over 6-12 months, but realized I was the only person who had a use for.

So like, during covid lockdown I wanted to assess cumulative risk from me going to the supermarket, or seeing my girlfriend, or each of us hanging out with meeting 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 people per day. This led to me writing a pretty insane Markov Chain engine/GUI for defining time- or repetition-based curves for expected outcomes of bespoke events (basically like: I go to a bar N times, each one gives me a probability of encountering covid around 5%, if any of those happens it triggers another event in which having a covid-positive test result goes in a parabolic curve from 0% to 100% and back over the 12 days from contact, anchored around day 5), and chaining them together with other events that would only happen if the initial conditions had been met. I credit that beast with preventing me from getting covid... but it's also basically so visually insane and complicated that just explaining to someone why they'd need it would be pointless. Yet it has an entire login system, a custom engine in PixiJS for drawing time curves, and a whole multi-threaded worker system on the back and front for comparing monte carlo versions of the chains. Me and one friend are the only users.

[edit] Also: An engine for identifying stock market patterns. It's my form of "low frequency trading" - one of the goals being to avoid wash sales. So far, averaged over last 2 years it's turned out trades about 14% over base increase/decrease on the stocks it's trading... and I set aside a fund with which I follow it religiously. It only suggests trades every month or two. I have no interest in making picks for other people, or in trying to market the software. Occasionally I give my brothers tips from it.

I was always terrible at getting out of bed. I tried some alarm clock apps that gave you challenges (solve a math problem, scan a barcode, etc). That worked until I realized I could just kill the app and stay in bed.

I realized I needed something outside of the app to push me. So I ended up building Nuj. https://nuj.app

It’s an alarm clock app that charges me $10 if I don’t get up and scan my toothpaste barcode within a 5 mins of my 7am alarm.

The alarms are stored in the cloud so if I kill the app or try to cheat, I still get charged the penalty. Also, alarms “lock” 1 hour before going off so I can’t turn off the alarm and stay in bed if I wake up before it goes off.

It is still hard to me to know how to convert timestamp to human readable date and vice-verse. So I have created this simple website to help me out - https://timestamp.online/.

I wrote LLDAP (https://github.com/lldap/lldap) after struggling to install and configure openLdap on my homelab. It's a simple and light LDAP server that only handles users and groups (which is all you need on a homelab).

I wrote a tool to save the newsletters I receive : https://www.npmjs.com/package/email-backup

A static site generator: https://hi.imnhan.com/s4g/

Not the most original of ideas, but I was really sold on djot [1] and wanted something less fussy than pelican [2], so it just happened.

[1] https://djot.net/

[2] https://getpelican.com/

A lot! i've just written everything down here: https://jerrynsh.com/a-look-back-on-7-years-of-automating-st... it was alot of fun and a good reminder of why i started programming

the one that meant the most for me was earlier this year, I made an add-on for me and my friends that automatically syncs esports matches (e.g. Valorant, CS, LoL etc.) to Google Calendar . Things took some turns 10 months later I now have 100+ users (https://tournacat.com/).

I've made two things that I use daily (for several years now):

RSS/Atom reader for CLI: https://github.com/lallassu/gorss

Simple Todo list (replacement for Wunderlist): https://github.com/lallassu/doit

first 3 are web apps, that can be installed (even on phones) and work offline.

backgammon: https://github.com/nenadalm/backgammon - board game for 2 players, no single player - I use it when I'm out with someone and there's nothing better to do - couldn't find free one on play store without adds and in-app purchases

life-counter: https://github.com/nenadalm/life-counter - life counting app for 2 players, usable with several board games. It has profiles that allow to configure number of hp, count-up/count-down. I use it mainly for StarRealms and Cribbage. - couldn't find one on play store that would allow quickly adding/subtracting specific amount of hp. All I've tried could either add/subtract by 1 (annoying with bigger numbers, like 24) or set specific amount (I have a phone, which is capable of doing the math, so why would I do it?).

bbb-games-list: https://github.com/nenadalm/bbb-game-list - I attend various board gaming places with sometimes crappy list of games on their website (just names, nothing else - like player count...), so I wrote my own site, which download's games from these sites and enriches them with info from bgg (updated via cronjob once a week via PR)

postgresql-log-viewer: https://github.com/nenadalm/postgresql-log-viewer - I needed to see which sql queries were executed by an app, so I wrote an app that can read them real-time from csv logs of postgres and show them formatted with copy-paste option (didn't use it for quite a while, since I don't use postgres lately).

tiny-snitch, mighty-snitch: monitor and prevent internet connections

libaws: make aws easy

aws-exec: make services easy

aws-gocljs: make webdev easy

s4, bsv: make big data easy

arch-setup, alpine-setup: make laptop bootstrap easy

backup: make backup easy and unborkable

all at https://github.com/nathants

I've built a chrome extension that replaces your new tab page with news feeds (among other things). That's how I stay up to date with HackerNews (including this post) :)

https://www.caddiedash.com/

I always loved Todoist but wanted a Kanban board to organise my day and week. So I created https://kanban.ist as an alternative client that lets me do this. It’s stateless and talks to the Todoist API directly, meaning tasks stay secret. Todoist released their “Boards” feature a few years after this but they only allow you to create a Kanban board for a single project, which didn’t work for me.

I created a Roku remote for macOS. Before I made the app, there was 50 iOS remote apps but none of them had a native macOS version. For a while I used the testing client that I found on Roku’s developer site, but it didn’t have volume buttons.

Building it gave me a chance to learn modern iOS dev and SwiftUI. And I even had a bit of fun playing around with audio streaming protocols to get the private listening feature working!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/roam-a-better-remote-for-roku/...

A daemon, which sends RSS posts to my email, because I didn't like any of the standard viewers:

https://sr.ht/~mrms/mmre

A tool which allows me to embed shell scripts into text files. I use it to generate my website.

https://git.sr.ht/~mrms/mmtt

Mussel Wind. Shows me if the Mussel Rock paragliding site near San Francisco is flyable. My first iOS app, written not long after the SDK became available.

For notes https://motyar.info/notes For todos https://motyar.info/todos

A way to look up error codes that's faster than Googling them: https://james.darpinian.com/decoder/

- Base64 decoding with multiple interactions and on browser. For use to decode links on a forum on high seas. https://www.miyuru.lk/base64decoder

- Dual-stack S3 URLs on browser. Most S3 links available online need to be converted to be used on IPv6 only instances on AWS. https://www.miyuru.lk/ipv6s3

I created Sono [1]. It’s a debt manager app. I created it because in the past every time I lent or borrowed money, I used to note that in a text file. Eventually the file became really long and hard to manage. With Sono I just need to record the transaction whenever I borrow or lent money, it’ll help me to keep track of the debts. I learnt Flutter and built it in a year. Then I thought that maybe I could let other people use it and see how it goes :))

[1] https://sonofinance.com/

I came to Tokyo more than 10 years ago when there were still feature phones. The email app was fast and easy to use, looking up train connections through the pre-smartphone WAP browser was slow and a pain.

I was looking up train connections so often that this became too painful and built an app that would accept from/to train station pairs via email and send you back the best connection.

A while ago, I wrote gearfinder, to help find gear combinations to match a given ratio. [1] It's a little GUI written in Lazarus

I've written a BitGrid simulator in Lazarus.[2] BitGrid is a hypothetical computing architecture I've been noodling with for decades. I'm hoping to learn Verilog/VHDL/RTL enough get a chip made in one of the free shuttles.

Then comes the hard part... programming the thing. I keep pushing myself back into perpetual analysis paralysis.

[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/GearFinder

[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

I usually have to commit large changes in Active Directory in production environments, to accommodate merges, splits or acquisitions. I created a tool to monitor in real time the changes happening in AD so I can see if there is anything wrong or unexpected happening. For that I created this tool for personal use and I open sourced it:

https://github.com/mihemihe/myADMonitor

I made https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash out of the need to collaborate on org mode documents with non emacs users. Once the first release was done, I got to reflect on the infamous top comment of the Dropbox HN to make an attempt at abstracting the storage aspect of Dropbox so those org document could be made stored on a FTP server, SFTP, S3, ....

A very simple one I did is a clone of the iPhone calculator as a PWA so I can use it in the iPad. It is plain Typescript without a framework, can be added to the home screen (PWA) and work offline.

https://getcalculator.app/

Started a small business selling products online only using opencart. Later opened physical shop and used multi-store feature in opencart as a point of sale, while still running the online side as well. As business grew, needed warehouse and second physical shop.

The biggest issue we faced was stock management/stockout issues. Available ones like dynnamics/topshelf/sap were very expensive for us, so I developed a web based inventory management tool in php/aurelia. It could do multi-warehouse/shelf level inventory. Shelfs are barcode labelled and its all paper free. Also added point-of-sale for shop use, catalog management, multi-pricelist/multi-currency (retail/wholesale) etc. It still runs the business as of today.

Now writing new version from scratch using nestjs/svelte with multi-tenantancy (so that others can sell on it).

I wrote a chrome extension to do site specific browser automation that quickly adds grocery coupons and credit card rewards categories after watching my mom spend hours clicking to add each one individually. Free on the chrome store. https://www.throwlasso.com

I wrote a little parser-DSL the last few days, mainly to parse the input of Advent of Code problems (because the manual '.split(...)' approach always looks so ugly and unsatisfying).

https://github.com/mckirk/aocparser

Granted, at this point the syntax has become convoluted enough that I'm not sure anymore whether it would actually be faster to type, which was also part of the motivation, but I think it at least looks cool :D

I wanted to create a chorded keyboard mapping where you use only the 8 keys on the homerow, but mapped easily to Colemak. I figured out, I could do a key combination on one hand as a modifier to pick if I want to go up, down, toward the middle or toward the outside. The problem is some key combinations are very hard to do, so I wrote a Q program where I rated some finger combinations and made it pick the most ergonomic ones for the most common keys.

Anyway, I also wrote a Autohotkey program that converts qwerty keystrokes to my chorded keyboard layout. The problem is, I switched completely to Linux and now can't use my AH script :(

edit: to provide some context, I was inspired by the Ginny 10 key keyboards and the ASETNIOP keyboard layout:

Ginny keyboard : https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/hltqdt...

ASETNIOP : https://asetniop.com/

I do all my daily work using my own text editor, which is also a micro-lite TUI IDE, sort of tmux+nano plus a directory browser, with easy frontends to grep and make:

https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette

I do not imagine that anyone else would ever want to use this tool, which has little to recommend it beyond the fact that it is perfectly tailored to my own idiosyncratic preferences - but it does suit me, and I have certainly gotten more hours of use out of it than any other code I have ever written.

https://github.com/manoj-inukolunu/migtunnel MigTunnel , ngrok like tunnel for my local use.

https://atomictessellator.com

I built this to teach myself all the aspects of computational chemistry that I am interested in

I have a phoenix liveview I can upload the bank CSVs with all credit card and checking account transactions, and it categorizes them and display a table with the sum/groupby where rows are categories and columns months.

I've built Caloree an iOS/Mac app that allows you to track your daily calorie intake, go on a calorie deficit diet and track your weight which has worked wonders for me. It's freemium, but most features are available for free. It can be found at https://caloree.app.

Over the years I had used a number of reddit clients for Android, all of which had some features I loved and some which annoyed me, so last year I started building my own.

I released an alpha build early this year (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.morrissey.m...) but abandoned it because I stopped using reddit altogether, and didn't love the idea of potentially having to pay reddit for an app I was giving away for free.

Was certainly fun building it though, no regrets.

Diary that stores everything in the local storage of your browser

https://myappp.tiiny.site/

- track your food

- track your Sports

- track your Habits

- track your whatever :)

Feedback welcome

A calorie counting app using ChatGPT. I got so bothered by existing calorie counting tools with endless dropdown and then they dont have your exact thingy I don’t care about anyways.

So in my app I usually at the afternoon I just write:

I had a large cappuccino a Bretzel a protein bowl with 500 calories a protein shake with 35g of p etc…

It then parses everything and adds it up and then I know my „budget“ for the rest of the evening.

So takes me a few seconds to enter it all I also integrated it with apple health.

As it is important to me to reach financial independence, I realized most investors are tracking their portfolios in spreadsheets. As I was focused on dividend growth investing, dividends are high maintenance to track in a spreadsheet, especially for bigger portfolios. So thanks to dogfooding, I've been developing a website to track dividend income for the past 8 years. If I wouldn't be using it, I'd probably have abandoned the project a long time ago. https://www.digrin.com/

Tiling WM for Windows with XAML layouts: https://github.com/StackWM

I wrote a self-hostable control plane for Nebula (a Tailscale-like overlay networking tool), and have been using it for about a year: https://github.com/losfair/supernova

Built this because existing solutions like ZeroTier and Tailscale are trying to be too "smart" (auto-selecting relays, auto-allocating IPs, etc.) and do not work well for complex network topologies.

I am an ham radio and SWL listener and I created my own logbook.

A while back I read about the Oklab color space, and long story short I decided I wanted to create my own Neovim coloscheme. That led to sunburn.nvim[1], which aims to take advantage of the hue and brightness uniformity that Oklab provides.

At first I was using lush.nvim to build sunburn.nvim, but quickly it became a hassle to only be able to specify colors via RGB or HSL. My initial thought was a PR to add Oklab support to lush, but that framework does so much that it was hard to see where to start. So I ended up writing polychrome.nvim[2], which is a dead simple micro framework in comparison to lush.nvim, but does enough to take care of all the boilerplate, and supports a bunch of color spaces (which are converted to RGB on the fly).

I also wanted push notifications for when certain RSS feeds I follow were updated, because I suck at remembering to check in on things or check an RSS feed app. But I didn't want to pay for IFTTT or other bespoke solutions, so I wrote notifeed[3]. It's designed to run as a service on a server, and then check all your feeds at predetermined intervals and send the necessary webhooks based on your configuration. Feeds and clients are configured via the CLI and stored in a SQLite DB for simplicity.

[1] https://github.com/loganswartz/sunburn.nvim

[2] https://github.com/loganswartz/polychrome.nvim

[3] https://github.com/loganswartz/notifeed

The beginning of October I started working on an experiment: What if Ansible used python syntax instead of YAML. I'm focusing on a single-machine use case, and also Cookie Cutter use cases.

https://linsomniac.github.io/uplaybook/tutorial/

There are many, some never released in public, but Unison [1] font & font generator would be the most unique one.

[1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison

iOS app that uses the camera to check if my toddler’s eyes are closing. And if so, turns on the flashlight and plays a nasty sound.

We used it in the car when having her fall asleep before arriving would have caused problems (having to wake her up, not getting her to sleep in bed).

I've recently developed a money manager application for Android. I haven't uploaded it to Github yet. The purpose of this project was to get back into android development and have an app that doesn't sell your data. Also, the best thing about making your own app is that you can add any feature you want and make it work just how you like.

Presently, I'm working on an app to selectively enable/disable silent profile for contacts. It involves leveraging Android's contact groups to establish user profiles. When you activate a profile, silent mode will be activated for contacts not in it.

My profiling tool: github.com/lally/ppt

I needed really high quality performance telemetry ("profiling" is a mixed choice) for my PhD. You specify the payload type in an IDL and it generates types and transport code. Fill in a struct and hit save(). If the process is being observed, this'll copy the struct to a lock-free ring buffer that the observer injected in. Includes CPU performance counter support.

E paper calendar with sync to all of my online calendars and project planning tools. Not pc app :D

A very simple Android app that submits a page to hacker news, or looks up a link on archive.today.

I wanted to create a beer-rating app for my circle of friends, like Untapped and BeerBuddy, since they're quite commercial and have an outdated look. We currently use an Excel file.

The project is on hold though, after the wife complained about it being a time sink.

After using a Macbook for a while, I became very accustomed to the "drag with three fingers feature" (found in accessibility settings, as I remember). But I am mostly use Windows, and after getting a new Windows laptop, I really missed that feature.

There are apps for that, but I couldn't find any that is lightweight and able to get around some edge cases, like when while you drag with three fingers and let one finger up, it should let you scroll with two fingers, but let you to continue dragging if that was an accidental move and you put third finger back. And you have to address many such small details to have a seamless user experience with touch.

So I wrote my own, and have been happy with it everyday since. It works with any Microsoft Precision Touchpad certified devices, so driver-independent, but I found that implementation of it can differ from vendor to vendor, and it can malfunction on some. And it is very hard to debug without access to device, so I tested only on my laptop, and couple of my friends'. So due to it, I didn't try to make it widely available, and therefore it actually is for my own use. I'll leave the link if anyone want to try: https://github.com/klkvsk/precise-three-fingers-drag, but if anything, don't ask me, make a PR :)

I've built a cli tool to insert translations into an ebook file, converting a standard ebook into a bilingual ebook. I wanted to learn Spanish, and all other learning methods were too boring.

I've made a lot of progress with my Spanish this way (it's fun), so I started to build a language learning app based on the idea, but then decided I do not want to build language learning app, so instead I just added a web UI layer over the tool:

https://bilingualebooks.net

I've just finished it. If you want to use it, note that only DRM-free epub ebooks are supported. Since it's tough to find DRM-free ebooks, especially in foreign languages, I've included a section in the FAQ on where to find them.

Pretty much most of the app I create is for my own dogfooding.

There is no better way to finish something that write a replacement for something that sucks.

They can be found here https://noben.org

I've been making a CLI for advent of code ( https://adventofcode.com/ ) this week: https://github.com/VitamintK/wang-aoc-cli

It's been satisfying!

I created a script to monitor the restocking of refurbished MacBooks on Apple's website and to send notifications to my Line account.

I've built https://vokabeln.io to memorize German vocabulary from YouTube videos and websites. Currently at 16000 swipes.

Over Covid, I got really into solving the Rubik’s cube. I couldn’t find any minimalistic apps to help me time myself and learn algorithms. So, I ended up writing an app for myself, which I later showed off on Reddit.

People really seemed to like the design, so I cleaned it up a bit and made it available to everyone. The site (https://cubedesk.io) has been free to use for 3 years and has 50k users.

Most recently, I've been working on an email marketing platform to help me email those 50k users. I noticed that emailing all those people was expensive and tedious, so created and launched https://cc.dev

Browser for Kindle highlights: https://github.com/karlosos/kindle_clippings_webapp

- No account needed

- Importing `My Clippings.txt` from your Kindle, exporting as json or markdown

- Browsing highlights from books, bookmarking highlights

You can check the demo here: https://karlosos.github.io/kindle_clippings_webapp/#/demo

Not directly for myself, but a friend who has a small event business.

I created a web based mobile ticket scanner.

They said the ticket companies would take huge subscription fees for their scanners and they didn't need all the features they offered.

So, I bought a 30€ Bluetooth scanner, wrote a small UI that allowed them to create events and check that each ticket is only scanned once.

Of all my software, this is probably the most regularly used one, lol.

Minor annoyances turned into OS projects:

* gui to start a timed shutdown on windows: https://github.com/a-sync/shutd.exe

* shell command to send or pipe content to slack: https://github.com/a-sync/slackr

* a discord/telegram/slack bot to show live server info, player list and population graph https://github.com/a-sync/game-server-watcher

This one was just for fun, a synchronized video player/chat app to watch movies/shows together online: https://a-sync.github.io/ws.cinema

https://www.hazumi.news/

I made Hazumi News for web and iOS to browse HN. It's the only side project that I've stuck with for years and still enjoying working on.

It's more of a modern presentation layer on top of HN with images and summaries of the linked article. The goal is to try connect a more casual audience with this amazing trove of tech news and discussion.

Funded mostly by myself and the handful of people who subscribe for €1 per month on iOS.

When discovery on Nostr was way worse I needed some way to find accounts to follow. So I built a quick Postgres based search:

https://sps.bio/?q=scifi+-bitcoin+-russia+-mastodon

Beware of spam. I did not clean the data for a while.

Bold Contacts is for me to help my folks who have Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease: https://boldcontacts.org

It was a telegram bot during covid (India), The backend would look for vaccine availability by calling the govt covid api's for vaccine availability. Then it would would connect to a telegram bot and alert subscribers when vaccine became available with hospital addresses, and no. of slots available. It was limited to one state, there were similar bots but it was a good project to do :)

I came up with a file format for time-tracking, which lets me store the data in plain-text files in a human-friendly notation. I also built a corresponding CLI tool for evaluating the files on the terminal.

I’ve been using it almost daily for the past couple of years, and so far it has served me quite well.

→ Project site / docs / demo: https://klog.jotaen.net

→ File spec: https://github.com/jotaen/klog/blob/main/Specification.md

My dog would not stop scratching his face, so I made a habit tracker for me and my wife to try and measure the impact of various behavioural tweaks.

https://joshvince.site/blog/20230803_dog_days

Mini Cambridge Analytica - A PoC for psychographic targeting: https://objective-goldberg-0daad6.netlify.app/

I built a website to visualize a day as 144 rectangles, where each rectangle represents 10 minutes:

https://rectangles.app

These are all CLI...

https://github.com/jftuga/less-Windows - [not really mine, but I just help maintain the port] - GNU less compiled for Windows 10 & 11. Stand-alone version with no dependencies.

https://github.com/jftuga/gofwd - A cross-platform TCP port forwarder with Duo 2FA and Geo-IP integration

https://github.com/jftuga/spotprice - Quickly get AWS spot instance pricing - a bit easier to use than the aws cli; is also faster and has more features

https://github.com/jftuga/tcpscan - A standalone, fast, simple, multi-threaded cross-platform IPv4 TCP port scanner

https://github.com/jftuga/ipinfo - Return IP address info including geographic location and distance when given IP address, email address, host name or URL

https://github.com/jftuga/photo_id_resizer - Resize photo ID images using face recognition technology

https://github.com/jftuga/chars - Determine the end-of-line format, tabs, bom, and nul characters

Here is a fairly new Firefox extension that I created...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxcolorbox/ - allows you to change and customize browser Window colors. When you open a new window, it will have a distinct color. You can also change colors by clicking on the extension icon.

I hated leaving my window just to dig up info on a scene or cast when streaming on Netflix. So, a friend and I thought thought, why not build an AI layer for streaming?

Now, SceneXtras is chrome extension that lets you chat with millions of AI characters directly on Netflix. Imagine asking Tony Stark about his suit tech mid-scene. It's half-duplex voice-enabled for natural conversations.

Also, there's SceneGPT for when you're lost in a complex plot or can't decide what to watch. It's like having a film buff buddy, right in your streaming window, ready to explain who's double crossed whom in that foreign political thriller.

It's a passion project turned reality, thanks to AI leaps. Curious to hear your thoughts, especially from those who've felt the need for something more interactive on their streaming like Amazon's X-ray.

https://scenextras.com/

I made my own tab manager as a Chrome extension, it gives some statistics, and let me filter out tabs.

I wish the grouping API was available on Chrome, even if the docs say they are, they just don't work properly.

https://github.com/Jcparkyn/scrobburl

A scrabble-esque word game to play with my friend, and try out some modified game rules. Built with Elm.

I recently wrote a simple Linux "app" to render the output from a common USB infrared camera designed for android phones on a big screen using a raspberry pi zero: https://github.com/jcalvinowens/ircam-viewer

I wanted to automate important parts of the job seeking process:

https://getspence.ai

The one I'm working on is still in-progress: https://aiconstrux.com to build software with AI.

I plan to sell it, yes, but I also want it for my own use.

i created an apple watch app that lets you sync your own music library to the watch using wifi (much faster than the bluetooth channel all the other watch apps use)

it also gives you the option to play songs using either attached airpods or using the internal speaker (impossible using any other app)

it's called sync-sing :)

A book / library / reading progress app:

https://j11g.com/2019/11/16/foster-how-to-build-your-own-boo...

Everything at https://jacobdoescode.com/

There’s a calculator app, measuring app, and two music apps

I wanted a nice-looking RSS app. So created Twine, a cross-platform app written in Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform

https://github.com/msasikanth/twine

https://git.ishanjain.me/ishan/multicaster

This is a mdns repeater for (primarily home) networks. The "recommended" way is to use use PIM/IGMP but you can not control the specific mdns names that'll be repeated over the vlan boundary. There are a few other repeaters but nothing that would've worked for me so I wrote this. It still needs a few improvements around caching responses. mdns enabled devices do known prefix suppression which some times causes problems.

About a year ago I made a little wear os app to track the upcoming departures at the station near me - it was suprisingly useful (especially at big stations - sometimes you can make incredibly quick connections!), so I decided to genericise it to the point it'd work for other people (in the uk) as well! So far people seem to really appreciate it [0], which I'm glad about

Alternatively, for something slightly less polished, I made an app that connects to the spotify API, fetches synced lyrics for the track currently playing, and displays them on an electromechanical (flip-dot) bus sign from the 80s that's sat in my kitchen!

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.nthn.androi... (paid, but feel free to reach out if you want a free copy)

I run ads on amazon. I have around 40 campaigns running in the US, and a dozen more outside of the US. Adjusting the bids each day was becoming a chore, so I created a Chrome plugin that basically does the math for me and tells me what to bid.

I still have to go into each campaign but no more copying the data into excel or using a calculator to figure out what the bid should be. Probably saves me 30 min a day.

Grocery booker. It monitors things based on a weight pad and automatically orders then through online grocers when they are low and the total adds up to a certain amount.

Most recently, https://github.com/igor47/dcsm for managing secrets in docker compose repos.

I made SimplifyRecipe.com, a utility to get the crap off of recipe sites because I was genuinely sick of it.

Cooking with a standardized recipe view is just so much better.

It’s also free for others to use but I don’t think anyone outside my family does.

I created a language learning app (Macedonian to English). https://www.picowords.com/

PyCmd: wrapper for Windows' CMD.exe to provide a modern, dramatically improved interactive experience while maintaining ~complete compatibility: https://github.com/horeah/PyCmd

I started it many years ago for my own use, but it is an open source project and has aquired some public "audience" in the meanwhile.

It has a recent Linux port (beta quality) which brings the same interactive improvements when working with bash.

An app for my phone that tells me when the different types of trash are collected by the recycling company, so I can tell when it's a good idea to bring out e.g. the paper trash.

I find that manually reconciling my accounts (bank, credit card, etc) forces me to think about the money I spend. For years I used Microsoft Money. After they discontinued it, I even used their “sunset edition”. I got tired of having to keep a Windows box around for it, and it didn’t run well on Wine, so I wrote my own replacement. It has changed over time. I think it started out as a desktop app using Qt. The current version is a web app written in Go using html/template, and a rewrite is in progress that includes htmx. There have been versions ranging from curses to express and react. This has basically become my test program to write whenever I want to play with a new technology, as I know the problem space pretty well at this point.

I’ve also written code for Arduino and for rtlsdrs to read my smart water meter’s RF mesh network and insert the data into influx / Grafana. This project came about after my city utility office called me when I was on vacation to ask if I was filling a pool. Turns out a toilet had been stuck running for days.

Link aggregator. Started as a HN/reddit/lobsters clone but I pared it back so it just met my specific needs. Stopped using it recently though :/

https://links.ols.wtf/

I've built a wrapper for docker to simplify containerized development and interactive usage. It's similar to Microsoft DevContainers, but with different accents, and doesn't require you to use vscode.

It allows to easily spin up the SSH server inside container for Pycharm or VScode remote development, automatically sets a UID\GID inside container to the same as outside to help with permissions problem when files created in container are created as root.

https://github.com/hexfaker/doh

Created www.coachpoints.ai for team coaching because I felt the workflows were disorganized and broken for a very important aspect of growing as a professional

Check it and out and let me know if you'd use it.

Link to app - app.coachpoints.ai

Just some little perl scripts. One to randomize my playlists, while keeping all movements of a classical piece together.

A web page to record and graph my asthma medications and peak flow numbers. Impressed my doctor, if nobody else.

Another web page that started as a tracker for all the new beers that kept coming on the market here in Denmark. That evolved to tracking all my drinking and restaurant visits. Been using it since 2016, and improving it along the way. Now some 3k lines of more or less readable perl.

(edit: typos)

https://github.com/hbcondo/revenut-app

I built this web + mobile app (PWA) written in React Native + TypeScript that does simple revenue forecasting for a SaaS that uses Stripe.

Stripe's mobile app and others kinda do this already but some of their numbers can be inaccurate (as detailed in the repo's readme) so that made me open-source + solve an issue my own SaaS[1] has with Stripe.

[1] https://Last10K.com

I was a hardcodre user of notion, but it was super slow in the intial days. I was mainly using it for note taking, temporary copy pasta and to store code snippets. Felt like notion is a bit of an overkill and built a local first app that runs on the browser. Stores everything in locally in the indexedDB and is super fast to load. Check it out https:///snipp.in. Which is now being used by most of my engineering friends who know me, it's also open source.

Also, while working on maps, felt there weren't any good alternative to GeoJSON editor online so built something by spending hours, it's one of the best GeoJSON Editors out there which is free to use https://krata.app

I'm building a program in clojure that ties together Twilio, Chromedriver and Azure cognitive services to be able to access different test platforms (mainly ankiweb) to be able to quiz me by phone whilst I'm driving or walking.

I made https://www.bodyweight.fitness to help me create and track workouts in bodyweight fitness exercises, and my progressions between them.

As a true 'own use' project it has no onboarding, no marketing, but if anyone is interested in using it, let me know

recreation.gov notification "system" so i can seize the opportunity whenever a coveted backcountry permit opens up.

it's just a web scraper ran via github actions. i get emails whenever my subscribed permits changed.

i shared it with other people on reddit. they signed up through google form that triggered a gumroad payment link (via zapier). it also notified me about the new subscriptions so i could add them (via changes to the google form's google sheet and the notification triggered by zapier). i had two sign ups and donated the money to trail maintenance org.

Made a command line app in Go that recursively reads comic book files in a directory and serves them as a Opds spec[0] api so I can read comic books from my iPad using the Panels app[1].

There are more apps like this, but they all weigh too heavy on me because I simply want a directory three representation of my files and not be managing a library. Also it’s super low memory.

There is a similar Go project on GitHub, but that does not support directories mixed with files, and I don’t think it supports streaming comic book pages.

[0] https://specs.opds.io

[1] https://panels.app

This years I got involved in exploring anything 4 day week (4x8hrs), so I built:

- 4 day week job aggregator. Currently ~200 listed jobs from companies around the world: https://okjob.io/

- 4 day week companies. 120 hand picked companies hiring for 4 days (not seasonal 4 day week or 4x10hrs)): https://okjob.io/companies

- 4 day week calculator. A funny little tool to calculate the number of workdays you save before retirement by switching to 4 day week job:https://okjob.io/4-day-week-calculator/

A combat log parser for swtor (in Python), just using as much of the built in stuff as possible, organizing things into dictionaries. was CLI obv but it had a menu system that let me dive further into details then back up to top level view. It was very useful to see what works and what doesnt (in the game) from a raw data perspective. it allowed me to git gud as they say ;)

edit: another that springs to mind was a distance tracker for my phone using gps coords so i could see how far id jogged each session. it was educational buy my gosh phone apps are painful to make, it was the first and last one ill do.

My friends and I wanted a way to share expenses easily in a fair, based on revenues mostly. I created https://app.anacounts.com/ (https://github.com/anacounts/app) to do that.

A very simple and opinionated web-based rss reader: https://git.sr.ht/~oyvindsk/rss-web-reader (https://github.com/oyvindsk/rss-web-reader)

Main feature is just having something I can use effortless across all my devices.

Only runs on google cloud ATM, since it used their proprietary database =/

https://rentroy.co.za

I do bit of property investing in South Africa and needed something to evaluate all potential deals.

I created a Flask app called holly. It was originally made to record when I'd given my kids different medicine, but has now expanded to an event scheduler, meal planner, and checklists.

I created a small python library, a visual task-tracker with showing dependencies between tasks. You can create tasks either as Python objects, or as markdown files.

Made a simple and free pushup counter app that uses the depth sensor on the iPhone to count push ups. https://PushupCounterApp.com The existing apps I tried were subscription based / unreliable / overcomplicated. It's a WIP since I hacked it together over a few days.

I created a mobile and desktop GUI app for note taking, todo/task management and basic knowledge management. Focus is on simplicity and security. It synchronizes between devices using Dropbox but is at the same time e2e encrypted, meaning encryption and decryption happens on device, thus also no web UI. I use it daily

OP here.

Wow, this is cool. I never thought that this Ask HN of mine would result in so many replies by people talking about the apps they have created. It was fun and inspiring reading many of them, so far, after I checked back on the post today evening. I was quite surprised.

Anyway, it only goes to show that there is a lot of hidden innovation happening out there in the world. Great to know.

I'll now have to spend a bit or byte :) of time over several days at least, ha ha, checking out more of the comments, and the apps mentioned, for those that have links.

Nice way to spend some of the year-end partial down time :)

So once again, thanks, guys, for talking about what you built.

All of them.

A compass https://compass.nad27.net/

I just wanted an app to tell me which direction I'm driving and how fast. It works best while moving lol. I'm looking at how to expose other sensor APIs to make it more compass-like.

I've created an app to quickly launch timers on my iPhone. I frequently use timers during my day: for tea, naps and for my morning routine, so constantly changing the duration on the default app became a pain. I created Enchant to be able to launch timers using iOS widgets or Siri, and it's really fast and fun to use :)

I've published the app a couple of month ago: https://apps.apple.com/app/enchant-amazing-timers/id64460937...

I wanted a specific pair of Vivobarefoot trainers in a specific size that was our of stock, but at the time the site didn't have an "Email me when this size becomes available" option.

I wrote a tiny Bash script called by cron that pinged the URL every hour, parsed the HTML and sent me an email when the text "<option>Size 45 - Out of stock</option>" wasn't there.

Not rocket science, but I enjoyed the fact that it was so simple.

I created https://boxshadows.xyz as an interactive tool to simplify the use of CSS box shadows. Similarly, I developed https://selectors.info as a learning tool to classify selectors and combinators by type. We also made/use https://alwane.io to reorder color lists by palette, and it assists me in extracting colors from websites to study their color implementation. Additionally, we developed http://divize.io as a platform to practice HTML/CSS through a series of challenges. Lastly, http://front.tips is a directory I maintain for organizing interresting frontend-related tips I've discovered.

I built https://persumi.com to uplift my own blogs, and to turn text into audio (you can subscribe in your podcast app).

Then, once I realised there's no good tools to promote it, I built https://rizz.farm so I can promote Persumi.

decision matrix web app. features * automatic weighting & scoring * draggable criteria/choices interface

tag-based file manager CLI app * keeps all files/directories in a "~/t/multi./tag./structure./" * directory structure is kept in a hierarchical order based on tag frequencies - most common tags are always at the top level directory.

At one time the wifi password was altered every day at the office, so I wrote an Android app to get it and set up wifi on my phone.

I also have a bot to verify the agenda for my local consulate, because it is very hard to get an opening and they don't send alerts: you have to login and check the calendar.

A cmake wrapper / cmd runner / package manager thingy called fips. Hard to pitch it in a sentence but I've been using it for nearly a decade now each day for most of my C/C++ projects.

https://floooh.github.io/fips/

...I still hesitate to recommend it to other people over a pure cmake-based workflow though because it's very opinionated and violates some cmake "best practices".

I have a cli prompt that asks me each day if I'm doing client work for a certain client. At the end of the month it calculates the total, emails the treasury department asking for the invoice.

I also was unwary enough to build my own web framework over time, so part of the code I initially developed for a non profit to manage memberships is now also used as my status page to check on website status, hosting renewals, to keep a list of clients, organize invoices. I also use part of it in my house automation instead of something like home assistant. The interesting part is that developing a complex module for one project sometimes creates new possibilities for the others.

I am a freelance software engineer and have to track my time to write invoices. I got annoyed that I had to pick between something nice but closed-source and cloud-bound-for-no-apparent-reason and nerdy command line tools. I wanted something in-between: A low-key GUI that lets me see the tracking state in the task-bar and start/stop from there. At the end of the month I need to aggregate the worked times by client/project to copy-paste them to my invoice template. Here it is: https://github.com/ernestum/Wage-Labor-Record/

I built a dotfiles manager because I didn't like how any of the newer ones worked. I just wanted a newer, nicer version of GNU stow that doesn't require perl.

I (recently) created kubeconfig-bikeshed, a small CLI application to manage the high number of kubeconfigs (configuration/credential files to access Kubernetes clusters) that I have to deal with on a daily basis. It was also a nice learning experience with Rust, and I have to say I was much more productive with it than I was expecting to.

https://github.com/embik/kubeconfig-bikeshed

A half-backed GUI app to learn writing Chinese characters.

When I was in Chinese class I developed a pencil and paper system that enabled me to memorize writing about 10 words per day. It's simple: I should be able to write a single word in about 15 seconds. I usually memorized a 20-word list at once. Set a timer for 15 sec * len(words) and speed through it looking at a list of definitions/pronunciation. Pencil down when the timer goes off. Grade harshly, a single mistake means the word is wrong. As I'm grading I rewrite each word I got wrong. Then drill again with the list of words that I got wrong again. Repeat until no words are left. Occasionally restart with the entire list.

I wrote it in Python using PyQt6 and standardizing on importing Pleco flashcard CSVs since many of them are readily available for most textbooks. I have lots of ideas and little time to improve it, but it is useful already.

https://git.sr.ht/~zacstewart/renzi

Nice question! Let's see...

CLI - TOTP/2FA tool with fuzzy search - A script on top of timetrap, to type a number and change your current activity (emulating a Timeflip) - A simple view of % of time spent for each activity - A few scripts on Python, PHP or Go to automate stuff at work

CLI/Web - http://gemugami.com/week/ Get the current ISO week

Web - A site to ask people of their preferred time for a meeting, trying to find one working for all (quite difficult :) - https://eapl.mx/price/ Compare price and sizes/weights of 2 products to know which one is 'more' convenient - https://eapl.mx/twtxt/ A public view of my twtxt microblogging, and a single-user admin view - http://gemugami.com/time/ Get your browser's timezone

Not tools, but quite interesting - http://gemugami.com/hexclock/ An hexadecimal clock - http://gemugami.com/clock/ A decimal clock ('hours' from 0 to 1000) - http://gemugami.com/kcolc/ Time goes in reverse from 24h to 0 - http://gemugami.com/solar/ Shifts the time to be 7am at sunrise, based on your location - http://gemugami.com/holmes/ A scoring app for a board game

And a bunch of game prototypes, mostly to learn new stuff and game design

Mobile: Two RSS readers (one for news, one for videos), calendar, text editor, spending tracker, several games, wifi remote controller for esp32cam, euro coins collecting tracker, moderation tools, web browser.

Desktop: git client, music player, video editor, text editor, calculator, schematic capture and simulation soft, perfboard designer, to-do, spreadsheet, and about 30 one off tools and chrome extensions.

FinalKey - Hardware password manager - Includes a CLI and GUI client

DSTream - Bespoke music player for web - Includes web gui and android app

eepromlogic - LISP package for turning EEPROMs into simple programmable logic

RacingGPSTracker - Package for rendering a nice GPS overlay on top of gopro videos when road-racing.

superawesomedraw - For my (then) 2 year old son to learn how to use a mouse

justhpscan - hook scanner up to raspberry pi and scan via web gui, no drivers required so it can be used with any computer/phone on the network

u64view - bespoke client for receiving the video and audio streams from the Ultimate64 FPGA implementation of a Commodore64, for streaming on twitch

boilerController - The firmware and hardware for automatic startup and turnoff of my wood gasification boiler

chromogen - static image gallery generator for making online albums to share with friends and family

I've made many more small tools, but the above are what can be found on my github

Its still a work in progress. https://github.com/DumbMachine/pbs/ to use a keyboard to interact with web. It's like vimium but tailored to my liking:

- hints are acronym of textContent ( or metadata ) of html elements.

- A command bar with fuzzy search for browserhistory.

Helped reduce mouse usage, which I think was causing strain on my wrist.

Not really an app, but I really missed playing the 1997 multiplayer-only game QuakeWorld Team Fortress, so I forked it and made FortressOne. It worked! We play most days, and wonderful community has grown around it.

https://www.fortressone.org

I practice yoga almost daily in a yoga center in my city. There's a limited number of slots for all lectures and you have to register in advance. You can unregister more than 2 hours in advance without any penalty - as a result, many people register to lectures days in advance and unregister shortly before the lecture if they decide not to go. Many of the best lectures are almost always fully booked.

At first, I made a simple notification bot that checks the website regularly and sends a Telegram notification once a lecture is free. Recently, I added a script that logs me to the lecture automatically, so I don't have to follow notifications. Simple and useful project.

I made an automated DJ at https://cappinkirk.com because I like listening to hip-hop instrumental music in this style with on key mashups but I can't do it as perfectly as software can, also it has way more variety of combinations than I would be capable of.

rtpmidid[1]. After getting some hardware synthesizers and wanting to connect them without using a computer.. but being able to use them too using the computer I stumbled upon with rtpmidi the protocol and it ticked all the boxes I needed. I could connect all my gear to a raspberry pi, use ALSA sequencer to connect devices to each other with another of my programs AseqRC[2], and then use my synths from my DAW without touching any cable.

So after a fast prototype I created rtpmidid and I'm quite happy on how it works.

And it also helps with the USB ground loop noise that it seems unavoidable some times.

For some time I had even two Orange Pis connected to two sections of my gear, using USB gadget support so my MPC One could speak rtpmidi. MPC One has support to connect as host to MIDI devices, but as guest (connect to the computer) only in controlled mode which is not what I needed to convert my MIDI tracks to my DAW.

[1] https://github.com/davidmoreno/rtpmidid [2] https://github.com/davidmoreno/aseqrc

I wanted to have a way to type something in a meeting and display it to the person sitting next to me with as large a font as possible, so I threw together https://fullscreentext.com/

I've developed a GUI / workflow around converting bitmap images to vector traces. The first version was jquery and duct tape, the second version was react / material UI, the third version was a backend service and "forms" based application I made with the intent of hooking it up to another backend. I found other cool data sources to feed into plotters as well.

I have a half built CNC machine, currently stuck on replacing the mainboard because the first one I used died. I want to design a web UI around a pen plotter as a piece of artwork, not a slave to the "bored moms monetized cloud" like my Cricut is.

I took time off from this project because my career exploded. Things are finally getting a lot better. Looking forward to working on this again, experiences like this teach you how bad you really want it.

https://www.instagram.com/robotdrawsyou

Pomodoro webapp with an editable list of stuff to do during breaks, plus additional timers, radio … https://www.timerone.com/pomodoro

Chrome extension - view hyperlinks (internal and external links, phones, emails) https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/link-list/caifphhfa...

I enjoy looking for houses in my neighborhood and imagining what I would do if I were to buy it and fix it up.

So I built a quick little app that can reimagine a house from a single photo.

https://dream-house.clarkdinnison.com/

It uses Replicate API to send your photo to an AI model that is specifically good at detecting straight lines/edges (perfect for architecture applications) - then layers on a remodeling prompt I iterated on for a few weeks.

I found it a pain to find good recipes that fit my macros, so I built this simple little search engine: https://highprotein.club/

I basically just found a bunch of recipe sites that actually provide nutrition info and scraped them.

https://privmate.dimir.id/

Simple markdown note taking app that works offline in the browser and lets me save the notes in the browser local storage or export as txt.

https://www.posterramen.com/ - I was having fun with THREE and shaders, and created a tool for making simple posters quick.

I've written many over the years. Not all were published and some of them I don't use anymore. Anyway, here are a few examples:

* `inlinehashes`[1] - To help build the CSP of websites that I don't control the source/development.

* `worker-ddns` [2] - simple DDNS solution using cloudflare workers

* `kinspect` [3] - a web tool to quickly inspect PGP keys without importing them to my keyring.

[1] https://github.com/dethos/inlinehashes

[2] https://github.com/dethos/worker-ddns

[3] https://kinspect.ovalerio.net/

At first I read this post and I thought: nothing, but then I opened my gh account and saw a bunch of random stuff I made.

Here my favorites:

https://github.com/rafaeldelboni/cajus-nfnl neovim configuration / documentation, focused on working with clojure, that I wrote trying to convince an Emacs friend to jump into nvim. (It didn't worked he still on Emacs :D)

https://github.com/rafaeldelboni/nota Static Markdown blog/site using Fulcro & Pathom with no backend source that I did for my blog and for learning cljs + pathom.

https://github.com/rafaeldelboni/super-dice-roll-clj Discord and Telegram bot that roll dices using using commands like /roll 4d6+4 that I did for playing RPG on telegram and testing a clojure backend stack I built.

https://github.com/rafaeldelboni/Graphmosphere A Twitter bot that create random geometric pictures and gifs using only clojure and Java that used GH Action as post trigger. (Disabled because the new api pricing thing on Twitter.)

https://github.com/rafaeldelboni/paro Tool for managing dotfiles directories; Heavily based on rcm that I did for learning Rust. (Horrible code)

I made a CLI tool called Promptr that allows you to make changes to a codebase via plain English instructions:

https://github.com/ferrislucas/promptr

There’s a templating system (liquidjs) included which is useful if you have a library of prompts that you want to reference often.

You can think of it as a junior engineer that needs explicit instructions.

Here are a few example PR’s implemented by Promptr - see the commits for the prompt that was used to produce the code:

https://github.com/ferrislucas/promptr/pull/38

https://github.com/ferrislucas/promptr/pull/41

- https://github.com/dbeley/fdroid-insights: just a simple website to help me find popular and well-maintained F-Droid apps

- https://github.com/dbeley/lastfm_cg: a scriptable lastfm collage generator (it has been active on my Mastodon account https://mamot.fr/@dbeley for years now)

And on the same model as F-Droid Insights but with different data sources:

- https://github.com/dbeley/firefox-addons-table: to discover Firefox addons available on NUR repository

- https://github.com/dbeley/lpa-table: to discover Linux apps tracked on LinuxPhoneApps.org

I developed a beer price comparison website for me and my friends. This helps us discover the best beer for our beer tastings and identify fake discounts.

https://nextbeer.dk/

propertizer.com to find the best properties to invest. I had enough to visit property portals check stats, collect info from Airbnb, and sum it. I wanted a place where I get everything.

I wrote git-genie to automate commit message writing with GPT & pre-commit hooks, works surprisingly well (most of the time) - https://github.com/danthelion/git-genie

I created an app to improve faster at chess using puzzles and spaced repetitions. About a year ago I converted it into a public web app: https://chess.braimax.com/

Right now I'm in a hiatus in development (as I had to find a new job) but I'm planning to go back to it in some time.

Tactically I achieved a substantial improvement using it.

Christmas 2015 my SO got 4 thermoses for Christmas, so I built a simple wishlisting service and released it late 2016. It now has close to 11k users, and my entire extended family uses it every Christmas :)

An HN moderation browser extension.

A few years ago, I made a Telegram bot that I use daily to remind myself things I have to do: https://t.me/remembr_bot

You basically send it a message that says : "Pay water bill in two days at 9am", and it will send you a notification that says "Pay water bill" in two days, at 9am. You can also easily snooze notifications using handy quick-actions buttons.

It's free btw, anybody can use it.

https://github.com/daltontf/clipzoomfx

I wrote it to be able to extract exceptional plays from footage of my daughter's volleyball teams and be able to zoom in on each clip. Pretty much a minimal viable product.

https://factorhouse.io/kpow/

An enterprise toolkit for Apache Kafka (and now another for Flink).

I spent years working in large enterprise orgs, a few more working with distributed systems. Along the way I picked up Clojure and by the power of greyskull managed to combine all those factors into a company. Now I work with a small team shipping tools for programmers. Good times.

Today we have users in 100+ countries, but it started off as something I needed for myself / my team when working on client projects.

https://postacard.co - I wanted a dead-simple way to create a postcard from a pic on my phone/device and then mail it, without a required login/subscription/ad-laden/SEO'd-to-death interface etc.

Had the idea while on a trip with friends last year in Mexico. The postcards we sent were a huge hit with our boomer parents.

Six years ago I made this chrome extension[1] to see random photos from my Google Photos account in my new browser tabs. I had all these old photos but never an occasion to look at them, and it brought back a lot of surprising and fun memories. I recently ported it to Firefox for myself and it's bringing me joy again!

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/photos-new-tab/fplj...

I'm currently building Browser Actions for macOS (https://actions.work/browser-actions), because I like Shortcuts a lot for automation, and because I think that it's insane that Chrome/ Chromium/ Brave/ Edge/ Vivaldi have no Shortcuts support, and that Safari's could be much better.

It's an actual itch I'm having. (If anyone's interested, there's a TestFlight going on, see the website.)

I made universal CLI project where adding new function as is simple as adding new class with arguments parsed into an object.

It has 49 actions now even when I keep removing obsolete ones.

I also made PDF viewer for comparison of 2 documents - synchronized zoom and scroll, even overlay.

I built on top of the in-browser PDF document-reading app to help me curate, visualize, and recall personal knowledge as I read and annotate research papers; the app extracts data from documents such as URLs and references and makes it readily available to view or download - https://www.knowledgegarden.io

I wrote an app for bowling so we can track our scores. It got out of hand and now we have a RPi that connects via BLE to the app to configure a game so all throws are filmed, segmented and stored.

Our bowling scores haven't improved much but it's fun.

https://NextApex.co currently am one of a handful of registered users at our dynamic real-time link share (substantially inspired by HN) built on Clojure. With a newsletter every once in a while, with synopsis.

I built a Chess app called SpicyChess(https://spicychess.com) that has a training component which leverages spaced repetition and strict time constraint to increase your pattern recognition ability for tactical motifs. SpicyChess also allows you to "bookmark" a puzzle for review later on. The philosophy behind the training regiment is inspired by the following two books which have been very helpful in improving my game: reading Rapid Chess Improvement, The Woodpecker Method.

I built https://getweeklio.com/ mostly for myself, it's an app to organise weekly meal plans/shopping list that you can use with multiple users. I use it with my wife, since we had a child and it has been useful, thought it was mostly an excuse to learn react native at the time.

I started to add some more features like asking chat gpt meal plans and other things I have on my mind but I haven't gotten around implementing yet.

Then I thought: I might as well make it a full fledged product and see how it goes, which was an interesting exercise in itself, although I haven't promoted it, and the monetisation strategy definitely needs some work. Not many are willing to pay monthly for such a limited set of features. Maybe a small one time payment will do better.

Currently is on an hiatus as I changed jobs recently but I'd like to work on it some more.

I've been meaning to ask for some directions about marketing it to get some feedback. There's a handful of users that have tried it, but none even bother with the first month free trial to check the full version features. Perhaps these should be fully available for a time and then put them after the paywall again.

But building a product has helped me a lot on interviews so that's another nice outcome at least.

- An alarm clock with a single-click wake up time picker for Android, back when my schedule was unpredictable.

- Several games (for DOS, TI-83+, and later Windows or the browser).

- A wiki.

- A chatroom for our Tremulous clan.

- A forum for our travel group.

- Several programming languages - currently working on one as well.

- A budget tool that would take my transactions and group them.

- A web framework for Scala based on React.

Some with friends, some alone. Plus, as it goes, a bunch of things that never reached a usable state.

Built my own period tracker bot, migrate to gpt4 now: www.bearhug.org (the Facebook messenger version is not maintained and are planning to migrate to assistant api)

If you create collage (cut and paste) art using typography, you might find a tool I created this week useful. It cycles through randomly picked Google Fonts and lets you edit the text. I'm using it to create art inspired by Chris Ashworth (https://www.thisisme.art).

https://fonts.joeldare.com

I wrote my own version of the quickbooks pro timer app since the old one doesn't work on modern windows but I need it to track time to bill clients and I didn't want to use one of the subscription-based timers. Wrote it in Avalon so it works on PC and MacOS.

I wrote https://gardenate.com for my own use so I could get reminders for when to plant vegetables - it's expanded a bit since then.

A tracker thing for my son's in their first year. tracks sleep, food, awake, poos. easy hand off between me and their mum so we know when it's time for a nap or feed etc. got a cool radial data Viz where easy ring is 24h and the rings stack up. let's you see sleep patterns really easily. sorry no demo or screens as the data is all private and there's no security on there!

I wrote a Python client for controlling the smart home hub from IKEA, Dirigera.

https://github.com/Leggin/dirigera

I use it for controlling my home via a telegram bot and logging climate data to a database for interesting plots.

I mostly make small stuff for myself or to explore an idea or topic. Most recently I made a small CLI python app that moves my mouse to a specific area using cosine interpolation. The reason being I hate the youtube homepage's mouse-over autoplay "feature" and I found a spot on the homepage that will allow me to scroll through videos without having my mouse on a spot that will cause autoplay. So I made it so, if I'm moving my mouse, it just moves as I tell it. Once it's sitting, after a delay, it retracts the mouse like a pen at a bank. So I can explore as much as I want then, when I'm done exploring, it moves my mouse back! No more forgetting my mouse in a spot that causes autoplay.

It's small and simple but it makes my life better!

I wanted to be able to watch the onboard cameras of endurance races all on one (full)screen as some teams publish the live feeds on youtube during races. So I created https://videwall.com where you can add video players (or other web pages) from a URL and they are set up in an optimal way to fill the screen as much as possible.

I used it for the 24 hours of Le Mans and the next races and had a blast watching them that way :) It was also a good excuse to learn React.

I plan to add a few more features and write about the placement logic when I get the time for it.

I was tired of checking text files for texts that I need frequently (passwords, logins, accounts, snippets, server ips, ... ) so I created this clipboard manager to retrieve that data with keyboard shortcuts, then I polished and decided to publish it

in case you want to check (only osx):

https://shortexts.com/

I'm an elementary school teacher and sometimes build tools for myself. I made https://10f.io, a tool to create images for math teaching. I'm working on a tool to create hi-res number line images too.

three windows tools for my surface book (only first is device specific):

https://gitlab.com/WRFpcT/surface-tools

filcker-fix (ahk): fix top line flicker bug of SB1 and SB2.

cursor-keys (ahk): maps right shift + cursor to home, end, pgup, pgdown

event-filter (java): get event logs in useful text format

in theory some publications are available as torrents, in theory they are in batches zipped together and in theory one could, by requesting certain parts of the zip file using a crafted torrent client, download only the publication they are looking for, in theory

I've created Kernel Tuner (https://github.com/KernelTuner/kernel_tuner) as a small software development tool, because I was writing a lot of CUDA and OpenCL kernels at the time. I didn't want to manually figure out what best thread block dimensions and work division among threads were on every GPU over and over again.

The tool evolved quite a bit since the first versions. I'm also using it for testing GPU code, teaching, and it has become one of the main drivers behind a lot of the research that I do.

My oldest is my home page, I've had the same home page on all browsers and devices since 1998. It was Perl, then PHP, and it uses a text file as the database, and around 2000 was updated to XHTML and to have the ability to pull in RSS locally and incorporate that.

https://dee.kitchen/bookmarks/

Because it made everything I typically access available so easily, I took up resetting my browser each time it started, and then using private/incognito browsing when that became available. My browsing session is essentially ephemeral and I don't keep tabs open, I just reopen whatever I need.

I'm actually unsure how everyone else browses, do you all just start where you left off? You use bookmark toolbars? Just search for things?

I feel that what I do requires very low cognitive load, like it's mentally traveling light, no burdens.

This feels like a good time to rewrite it TBH... it's my only remaining PHP and JS is so capable now that I could just do this 100% client side and make the whole thing cacheable, except for the "fetch RSS" which could be simplified to a cron.

I wrote an optimized C++ FFMPEG player as a video surveillance system, initially to watch my pets in my yard, and then kept going adding (human) face detection, and then a DL/ML training scaffold, then Live555 re-encoding, then an embedded web browser, then I added tons of comments and turned it into a learning demo project. It's on Github, I still use it to watch my pets: https://github.com/bsenftner/ffvideo

An iOS (and MacOS) Hacker News Widget. Very simple, the links let you quickly preview the linked page and comments, read only.

https://imgur.com/a/QZ7NWlW

Moving from Android to an iPhone some years back, it was the only thing I missed. So far haven't released this to the appstore but if there is interest, I could.

https://www.mikebwilliams.com/chords/

Tool for teaching myself piano / real book chord symbols, scale degrees, chord progressions, etc.

Works best with a MIDI keyboard attached. Be warned... I've only tested it on my own computer, since it is truly for my own use.

CLI for Baltimore Y lap swim times today, https://github.com/brianzelip/lapswim.

Created an extension, for browser/email client, to quickly open web pages with selected text as input to save lots of time in copying and pasting. Initially intended to save my time in work, after making it generic now I'm happy to see others also finding it useful. https://quickowl.app

A simple google home app that triggered an IFTTT script. It allowed my kids to ask who was the best dad and say back my name. I was the coolest dad that day.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mustachio-redux/hbn... - made an offline version from the API based one a long time ago.

Not really public right now, but I have created a bunch of small services for tracking various data that is relevant to my life. For example: I only fill up at one brand of gas station (have a membership there) and I am interested which of theirs is the cheapest at which times in my area. So I have a scraper that uses their public website, dump it into a time series db and analyze it later. Now I pretty much only fil up on Sunday evenings from 18:15 to 18:45 at a cerain station because it reliably always has the lowest price of the week.

I created a Telegram bot [1] to help me keep track of expenses, grocery list, workouts, and random thoughts. The bot simply copies messages into a Google Sheet, which I then browse/analyze periodically. Some simple parsing logic splits the text into columns so that the data is already structured in the right way.

[1] https://t.me/gsheet_notes_bot

My new project has slow tests and I write deep stacks of patches. So I wrote a parallel git bisector:

https://github.com/bjackman/git-brisect

Many years ago, I built a personal budget software. It started as a simple dashboard to analyse data with my wife, then I added a telegram bot to insert expenses on the fly.

Made with Django

https://mixedname.com started as a command-line script to name our child, then added more languages and put up a web interface (actually nothing is dynamic all pages are precomputed)

I generally write my own infrastructure tools.

Most notable ones are:

- Nudge (CLI for Pushover): https://sr.ht/~bayindirh/nudge/

- Railgun (CLI for Mailgun): https://sr.ht/~bayindirh/railgun/

- Magazine Renamer (Auto PDF renamer): https://sr.ht/~bayindirh/magazine-renamer/

There are other older ones lost to the sands of time due to being inexperienced with these things. Nudge is being actively developed, Railgun & Magazine Renamer are stable. Another tool is on the design board.

snippy: https://github.com/barbUk/snippy To manage snippets with rofi or fzf on linux.

Bread.chainring.xyz

It’s for calculating bread baking recipes using bakers percentages

2 silly small ones:

* Small util on an ESP32 to turn my garage lights on when I open the side door.

* An app to track players I've played against before in Dota2 and pop up before a match so I can skip matches with players who I've found to be toxic.

From the last 2-3 years:

Web site for my sailing adventures. I upload a gps track, images, text. It parses the track, paints it on a map.

Small, android, no frills app for calling http backends, that arranges the calls in tiles. For very basic home automation.

A lot of non-AI, small bots for personal use. For example a bot that notifies in a group chat when a member did a new bike ride. Also collect stats so we can compare :)

Several tools for some games that I play.

I used to write everything in Java, but recent years more and more stuff is JS with Node. And more recently Go in the backend.

A home/internet file system sharing app.

Distributed test automation for the browser.

A WebSocket client and server.

A code beautifier for a great many languages.

A diff tool.

Some accessibility tools.

A website allowing to browse chords for variety songs (mostly french songs): le-chansonnier.com

A twitch button clicker thing that also keeps a track of how much points it saves you from clicking yourself.

I generally try to inspect the code of any extensions in my browser, but found it's too much work to also do it for the upgrades.

We used to play DnD with a TV screen flat on the table. The DM would show city/battle maps on the TV, and we could walk across them with our miniatures. We liked to play with a grid, but not all maps had one. So I whipped up a tool just to get a grid on a picture and save it: https://www.gridtool.xyz

A bit childish, but I've coded a sound button website for myself, where you can grab a sound from reels or tiktok (or YouTube), trim it and add to your own collection. It is stupid, but I enjoy poking my friends, colleagues and kids with those buttons. Male, 39y. It took me about 2 weeks to build, zero regrets, absolutely worth the time spe t.

https://4j.ee

https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help to extract description for command options (inspired by http://explainshell.com/)

For example:

    $ ch rg -Mt
           rg - recursively search the current directory for lines matching a pattern

           -M NUM, --max-columns=NUM
               When given, ripgrep will omit lines longer than this limit  in  bytes.
               Instead  of  printing  long  lines, only the number of matches in that
               line is printed.

           -t TYPE, --type=TYPE
               This  flag  limits  ripgrep to searching files matching TYPE. Multiple
               -t/--type flags may be provided.

See also: "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232

Years ago I switched from Firefox to Chrome and I was badly missing "translate on mouse hover" from Google Toolbar plug-in. Ended up writing it: https://github.com/artemave/translate_onhover/

I also spent years searching for a way to open file links in vim (all within a tmux session). Ended up writing it: https://github.com/artemave/tmux_super_fingers

i very recently started working on it https://tools.sayana.pk/. ideal is to keep on adding tools that i or other need here that anyone can use for free, without having to sell their soul for it

Resoday – habit and chore tracking calendar: https://github.com/rybak/resoday/

I track taking vitamins, doing laundry, exercise, etc. using this application.

https://www.coveapp.info/

cove is a self-hosted torrent browser that bundles a BitTorrent client, DHT indexer, and a web UI on your device. It provides additional functionality like automatic transcoding of resources for browsers and Chromecast. cove requires no external servers. The search capabilities, streaming, transcoding and other features are operated entirely on your device.

I made this by cannibalizing various torrent components I had built for various separate projects. Some components are open source some are not, but the big ones you can find on my GitHub profile https://github.com/anacrolix

I created https://kidsclock.quaxio.com/ to help my kid learn to read analog clocks. He mastered the skill before I finished the app (works fine on desktop, not yet fully functional on mobile). I love to create these kinds of very simple webapps to keep kids busy at e.g. restaurants.

I bet there are tons of similar analog clock apps out there but mine is 100% free and open source (https://github.com/alokmenghrajani/kidsclock), without any tracking or ads.

I just launched WhatHappen, an audio RSS reader that supports voice control... then this thread popped up while I was testing the new version 1.7.7.

I think it would be really cool if anyone other than myself could like it

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.whathappen https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whathappen/id6473885439

I just launched WhatHappen, an audio RSS reader that supports voice control and touch guard,

then this thread popped up in app while I was testing the new version,

I think it would be really cool if anyone else like it too!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.whathappen https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whathappen/id6473885439

One of the first things I learned to write for myself when I was a teenager was a diary program, written for DOS. I think I wrote it in QuickBASIC. Then later, I wrote another one using Modula-2. I believe I wrote another one after that using C++. (I'm going to have to dig up a copy to read those entries I wrote years ago!)

Anyway, earlier this year I thought it would be neat to have a journaling app that had the UI of twitter, so built it and finally released it recently: https://minders.ussherpress.com/

I have been recently using a task manager app that I made myself as a beginner project called https://simpletaskmanager.vercel.app

Similar to others here, I've made way too many projects to count, but some of my recent favorites:

1. https://mapofthebest.com - Simplifies finding the best restaurants & bars around the world

2. https://barspro.com - Helps me identify the healthiest energy & protein bars

3. https://www.foodie.bot - Automatic restaurant reservation checker & booker

I'm starting to realize all my projects are food-related...

https://iAmAgile.io

My dev team were falling asleep during our plannings/refinement meetings. So we've built a tool to keep everyone engaged. Worked surprisingly well

I made a simple web site to easy share photos and videos with my elderly parents (early 90's). They are not tech savy, and we live in different countries so it is rare when i can show them in person new snap of the family... They don t use facebook and get confused easily if i share photos throught whatsapp.

It is a simple interface, read-only (so they don t delete photos/videos from their devices as they have done already) and also private.

My extended family ia using it as well.

I might turn it up as a saas product but needs to find the time...

Https://m.emori.es

I built a sort of meta webapp for online collaboration. Began as a side project to mess around with WebRTC and browser apis. Now, I’ve got something like Zoom but with tools like terminal sharing, a whiteboard, and even GPT inside (everything e2ee).

Now it's my playground for new technologies and ideas.

https://oorja.io

https://github.com/trypromptly/LLMStack - started working on this as a wrapper over OpenAI's endpoints for another product and it gradually became this.

Another project I worked on for my own use was a network isolated, lightweight video monitoring system. Around 5 years ago, I was looking to install a camera in our living room. I couldn't find anything I trusted that worked completely offline without some companion app pinging their servers. So I bought a basic IP camera on Amazon that supports rtsp and a raspberry pi. Created a fenced wifi network and added the camera to it.

Had an FFmpeg process read camera stream on demand and write to local buffers. Wrote a simple python server to listen for incoming connections on a different interface and stream the video on API requests. Then built an android app that talks to the python server to stream video on demand.

Also installed motion (https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion) on raspberry pi to detect motion in the video and store those snippets to local storage. With motion running, the adapter I was using wasn't delivering enough power resulting in storage occasionally unmounting and raspberry pi restarting taking the camera system offline. With motion detection disabled, the entire setup ran reliably for many years.

A personal journaling web app that records my voice, sends it to a speech-to-text API, then sends that text to ChatGPT to rewrite it in a style of my choice (bulleted list, casual, professional, etc). Then saves that as a markdown file for viewing in the same web app. Pretty easy to make and I really like journaling with my voice.

https://github.com/agentcooper/telik

I was tired of YouTube website UI, so I created a simple macOS app to track YouTube channels and playlists. It is called Telik and available both as open source and for a small fee in Mac App Store.

Due to tax payments being weird and uneven where I live (Austria) and having a number of other upcoming expenses, and considering moving flats, I wanted to understand what I'd be able to afford (in terms of cashflow) so I created https://whenwillirunoutofmoney.com/ mainly for my own use.

Was just working on https://github.com/adityarsuryavamshi/Sniper which is a Manifest V3 extension which does dynamic user action execution without needing `userScripts` permissions.

I was mostly interested in solving a very specific problem for myself (basically poll a website behind auth + 2fa and react/notify to changes) and since I also had recently gotten into frontend decided to also try out building extensions.

I knew about Tampermonkey and such but had never used them, and I also wasn't sure if they would be long term viable with MV3 coming in. Moreover I also wanted to explore some way to keep options open in case chrome ended up being very heavy handed with extensions, in the process I discovered there are still a lot of things you can do if you really really wanted to bypass the current limitations.

In the end though I personally decided to use Violentmonkey instead of this, but this could be an alternative direction for others who don't/can't use dev mode for extensions.

In my job I am constantly given two lists and needing to vlookup on them. After spending so much time opening Excel to do this, I wrote a simple app and compares two lists of strings and gives you the shared items or unique items from the left or right.

https://github.com/adderthorn/CrossCompare

I created PyLaunch, a web UI for running scheduled Python scripts. For my personal use, it has usually been to send daily/weekly notifications about things: weather, metrics about my projects, news about TV shows and video games, shopping/prices, etc. I am basically sending stuff to push notification services like Pushover or Ntfy.sh. It has been working really well. I was surprised to see a few sign-ups already in less than a month.

If you're interested: https://pylaunch.com

I've developed some of small tools and websites(primarily using Go and templating techniques)

- Pasty: A pastebin alternative that I regularly use. (https://github.com/abcdlsj/pasty)

- Golink: A straightforward URL shortener that uses 'go/' as its domain.(https://github.com/abcdlsj/share/tree/master/go/golink)

- Readability: This tool strips down websites to their clean, readable content. For more information, visit my blog post at <https://abcdlsj.github.io/posts/write-a-readability-tool.htm...> or view the code at https://github.com/abcdlsj/share/tree/master/go/readability.

- Gnar: My personal alternative to tools like Ngrok or FRP, crafted for my own use. (https://github.com/abcdlsj/gnar)

I'm excited to share these with the community!

I use a lot of Adventure Game Studio so I ended up adding things in itself to make it easier for me. But additionally I created agstoolbox to help me organize different projects using different versions of AGS and to be able to automate build pipelines with AGS.

https://github.com/ericoporto/agstoolbox

When I localized my first iOS app (https://watchful.cam), I created some scripts to translate the strings with GPT-4. I also hired professional translators to proofread the translations, but I had to spend hours copying and pasting the strings back into Xcode.

I decided to create an end-to-end solution with a nice user interface, and the result is Local Hero (https://localhero.dev). You can import your strings from Xcode, translate them with GPT-4, and share links for others to edit your translations. For quality control, you can translate the translations back into the source language. When you've finalized your translations, you can easily import them back into Xcode.

The prompts sent to GPT-4 include the comments associated with your strings for context, and you can also provide additional instructions to ensure more accurate translations. For example, you can instruct the language model not to translate your app's brand name.

So far I haven't done much to promote it, and it might just remain mostly for my own use, but if you get a chance to try it out, let me know what you think!

Automated copy / paste from access to SAP

Shipped two iOS apps so far:

1. I built https://pixelist.app as an extremely minimalist habit tracker, incorporating ideas from Atomic Habits and other similar books. ~3 years ago there weren’t many great habit trackers (as opposed to todo-lists), but now there’s been an explosion of them; IMO it’s still better than others in its simplicity, ability to quickly update your checklist for the prior week, and ability to self-rate “intensity” of completions. Still using it many years after the initial prototype.

2. I’m building https://mujo.app to replace my paper journal as a classical guitarist; think “Fitbit for musicians”. Knowing several pro musicians, the industry largely prefers paper or Google Docs/Sheets, due to existing apps being too complex. The UX is inspired by a simple digital metronome, adding modular widgets to record practice time, take notes, count repetitions, save tempo for exercises, etc. It’s niche, but I use it every day and love it.

I wrote a desktop and mobile app in Flutter that helps me quickly calculate state and federal taxes as well as after-tax income for my freelancing work.

MonsterWriter

A task timer that helps me stay on task trying to get multiple things done at once in my free time; highly configurable and controllable. I've always wanted to turn it into an Android app, but it's written in a dead language for a dead platform because that's where my skills ended, and I wouldn't know where to start.

I built WattsApp (https://wattsapp.co) to let me see the battery status of my second phone, then i figured i could add a social spin to it.

20 years ago, I built a CLI application for learning English. Kinda like Duolingo in the sense that it was mostly vocabulary and had some gamification. IIRC it did actually make a difference.

I created an app with share a file and watch it with someone https://github.com/LucCADORET/comeover . It works with WebTorrent (torrent for the web over WebRTC), has a wasm ffmpeg embedded for manipulatin the video file. I used it with my girlfriend a lot. I honestly couldn't tell you why I didn't use Discord directly though, as this is mostly obsolete now (unless for the quality of the video).

- I made my own budgeting tool that mapped to my own personal ideas, using my bank's API[0]. Not using it anymore (transitioned to different kinds of budgeting that need either less apps or none).

- Also made a PHP SDK for said API [1]. Has a handful of users, but looking to transfer it to someone else in the community who is more involved with that community right now.

- Made a small server tool that tracked South Africa's loadshedding schedules and would issue Minecraft rcon commands to save the world, warn players, and safely shut down the machine prior to the scheduled power cut.

- Rolled my own Ansible setup for Nextcloud and a handful of other services (these days I'd rather use yunohost/sandstorm/umbrel/etc).

- Currently working on my minimalistic (or rather, alternative) Laravel stack as a SaaS starter kit, called Toybox [2]. Currently waiting on FrankenPHP's Octane support to go live and then will transition to using that as the Toybox server. Right now it's in a bit of a WIP state. My intent is to use this as my own springboard for indie hacker type projects.

- Made a Carrd site for my Airbnb side hustle [3] - currently busy trying to sell the property again so the Airbnb side of it is shut down.

[0] https://github.com/nikspyratos/mneme-kai-nous

[1] https://github.com/nikspyratos/investec-sdk-php

[2] https://github.com/nikspyratos/toybox

[3] https://1105fourseasons.capetown

I made one related to this xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1360/

Several of us, which I found out by reading comments here, have each developed on our own our little utility to do the same thing: clean up / deduplicate / get rid of old files.

And it's not just a matter of using fdupes or jdupes: I created a database where I tag files based on their cryptographic hash (and size, for speed). For example a file can be tagged as "file with that hash can always be deleted" or "file with that hash can always be renamed to xxx".

I then can run my "bezerker" on entire filesystems and it'll delete files tagged for deletion.

I used the Blake3 hash for speed but I also saved which hash is used, so if something much faster comes up, I can switch (I'd still need to use Blake3 for the hashes already in the DB but that's no issue).

I did this because I got tired of having for example the wife and mother-in-law coming with yet another USB stick, with yet another "directory inside a directory inside a directory with family pictures and movies from 2017" or whatever and having to delete for the ten times that same blurry picture or that same little 3 seconds movie taken by mistake etc.

So, basically, instead of lamenting, in that xkcd 1360 style, about old files and old directories, I made my own little utility to get rid of the problem once and for all.

Works wonder but as you asked: it's really for my own use and I kept it private.

That said I take it there's at least some interest in a public / open-source utility doing that: otherwise there wouldn't be several of us here on HN (and certainly elsewhere too) developing our own solution for this problem.

Grasshopper (tab manager extension for Firefox)

I'm currently working on it, and I use it myself for all tab management.

I use it in all my firefox profiles since it can be used as a sidebar and as a popup for smaller windows.

https://sim-atc.com

Do online ATC on VATSIM and hated being unprofessional. Gives you airport names, abbreviations, and helps with some calculations.

Surprisingly annoying to get airport data.

The one that the most other people found useful: Remote Control Collection. It's an app that allows you to control your PC or Mac from your Android or iOS smartphone while connected to the same network. It also was available for Windows Phone and BB10 back in the days.

I've built it about 10 years ago for myself because I was too lazy to get up from the couch to control my media PC and the existing apps were all terrible to use. Turns out many people found good use for it, over 10 million across platforms by now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.steppschuh...

An app to remote control my home theater and all its various devices as well as my HTPC.

https://github.com/nicko88/HTWebRemote

Originally it was for myself, but then I expanded the features and devices that it supports for friends and other home theater enthusiasts over at the AVSForum.

A personal budgeting app for my household that shows instant effects of every financial decision into the future (up to 40 years)

In my spare time I created Dash. An app used to track metrics from Strava in the form of iOS widgets. Officially Strava hasn't done much on this front, so I took the matter into my own hands. After two years, I still use Dash every day. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/dash-widgets-for-strava/id1556...

I created atbswp[0]. When I was daily driving Windows, I was using tinytask[1] at one point, I switched to Linux full time I didn't know about such an app, so I wrote it for myself.

0: atbswp.com

1: tinytask.net

A monitoring/configuration system for the various mixed Windows/Linux/MikroTik/Cisco environments I manage. It's absolutely re-inventing the wheel, but since I could just not find anything existing that really worked for me (heh!), I'm now dragging that particular millstone along as well.

It mostly connects to hosts over SSH, and uses CLI commands to gather data and make configuration changes as needed. Think things like NMVe storage health, disk space usage, Windows AD/Exchange/SQL/VSS health, Docker containers, reverse proxy mappings, Netflows hinting at BitTorrent or other data exfiltration, finding a MAC on a port, configuring VLAN access for a port/trunk, Wireguard tunnels, etc.

It's absolutely horrible, code-wise, since I tend to use this project to experiment with just about anything I think of. Current rewrite is about 2 years old, C#/.NET 5->8, UI using Tailwind and htmx, plus chartjs for the pretty pictures, although I have some custom rendering things for switch ports and traffic. Data store is SQLite, with some hacked-on time series features, and this is probably the most terrifying part of the whole mess, since I explored some really bad ideas there. But that also lead to some very good stuff for other projects, so possibly still a net win.

Scheduling events with lots of people and timezones was always a pain. Stick an epoch time into a url for a static portable timer.

https://aisle99.com/cd/?d=s5ub7o&t=Game%20Night!

During lockdown 1.0 in the UK I wanted to get tv news from NL so as to get a second view. I’m from the UK but speak Dutch as a second language.

Anyway, I wrote a C++ (boost) command line tool to brute force MAC addresses to a popular illegal IPTV service out of Russia. The server had > 9000 channels available though I was only interested in the Dutch ones.

I’d feed the MAC address into Kodi’s Stalker Client.

tuido: https://github.com/NiloCK/tuido - a tui that scrapes various text format files for things to do, with some nice value adds.

skuilder: https://github.com/NiloCK/vue-skuilder - a flexible SRS environment, which I currently use myself for harmony / ear training piano stuff, but also with my daughters who are learning to read.

Lately I've also made a couple of webextensions that layer some power tools on top of chatGPT (search past chats, faster keyboard based nav beween chats, faster keyboard based copying of gpt produced snippets). Also a cli utility to bundle the current directory into a zip file in the clipboard so that I can quickly share small projects with chatGPT.

(It feels a little weird to me that OpenAI's default offering doesn't offer more power-user friendly functionality off the shelf).

All of my pet projects can be found as real tools or services elsewhere, but I built them for myself (or in the case of Eurotripr) as a hope to monetize one day.

- Book tracker to track books I want to read (for self, with kids) and will randomly suggest a book from the list i should read next if I am unsure. It tracks my progress through reading the HUNDREDS of books I add to my reading list and estimates how long it will be until I am through with my list...far too long.

- Soccer Score 'pickem' game to play with friends during world cup, Euros, and multiple leagues. I don't like Fantasy sports b/c too much time/attention, and I can just add the leagues we follow only.

- Eurotripr: a tool to plan trips to Europe and track current average costs in european countries and cities for planing purposes.

- an "Intrview status tracker" to help me create interviews with other travelers for my Eurotripr project. I can email an invite to a traveler I want to interview and from a bank of over 150 questions it generates a simplified interview of 10-15 questions, tracks the interviewees progress, notifies me when they have submitted the 'completed' interview, let's me know what percent of the questions they answered. I can provide feedback and request further detail for the responses from interviewees. Plus it will track the status of each interview request: declined, in progress, completed, published. So at a glance I can see how many pending interviews I have to stay on top of or publish.

- A cycling tool that provides a basic 6-8 week cycling plan to get me from 0 miles to riding a century by the end of the plan. I had plans tot try to monetize this with a stripe checkout and if you finish the century (100 mile) ride and don't miss more than 2 rides per week during th plan, you are not charged your money, but shiny object syndrome got in my way.

A ML powered tech news aggregator (I don’t advertise it as such anymore because it doesn’t really excite anyone apart from me): https://dupple.com/techpresso

I use it everyday alongside 25,000+ people to stay informed.

I'm pretty sure that to this day, I am its only user, but it's fascinating how a relatively simple bash-based continuous delivery script can power the build & deploy pipelines of some quite complex and large-ish projects of mine: https://github.com/manuelkiessling/simplecd/

Not really an app, but I made a Firefox extension that sorts YouTube tabs by video duration, which I use every day

I've been making a VR game Rogue Stargun (https://roguestargun.com) for 3 years on the side.

I don't work in VR or gamedev, but I do enjoy making models in blender. I was able to model roughly half the assets in the game and set up an elevenlabs.io integration in unity for AI voice generation.

It's almost exclusively been for my own entertainment, but I hope to get a beta release out by Christmas.