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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.236s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
1. jen_h ◴[28 Apr 23 07:11 UTC] No.35738407[source]▶
* A script that periodically screenscraped booked-up campsite reservation sites for cancellations during dates I wanted and sent me text messages (thanks, Twilio!). We got to stay at a bunch of amazing places at the last minute this way. We’re currently grounded, but I recently ran it again for my parents and was shocked to find it still worked!

* An Alexa app that provides a search interface to Old Time Radio shows on archive.org and saves your place (this was technically for my mother-in-law, the proof-of-concept with arcade sounds for my spouse). We all ended up using it a ton, though, it was kind of magical (the random function was really fun). I also set up an Alexa app to read me recent CVEs, but it’s more of a goofy parlor trick than useful. ;)

* A Rube Goldbergian bunch of terrible scripts that I can feed PDFs to, OCR, poorly-translate (using the expected engines or my own diymodel) and generate epubs from. And a bunch of scripts that convert Markdown to LaTeX and epub for personal book publishing projects.

Thanks for asking this question, it’s so neat to see everyone’s responses! I might ping my spouse on this post, too, who’s developed a crazy amount of personal projects that combine software and hardware to fixup our/our families’ lives.