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

1901 points l2silver | 2 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.507s | 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.
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weberer ◴[28 Apr 23 09:06 UTC] No.35739065[source]▶
I like to play Factorio, but too often lose track of time while playing. There's no clock in the game's UI, and no way to access the system's time through the mod API. So I made a script that runs as a process on the host machine that every minute, sends commands to the game's process to build a clock in the center of the map out of concrete. Its pretty cool because you can also clearly see the time from the mini map.

https://gitlab.com/smew/factorio-clock

replies(3): >>35739359 #>>35740037 #>>35740499 #
1. deskamess ◴[28 Apr 23 11:37 UTC] No.35740037[source]▶
> sends commands to the game's process

You can do that? Is there an API?

replies(1): >>35740548 #
2. weberer ◴[28 Apr 23 12:37 UTC] No.35740548[source]▶
I was using factorio-init to start the process. That script makes it easy to send commands to the in-game console.

https://github.com/Bisa/factorio-init

https://wiki.factorio.com/Console