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1901 points l2silver | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.954s | 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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JKCalhoun ◴[] No.35740334[source]
I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up local video content to a schedule I create.

The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an evening movie, some late-night content, then the Indian head and "We Will Resume Broadcasting Tomorrow Morning...."

It fills dead airtime by choosing randomly among (literally) thousands of YouTube short clips I have on the drive — or showing a title card indicating when the next show begins.

Partly it's a fantasy — to have my own "channel" with my own scheduled content — my fantasy station.

Partly it serves to put on content I would otherwise not be inclined to pull up, double click and watch. It adds the serendipitous element to TV watching that I miss before streaming. The movie "Charly" (1968) just came on last night and I am sure I have not seen it since I was a teenager — had to stop what I was doing and watch a few scenes I recall vividly.

Today's lineup here: https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/

(Since the schedule is in JSON format, it was easy enough to make a web front end to display today's schedule.)

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1. Fatboyrunning ◴[] No.35740747[source]
What a great idea! Are you inclined to make a guide? If so, my old-school wife and myself would be grateful.

Otherwise, I will enjoy the fun of figuring it out for myself some day.

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2. JKCalhoun ◴[] No.35740819[source]
I'll open-source it when I get the embarrassing bugs worked out.
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3. joh6nn ◴[] No.35741159[source]
I encourage you not to be embarrassed and to simply opensource it. To err is human; anyone giving you grief because of bugs doesn't deserve the effort you've put in. And opening it now could actually bring assistance in getting those bugs fixed, while simultaneously benefitting everyone who wants to do something similar but isn't sure where to start
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4. giantrobot ◴[] No.35746195{3}[source]
I won't speak for anyone else but sometimes "bugs" in more about process than code. I have a similar project as the GP and am not currently interested in open sourcing the project because there's a lot of bespoke elements and manual setup process. I don't want to have to make a README describing all the process steps that make my code actually useful.

For me, on my hardware, on my network, I've got a process that works. It's a non-zero amount of effort to generalize the description of that process.