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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: 0.218s | 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. turshija ◴[28 Apr 23 13:09 UTC] No.35740843[source]▶
About 10 years ago when Droplr deprecated their free packages (and went to paid only) I've made my own free alternative - https://pics.rs followed with its own screenshot app for Windows (C#) and later Mac (Electron) and still use it daily... I needed a screenshot tool which allows me to select a part of the screen, uploads it and immediately copies URL to clipboard. Now I'm finding myself using it without app by doing CMD + CTRL + SHIFT + 4 which copies image directly in clipboard and then opening pics.rs and pressing CMD + V (paste event triggers upload if it contains image in clipboard)

I haven't touched the UI since then, its ugly but it works, I've tried allocating time to make more modern version and even started refactoring it a few times with a few friends in our spare time, but unfortunately finding time next to full-time jobs and family is much harder than it was 10+ years ago :)

I've never advertised it anywhere except shared with friends and used it on some forums in the past, but it slowly grew to 10k registered members and almost 200k uploaded pictures. At this scale (~100GB of data) its very cheap to keep it online since its using very small amount of resources on dedicated servers where I host some other important apps with regular off-site backups, but if it ever spikes and becomes problematic financially it will at least give me more motivation to make something more serious out of it or just slam ads onto it and call it a day (worst case scenario, not a fan of it).