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

Blind developer here; I often write tools for myself to perform some task that is not well supported by my screenreader. For example:

* I wrote an add-on that allows me to read HN comments in a structured way. A typical screenreader would present page in a linear manner, so you'd have to read all replies in order, which is quite tedious in popular posts. My add-on parses the page and identifies the level of each comment, and then I can navigate to previous/next comment at any level. So I can quickly check top-level comments and then read replies only if I'm interested.

* Another add-on makes Jupyter edit boxes to work with my screenreader. Jupyter was requiered at my company , so I either had to write that add-on or else. The way it works is that it sends Control+C Control+V keystrokes to the browser to retrieve contents and then presents them to me in an accessible window for editing. When I'm done it would Control+A Control+V new content back to edit box.

* BlindCompass - iOS app that I wrote for myself to navigate on the streets. One of the problems of blind people is that it is easy to lose the sense of heading, e.g. where is north vs South. So BlindCompass would read my heading and present it as a two-pitch sound, that allows me to deduce rough direction. It's also easy to figure out the right direction and just maintain it, so with BlindCompass I can cross large open spaces easily.

BlindCompass sounds (pun not intended) brilliant! Did you have inspiration for this or was it an original idea? Not any less impressive either way, just curious as someone who’s not at all family with this space.

Reminds me of season 5 of person of interest where the super intelligent AI known as "the machine" is giving relative directions to a character using ascending tones for right and descending for left, or something like that. The other character preferred directions in positions on an analog clock.

Reminded me of this: https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/. Saw this linked on HN somewhere back in 2012 or so.

That was actually season 2! The final episode, I just watched it last week on a rewatch of the show. A lot of it feels pretty prescient right now, although not quite as intense as when the Snowden leaks happened and confirmed all of the government illegality of the show but none of the AI lol.

Reminds me of the train puzzle in Myst!

Haha, this was my immediate thought as well! That was awesome. Root is a badass.

As the sibling says this was the season 2 finale. There were other similar instances.

S02E22 "God Mode": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 (3m54s)

BlindCompass is neat! My child told me that she had learned about the existence of compass implants and wants to get one. Would that be useful from your perspective?

Implants? Sounds too hardcore. But I remember some people talking about compass anklets; you put one on your leg and it gives a signal (vibration?) on the north side. They said it can greatly improve your orientation on a hike, even if you do not pay conscious attention to the anklet.

(This happened years ago, I do not remember more details.)

Those are pretty cool screen reader add-ons. Do you use JAWS, NVDA, or something else?

I use NVDA. Here is that add-on if you're interested: https://github.com/mltony/nvda-browser-nav/

I got the idea when I was learning to cross a wide street with a white cane. three lanes in each direction - and it proved to be a challenge because I would veer left or right and frequently get confused and lost. Then I thought a compass would be helpful, but a quick survey of compass apps on iOS showed that they are either visual, or show your heading as a number that can be read by VoiceOver, but it is still not very practical. So I thought that I need to encode heading as something that my brain can easily decipher during crossing the street. I have prior musical training, so that's why I decided to encode heading as a musical interval. This allows my app to communicate with about 10 degrees precision and in practice this is well enough to go on a straight line for long enough to cross the street.

Very interesting idea. I think it depends on precision with which that implant can communicate heading. If precision is 10 degrees or less, this can actually be extremely useful to visually impaired people.

I'm not blind but I wrote an EPUB to Text-To-Speech reader using Coqui (a really good AI TTS project). There are books I wanted to listen to while doing other things, and I couldn't find audio-book versions of them, so this worked out perfectly. It could be that I did not do enough searching, but I was surprised I didn't see anything out there that already worked this way.

https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts

Is this it? https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/blind-compass/id1546647415

I’m not blind but I have terrible time with directions and navigation. I’m gonna try it next time I have to stick to a general heading.

I see someones cane get hit by a car one time causing him to lose orientation and make an almost 90 degree turn in the middle of the road. If the cane is pointed towards or away from traffic people don't even stop anymore.

This was actually long ago but it stuck with me. Just now I realized what perfect analogy for life it is. You move towards something, something interrupts the journey and then you just continue, thinking you are moving in the same direction.

This is one of the coolest things I've ever read. If you don't mind me asking, I'm really interested in how you read, write and edit code. What tools do you use? What's your typical workflow like?