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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: 0.206s | 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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cobbzilla ◴[28 Apr 23 06:01 UTC] No.35737965[source]▶
My mom digitized many many old family videos, and wanted them online for sharing with family (including elderly & not-super-tech-savvy relatives). She asked me “should I just upload them all to a YouTube channel?”

Thankfully it was a phone call so my mom didn’t see my aghast expression. I prefer that big tech not index this stuff! Better to keep “in the family”

Seriously why does big tech deserve this free & super-private window into me & my ancestors lives?

So I wrote something[1] where:

* it’s fully free & open source

* cloud native

* plays on any device, any bandwidth, even if shitty

* yes my 90+yo Aunt Loretta (w00t to you Aunt Lo!) can use it on her phone & computer

* all data can be always encrypted, both source videos and derived/optimized assets

* and there’s more. please have fun

Basically point it at a source bucket on S3 or B2, and get your own private YouTube.

What I’ve built is very limited in functionality atm, but I believe the foundation is solid and plan to extend media support to photos and audio.

This can be a nice alternative to Plex/Google Photos/YT/etc.

It’s for when you don’t care about “building an audience” and in fact prefer that big tech can only see encrypted bytes from you.

Try it out and lmk!

[1] https://github.com/cobbzilla/yuebing

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actionfromafar ◴[28 Apr 23 10:14 UTC] No.35739449[source]▶
Not saying you shouldn't do this, but by publishing under AGPL plus

If you are an individual person or a not-for-profit organization, and your usage of this software is entirely non-commercial, you may use this software under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, summarized below and reprinted in full thereafter.

you have effectively created a new license and it's not completely clear to me what that new license even means exactly, except that obviously a company should stay far away from it.

With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.

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1. kubanczyk ◴[29 Apr 23 19:29 UTC] No.35756259[source]▶
> With regular AGPL, there is not a problem for a company to use the AGPL licensed software, it "just" can't offer Tivo-ised experiences or a website running modified AGPL code.

Nitpick: the company can use AGPL code wherever, it only needs to make the updated source code available to users. In many shops, devs would be perfectly ok with that, where legal depts are still mostly living in the world of "opensource it with MIT/Apache to make sure we can take it down tomorrow, just in case".