Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

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Previously:

Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17148959 - May 2018 (42 comments)

Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27482397 - June 2021 (455 comments)

Ask HN: Tools you have built for yourself? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34492579 - Jan 2023 (45 comments)

Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232 - April 2023 (1809 comments)

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The Fintech I work at is an abbreviation & acronym heavy environment. I made this little command line tool that makes it easy for me to capture them whenever I encounter them and then I periodically export them to a Confluence page for the benefit of my colleagues. I had nearly 200 definitions in it last I checked!

https://github.com/dcminter/rs-define

Back about 10 years ago I wrote a PDF splitter / joiner / re-arranger. The document I needed to mangle was like 300 pages and no online tool would support that size without money. As I only needed the one file, and I thought it would be an interesting learning experience ...

I have a workout manager. It has 2 parts, one is to plan out what weights to put on each of 4 pair of dumbbell bars. It would take into consideration what I last did, and if the time was over a week ago offer to reduce the load.

The second application displays the exercise, with explanation and weights. It will toggle between a pair of exercises for 3 sets. I used chatgpt to configure the DB such that 2 exercises did not use overlapping muscles. It also displays a timer (big letters) so I can hold or move the weight in an appropriate amount of time.

I made the application because I was frustrated doing it with spreadsheets. I also hated changing weights mid work out. Now I set the weights and do the routine.

Many! https://GitHub.com/hiAndrewQuinn

Here I'll highlight a handful of tools I've made for helping Anglophones learn Finnish. They do a passable job at showing my approach to software engineering in practice, which is to say, terrible but gets the job done:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470 - Once called the best Finnish vocabulary flashcard deck on the Internet by someone who wasn't me. What an honor!

https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem - A simple CLI tool that un-declines/un-conjugates Finnish words, so you can look up their dictionary forms.

https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ - A daily, static, chronological archive of the Finnish BBC'w Simple Finnish news broadcast plus an accompanying English auto translation for every page.

https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti - generate Finnish-English sentence Anki flashcards from the aforementioned archive. Every six months on the solstice I run this myself and release a new deck, containing the usually ~5000 new sentences of the six months prior.

I have a web app cooking that extends the work I started with finstem into a personal vocabulary training machine, but I've never run a public facing web app for myself before so I'm terrified of the cybersecurity sins I'm almost certainly making. Someday!

A couple of years ago, as part of an effort to reduce my exposure to Google, I built a tool to extract photos and videos from a Google Takeout archive, match up the original and edited file versions (not a trivial task), embed missing exif metadata back into the images, and apply a consistent file naming conversion. I used it as an excuse to learn MAUI, and I still use the tool a couple of times a year.

https://github.com/andyjohnson0/TakeoutExtractor

On a similar theme, and as part of freeing myself from an Adobe lightroom subscription, I built another tool to extract metatdata from the Lightroom catalog and generate xmp sidecar files. Not technically hard, but it gave me some experience of using Sqlite with .net.

https://github.com/andyjohnson0/XmpLibeRator

I created a Pandoc filter to render some code blocks into figures for my PhD thesis. This is nice because one does not have to manage text and figures separately.

https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot

I put together some old 'wordpress' plugins (mainly buddypress, bbpress) and reconfigured them to create a basic project management platform. It comes with private groups that function as workspaces, equipped with a forum, docs and a lightweight task manager. I use it to manage side-projects. It works well and comes free so don't need to pay subscriptions to Asana or Notion. I published the site which is free to use but attracting users has been slow tbh. The site is allinop.com, I just wrote about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42908400

I made this tool recently to help with creating custom accessible color palettes for web/UI design: https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

There's lots of color tools but I couldn't find one with the features I really wanted in one place: full control over every color (vs some being autogenerated), checking accessible contrast between any color pairs (like against off-white background colors, vs only against white), and having a live preview of what the colors look like on a mockup.

Lately I’ve made working on tools that make it easier to gather context for ChatGPT. For example, copy the relevant code files to my clipboard.

Read about a few of them here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/promptcontext.html

Black Screen - Make your screen black by pressing a key combination. https://blackscreen1.com

MeetingGlass - Easy long video meetings through virtual frosted glass. https://meetingglass.com

Just built this over the weekend: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=weloveoo...

Takes your open code file, chunks it, explains each chunk over tts.

I made an app to experiment with life interventions and track goals.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

Last one was zfs-tool, a tool to help cleanup snapshots and regaining space:

https://github.com/sandreas/zfs-tool

making this paper reader https://youtu.be/uU_WeER2PSs for myself, because I need to organize all papers in one place and order them based on reading dependency. I also want to track my reading progress.

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