What's one of your favorite personal programs, and why?
I have a python script that uses my phone's haptic motor to produce morse code. Its not at all important, but it feels cool to be able to read a notification covertly. So what are some of your favorite programs like this?
My local newspaper publishes a puzzle called "The Challenger" (where you guess what numbers in a 4 x 4 grid will add up to the totals at the end of each row and column). It frustrated me because there's no one right answer -- you were just supposed to start guessing numbers until you stumbled onto a sequence that worked.
So I wrote a nice elegant program that crunched through every possibility (using 12 nested loops), eventually spitting out solution after solution after solution. The first time it produced a valid solution, I was thrilled -- and from then on I felt like I'd already somehow solved all the puzzles in advance.
Until iodine hit the scene I had my own DNS tunneller that could get a
short "Sorry honey I'll be late home for tea" message out in
situations where a nearby WiFi network would relay a DNS request.
I wrote my own web-based "scratch notes" program to aid my daily research activity with tons of quality of life features suited to my own workflow (autosave, autoscroll while typing, image paste, ergonomic fonts).
I have been using it everyday since i first developed it in 2018.
I wrote a program to implement a half-QWERTY keyboard on a full-QWERTY keyboard (holding the space bar horizontally flips the keyboard layout) while I was recovering from a serious bike accident and didn’t have any use of my left hand for several weeks. It was my first time writing a Mac app and my first/last in ObjC. I built it so I could work more efficiently while I was injured, and because I needed to work.
I didn’t release it to the public because:
1. It very probably would violate patent law, and I don’t want to find out.
2. It was extremely crashy, probably because I was more concerned about making something kinda work than learning memory management. (The only change I made restarted it when it crashed.)
I have an iOS shortcut that automatically re-builds and re-deploys a static site on Vercel at the start of every month. The site includes stats/visualisations for the current month, so the code finds the current month at build time and I just re-build it once a month. Completely unnecessary but it's pretty cool seeing that notification that my phone just re-deployed it for me :)
Unsatisfied with built-in folder-based bookmarks, I made a tiny site in Flask where I could add links, along with comments and tags. I can then search any of these fields. I'm sure it exists somewhere, but it was a nice learning experience and I use it an awful lot. It's quite satisfying to see my "library" grow.
My `cfg` script, which is bash script that wraps around GNU Stow and lets me
`cfg pull` - pull latest git repo and apply via `stow`
`cfg push` - push local config changes to git server
`cfg apply` - apply local changes with `stow`
There are a few other commands too but I don't use them often. This simple script + repo lets me manage my dotfiles across ~7 machines
I have two I run most days:
- A `daily` script that creates a daily notes markdown file with the current date and pulls in the tasks from the previous day of notes
- A `config` script that tweaks some files for a local development environment so I don't need to worry about using `git stash` for the things I always change the same way
I have been working on a Hacker News client app that can notify you when there’s a new reply to your post. Been using it daily rn.
it's such a tiny thing, but I can't imagine not having it on my machine. It's one of the first things i always download on a new system.
PS. The morse thing sounds cool! Care to share?