Little programs or scripts or automations you’ve created ad-hoc to solve a particular single use case
I have lots of shortcuts i make on my phone and I have one i love that detects when bluetooth accidentally or purposefully disconnects from my speaker and reconnects it and fixes a playback glitch so its back to playing properly
orphankiller
, becausepacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)
is too much to typeI wrote a coin flip script that randomly calls
qlmanage -p tails.jpg / heads.jpg
(Mac) to flip a virtual coin.I basically rewrote all of polybar using eww widgets because I didn’t like how polybar was too rigid in certain aspects.
So lots of scripts handling audio control, dark/light mode, i3 workspace switching, media control, login session management, weather widgets calling external APIs, etc. It was a whole ecosystem of tools and widgets.
I just recently bought a new computer with an AMD GPU so I’m finally running Hyprland, and now I’m using Waybar. But I might start a project to do it all again using Astal. Who knows. Or maybe Waybar will be able to suffice. We shall see.
Cowsay as a Service. A Go microservice that lets you send form or json http post with curl or whatever to an api over the internet and in return you get the cowsay ascii art you requested.
I have one deployed project using a raspberry pi.
A water temp meter that reports the water temp at a local swimming hole to a private webpage. Built using a raspberry pi zero w a timer, an MC battery, a DS18B20 sensor and a bash script running as a service on bootup.
I have a lot of comic book boxes:
I created a script that lets me query the database to return the box numbers for certain content.
I can search by writer, artist, title, character, notes, even down to issue number.
What I’d LIKE to do is hook it into a voice recognition system and smart lights and get it to light up the boxes “Wheel of Fortune” style. But I’m aways off that yet.
That’s a lot of comic books.
What’s the value of a collection like that?
Hard to say, it’s been years since I’ve done a full inventory and I have books signed by people who have since passed away. :(
Working on a current inventory now.
That’s really cool!
I made a browser extension to make downloading Minecraft mods easier. It would scrape the curseforge page you’re visiting, search for the mod on modrinth, and redirect you if it found one. It was actually very useful when I needed it, I even put it on the extension stores and it gained some users.
I also have a small collection of random python numpy and matplotlib utilities. I need to do some basic graphs and data analysis for uni, and this simplifies it a lot.
Back over 10+ years ago on the original raspberry pi, I made a butler program. Every hour on top of the hour, it would use espeak to say what my schedule was, the current internet usage (there was max usage of 100gb) and a couple of other things. It worked really well for years.
It’s not an answer, but I really hate how hard this is to do on Android, including it’s FOSS versions. You can root it and do something like that then, but that undercuts the whole system design and is a terrible hack.
That’s like my main beef with the whole mobile ecosystem.
I made a D&D character generator once.
i wrote a simple program to wiggle my mouse
you can guess why
it was a rip off from a coworker’s program
It was to keep the screensaver from coming on while watching a movie with your date, right?
I built a script that runs on a raspberry pi with an nfc reader and speakers. It’s setup with nfc cards to play music for my kids. they don’t use it as much as they used to but it’s still going strong after four years!
I wrote a link handler, that allows me to just click on magnet: links or open torrent files and send them to my remote torrent client. I use this almost daily.
I also built a torrent crawler that fetches multiple torrent sites and shows me the new stuff, while filtering out shit quality stuff and things I already have.
And then I built a viewer with search for multiple defunct story sites I crawled years ago.
Those tools I use all the damn time.
I mostly write utilities/tools like this. Some examples from my ~/bin/ folder:
- A script that turns caps lock off and numlock on, and remaps caps lock to compose. I have this run by cron every minute.
- A script that saves the current buffer of my continously running screen recorder to a file. Bound to the Lenovo coilot key.
- A half-finished script that downloads and installs the latest version of discord, as Discord and ants me to manually upgrade it every time I start it.
Edit: OH, and on my work laptop I have a script named Fnkeyfuckery. The keyboard layout is annoying in that I have to choose between Function keys or have Home+End.
I want my function keys AND I want home+end. Luckily I don’t need F11 and F12 very often, so I’swapped around those two with their alternate function. That way I have F1 through F10, Home and End by default, and if I hold Fn I can have F11 and F12 too. It runs on startup.script that saves the current buffer of my continously running screen recorder to a file
Curious to know why you are continuously recording your screen. Must fill up your hard drives really quickly?
Why: I case I want to show something unplanned to someone. Freak accident in a game, for example.
Disk: It’s only keeping the latest 30 minutes in a buffer. Saving basically means copying that buffer to a different file.
I haven’t written many utility scripts/programs in a while but my apartment is fully automated with temperature, humidity, light, presence and door sensors.
We like how keep our screen doors open when the weather is nice so I have things like fans, heating, air conditioning automated but set to turn off when a door(s) is open.
The outdoor lights are also automated but I have them turn green/blue when it’s foggy or rainy and they turn red when there is aircraft above.
Before smartphones started using random MAC addresses on WiFi I also automated some things depending which guests we had over, but I haven’t done that in a long time.
What kind of hardware do you need for all this crazy sci-fi shit? 🤯