Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

526 points by shovel ↗ HN
I'm thinking of tiny projects along the lines of single-function tools like domainr. But also game-changing ebooks, newsletters, courses.

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Locateonspot is an simple app to find family and car you can take it up as simple product
There are several.

* cfgen, a config files generator that is fed with config templates and parameters to fill them

* CronBuilder, to pull a repository, run building command, and save the results in another repository

* flowmon, which shows bandwith usage of different streams, each defined by BPF filter (a.k.a. "tcpdump syntax")

* sftponly, a shell for jailing in chroot accounts meant for data transfer only (for scp, sFTP, and rsync)

* xmlrpcd and its spiritual successor HarpCaller, RPC daemons for sysadmins

* logdevourer, log parsing daemon

These are just the public ones, the ones that were generic enough to be open sourced. I have few others that are/were too specific to the environment they were written for.

sftponly is really nice, needs updating and wider distribution (more packages for more distros).
What do you mean by "needs updating"?

And with packages, I disagree. I only use Debian (and have used Red Hat some time ago), so it would be quite troublesome for me to provide package build scripts for anything else. I wouldn't expect any developer to provide packaging for the whole variety of distributions and OSes. But providing a sane build process is enough for anybody to build a package for their OS.

https://typed.pw - Simple way to write online.
How do you keep it out of spam?
I want it to be spammed. I was creating another site which accepted user input and the problem was: how do I avoid spam? I searched online and found some simple and clever solutions. Typed is a way to test these solutions and a way to come with new ones.

This is not the only reason typed exists obviously...

Please expand on why you want it to be spammed?
In 1997, I wrote MailSend, a commercial command-line SMTP emailer for Windows. It is now free to use, open-source software.

http://www.mailsend-online.com/blog/mailsend-is-free.html

There were (and are still) a number of other similar programs with the same name.

It was my first experience in working with users world-wide, conversing with them both electronically and through postal mail.

I'm not sure whether "proud" is the right adjective, but that batch file I wrote when I was 12 or 13 which moves all images from the Desktop into a folder called "images" has been the single most useful thing I've ever written.
This is actually one of the few types of examples that I think fit here. Most of the other people are just posting their side projects. When I clicked this I was expecting some quick bash/batch/python/etc. scripts that do useful things.
One less useful thing for you: https://onli.github.io/izulu/. It is a bash script that changes the background of your desktop according to the weather at your locations, and can show the temperature and forecast.

Doesn't have much functional value, but it was easy to write (though over the years it needed some care, mostly thanks to closing weather APIs) and it is a small simple thing I use almost every day, as it is in my autostart.

That looks sweet! Is there a Windows version?
Thanks. Sorry, Windows is not supported. It is written in Bash, Windows was not a target at that time. It might work with https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about, but probably not since it also uses imagemagick to paint on the images, and xml_twig_tools as well as jq to interpret the api output. And it would need to detect that it is running on Windows to change the desktop background with the proper command, if that is even possible.
I spent way too much time on a tiny menulet that just switches Mac audio from stereo to mono.

http://charlesism.com/monomenulet.html

It's simple, but I think I think I made it nice to use. A couple minor details I added: you can change its keyboard shortcut directly from the menubar, and it flashes the keyboard backlight to get your attention.

So taking your project as an example, and having Carbon Ads, how much $$$ do you get out of them?
I don't pay attention to it and I can't for the life of me figure out how much it earns monthly but there is over $800 in my account. My hunch is $10-$15 a month or so.

I just moved it to a cheaper hosting plan so it's actually turning a minuscule profit now.

Nice. I thought the Carbon Ads and Deck Ads require some minimum # of traffic, so I guess you're hitting a lot of visitors on it?
About 1K pageviews a month it looks like
A tool to make JS bookmarklets:

https://bookmarkify.it/

I created this years ago because I wanted a quick way to create bookmarklets. Since putting it online I have had good months in terms of visitors (1000+) and worse (50), but I am still very happy that people keep coming to bookmarkify to create helpful bookmarklets for themselves and others.

By now it has been around longer than 4 years, despite what the banner says.

This is great. I've never had the time to learn how bookmarklets work, but your tool just let me make a simple one in under a minute.
Thanks a lot for the compliment! It is really great to hear from users. I just created it for myself and it is humbling every time I find out that people simply like it.
I have some sideprojects around the internet, but so far the most useful thing I made has been

http://paralleltext.io

A tool that helps you learn languages by reading public domain books. I should continue working on that...

This is fantastic, great work!
Very, very cool! I’m teaching myself Spanish, and I’ve been looking for something like this for ages.

I’d be curious to know more about how it’s built, and where you found the source texts. It it open-source?

Hey, thanks! I made the prototype using publicly available matched books and and got a friend included who built a matching engine for adding new books.

The frontend is react, everything is hosted on s3. If you have any questions lemme know!

Any plans to do short stories as well?
I'm proud of many things :(

* I converted a rotary phone into a cellphone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8

* I wrote a personal bookmark search engine: http://historio.us/

* A site that talks to spammers so you don't have to: https://spa.mnesty.com/

* A pastebin: http://pastery.net/

* A remote-controlled GSM irrigation controller for farmers: https://gitlab.com/stavros/irrigation-controller

* A button that orders food when pressed: https://www.stavros.io/posts/emergency-food-button/

* A python library and cli utility for controlling YeeLight RGB LED bulbs (a cheaper and nicer version of Hue bulbs) that I wrote this weekend: https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

* A secure communications library for IoT devices: http://stringphone.readthedocs.org/

* I took some non-terrible photos and made a site for them: http://portfolio.stavros.io/

* A hardware library for the A6 GSM modem: https://github.com/skorokithakis/A6lib

* Expounder, a better way to explain things in text: http://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder

* Dead man's switch, a website to email people after you die: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/

* I can't even remember the rest.

> Dead man's switch, a website to email people after you die:

Whats your thoughts and learnings on this one... it seems dark to me.. but i might be completely wrong..

It's pretty dark, but what can you do? You won't avoid death by avoiding thinking about it.
That's a great body of work!
Thank you, the face isn't too bad either!
that Dead mans switch type of project is only funny when you want others to use it.

That idea alone should make us reflect if we had lived a life being true to ourselves and told everyone what we wanted them to hear.

OK, next its my turn: Ill create a dating bot that contacts users on Valentines day, and invites them to restaurant if they will still be single next year. How does it feel ?

I can't tell what point you're trying to make here.

And how exactly does your dating example work? It invites them only if they agree to stay single for a year?

I think parent assumes users send their confessions and sins to people after they die instead of clearing things up beforehand or living an honest life. Says more about himself/herself than the product IMHO.
I like expounder, definitely haven't seen something like that before. I'd like it if there was an option to have the expanded text highligted in some way, just so I can keep track of everything mentally.
Having it reversible would be nice, too. Knowing the click is irreversible gives an uneasy feeling.
There is an option, it's detailed in the docs. I don't like it on by default, but some people (like you) do, so I added it.
Spamnesty is really amusing! It would be even better if your bot had a wider variety of responses.

I foresee that sooner or later, your bot will get stuck in an endless conversation with a spambot which keeps replying, leading to another round of replies and then another...

Haha, this already happened, I think the 22 response one was a bot. I have a ~8 hour delay before I stop it, so luckily I noticed it and deleted one of my responses.
I'm using historio.us for three years now, it's great. Thanks for that :)
Thank you, I'm glad you like it!
Those photos are absolutely stunning.
Thank you, I'm a novice so I'm kind of insecure about them, so your kind words mean a lot to me.
Spamnesty is nothing short of amazing! :)

I hope you'll also distribute the code so hopefully anyone not necessary trusting your service to not harvest email addresses or resell them (or get hacked) would be able to deploy that on a custom server.

In any case, was very fun to read.

Actually I just noticed that your repo is available. Awesome!
Yep! Feel free to issue merge requests for features!
Wow. so many things. Please consider taking time to write about how you are able to be so much productive. Just Curious, how old are you ?
I'm 33. I don't think there's much of a secret in productivity, I just like these things so much that I prioritize them over other things.
Nyan Mode.

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode

I made it as a simple joke, but for some reason it rapidly gained popularity among Emacs users, and now I sometimes find it or hear about it in unexpected places.

(Also I fear that on my deathbed I'll look back and realize that the most used thing I've ever made in my life was an animated cat for a text editor... sigh)

I have been using this for years and all my work colleagues always ask me "what is that nyan cat on your text editor? that must be super annoying!" and I always have to tell them I just really like it.

Thank you for building this, it's awesome!

Found it through Spacemacs. Totally love it. Even if it were to be your most used creation, it totally deserves it.
https://simplesharingbuttons.com/

Despite the site being free and open source, people still send me a few bucks each month, and very nice thank-you emails. And there are at least 2-3 sites out there that I'm personally a fan of that used it.

https://www.hiroapp.com - Note-taking reduced to the core that just works™. Offline first, no signup needed, easily sharable (url, sms, email) and (web)realtime sync between all devices and collaborators.

My co-founder and I moved on to a new project a year ago, but this thing is still buzzing along on a cheap DO box and works like a charm with basically zero maintenance. Frontend is vanilla JS, backend in Go and the protocol is our slight modification of differential sync[0] to (re-)synchronize all text and metadata.

[0] https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/

Hey, your first link is giving me a 502 Bad Gateway error.
Thanks for noticing, should be fixed. (there goes my "zero maintenance"-claim :) )
:) It works now, and looks great! I just tried to share a test note via SMS (with a spanish mobile), still waiting though...

Congrats, and keep up the good work!

Thank you! Fixed the sms quirk as well (twilio api key was missing). If you re-invite your phone-# now, the sms should come thru.
Your product look reminds me Fog Creek Software website. What the style/fonts were inspired by?
st - simple statistics from the command line

https://github.com/nferraz/st

Hey! This is great. Another thing that would be awesome would be to have a small histogram (could be oriented in rows rather than columns)!
An archive of chrome extensions versions: https://crx.dam.io (I should upload it to archive.org)

Also, this small templating library for python: https://github.com/mdamien/lys

Also, a chrome extension that display images like firefox do, people seems to like it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/center-images/dama...

I really like lys. (I've started to use it for some small bits and pieces and will possibly/probably continue).
thanks, I have a lot of ideas planned to make it easier to use, especially for django projects. Would love to get more feedback on how people use it.
Observideo, annotating videos tool for social sciences students. The norm is either excel or very costly software, this simple tool saves hours of manual tagging. https://observideo.com
I wrote obmenu[1] some time ago, a menu editor for the Openbox window manager.

I'm pretty proud of this simple tool because it eventually made its way to the repositories of all mayor distributions: Debian[2], RedHat, Arch, you name it.

I've received many emails from users, questions, suggestions, bug reports, people offering to translate it in their language... I'm super thankful to all of them (unfortunately I could not answer all of them!).

It's been unmaintained for a while, but it's on my To-Do list to refactor it, clean it up and add some missing features. It's been 10 years so I'm hopefully a better programmer now.

[1] http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://packages.debian.org/de/jessie/obmenu

A bash script that uses only builtins to truncate your PS1 to a fraction of the width of your terminal window.
An in-terminal interface for performing polynomial fits of a small number of data points. I use it for calibrating gamma-ray detectors, and so it has lists of the energies of some common calibration sources.
https://scri.ch/ draw => save => share (you can add .png to the URL)

https://gif.gg/ photos => save => share (you can add .gif to the URL)

I made them because they were useful for me, and I am still happily using them almost every day, especially scri.ch: nothing beats typing scri.ch in a browser from anywhere to quickly sketch an idea (except a napkin and a pen of course).

It’s nice to see other people using them too! :-)

http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/memescope The Memescope is a dynamic kaleidoscope that uses images representing leading news headlines as the source material.

http://PlayTheLoveGame.com or http://amzn.to/2fSyUXX The Love Game started as an app here on HN, then a crowdfunded card game that ended up in Urban Outfitters, Ritz Carlton Hotels & Amazon.

http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/spacejournals I took those images from NASA / JPL and created a series of 17 journals as part of a crowdfund. They are super beautiful and really incredible as a full set.

I fixed my prediction market last weekend: https://github.com/qznc/prema

It used Mozilla Persona for authentication, which is now gone. Switched to Github OAuth, which went surprisingly well.