Lobste.rs is doing a blog carnival, and the topic is “What have you made for yourself? You wouldn’t recommend it, because it’s not useful to others?”
I’ve got a few programs that I’ve built for myself, that are pretty niche,
here are 3 4:
xmpp/slack/local chat bot #
My XMPP/Slack/Local chat bot. I started this at work back in 2014 with two of my coworkers. We took inspiration from hubot.
Originally it was just meant to drop inspiring “code quotes” into our work XMPP chat, but it morphed into a fairly extensible plugin based chatbot that did a few (mostly silly) things. Over the years, the other devs stopped using it and I kept it alive and it’s been a useful prototyping playground. When I want to try something out, it’s easy to write a plugin to play with that thing. LLMs are the most recent thing I plugged into it so I could get more familiar with how they work.
It’s not a super useful tool anymore as I’m not even sure the XMPP support still works, as I mostly use it locally.
draft #
Draft is probably my mostly used useless tool, lol… all the functionality could probably be a bash script, but I like it and it’s become a very heavily used part of my daily workflow. Basically all it does is let me create a new note for editing via vim:
draft create -s "My New Note" creates a file ~/notes/my-new-note.md and
opens it in vim with some metadata dumped in the TOML frontmatter of the file.
There are a few other quality of life features built in, but overall it really doesn’t do very much though I use it every day.
I started this in 2013, and it was originally intended as 2 commands draft for
writing drafts and post for posting them to various places (twitter, blog,
etc). I ended up not using the post functionality much at all, but the draft
command became part of my daily workflow and I still use it almost daily today.
ecowitt #
ecowitt is a program I wrote to get weather station data from my ecowitt GW1000 into Home Assistant. I don’t need it anymore because Home Assistant now has an official integration for ecowitt that works just fine, but it was a fun project to work on.
moviedirfixer #
moviedirfixer is more of a script, but still fairly bespoke. I have a bunch of old DVDs that I digitized but weren’t named properly for my media player (KODI at the time) to parse, so I wrote this to fix the issue. It goes through every file in a directory, looks up the movie by filename in themoviedb and then gets the correct name for the movie as well as the date and renames the original file to match so that KODI can properly display it.
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