Dang, I really should write a programming portfolio page about all of the weird hacks I’ve made over the years. Other people link to their GitHub profiles in job applications and gesture non-specifically. I’d just point to my portfolio of weird hacks about weird problems I tried to solve weirdly. Anyway…

An ancient one I made back in the day:

I was listening to music while trying to sleep. I controlled the music player with infrared remote. Some mystery song starts playing and I have no idea what it’s called. Obviously, the monitor was far away and turned off so I couldn’t read.

So I was like, dammit, why can’t I just push a button on the remote and have the computer say the name of the song?

My previous project actually helped with that - I had previously made an extension for XMMS that allows other programs to read the song information via a named pipe. So I just whipped up a script that reads the song name and feeds it to Festival TTS, and hooked that up to the infrared daemon. And that was at like 3 AM, so I quickly got back to trying to sleep

Some more recent ones:

Long ago, I was using Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer to import my photos from SD cards (etc) to my NAS. It was horrible. It sucked. So much that when I finally snapped and switched over to better software (read: stable version of digiKam for Windows came out), I never trusted the photo organiser to get this thing right. So for a while I used random hacks and a bunch of weird scriptery. Then I decided to turn it into a PowerShell script. That started to kinda suck, so I now have a massive overengineered Python script to import my photos. And it does exactly what I want it to do. And I’m finally happy. (Available here for what it’s worth)

Another thingy: I have to set the clocks on some devices manually. Daylight saving time, clock drift, you name it. One of my recent old-lady whinges was “Why the hell doesn’t Windows even have an analog clock anymore?” I just prefer to have a clock that has both number display (to set the time) and analog clock face with a second hand so I can time the button press better visually. …so I made one. Because I’ve never written an analog clock before. First, I made one in Processing. Then, a second version, because I’m in process of learning Godot.

I write AHK scripts to make it possible to play certain games even though I can barely use my limbs. Often this means condensing a bunch of pointless inputs into one. Other times it means hacking controller support into a game so that I can use my preferred input devices.

Even though I fucking hate AHK as a general language, it is easily the best language for such tasks.

Once I wrote a PowerShell script to change all the public affairs officers’ job titles to pubic affairs officers on our exchange server. I never ran it, but I could have.

One or two versions before they included it by default, I wrote a Nemo Action to launch the monitor settings dialog in the right click menu when you right click the desktop.

I wrote a knights and knaves puzzle generator. I enjoyed making the program more than actually solving the puzzles though

I use Redshift to change the color temp on my monitors.

I have cron jobs at 1930 to change to night mode, and 0600 to revert back to day mode.

I’m very certain the temp change can be scheduled within Redshift itself, but I’d have to leave the terminal open, figure out the documentation, arguments, etc. Creating the cron jobs was easier for me. 🤷

I recently wrote a little library that adds some neat little features to enums in Rust. It’s tiny, does one thing, and does it pretty well, I think.

A few years back, I made a python program that searched free-for-commercial-use Google Images and auto-adjusted them to fit Amazon Merch shirts and uploaded them to Amazon. This was, of course, a violation of their terms of service.

I have a python script that I run on my phone to scrape a few websites and return the current food trucks at my few local breweries with the times they’re there. It makes our once/twice a week dinner selections so much easier than having to manually visit 4 websites. Some sites have been updated, and I haven’t updated my script and I need to.

me and a few friends have a dumb chatbot we’ve been fiddling with for 15 years. started out on irc, moved platforms multiple times, and i’m currently porting it to matrix. it can do poetry, markov chains, tell you when the weekend starts, pull youtube videos, create email aliases, etc.

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.

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’ve written an entire android app just for myself. I couldnt find anything with the features or widgets i wanted so i just made it myself. Presumably because widgets reduce the need to open the app and that reduces ad revenue.

My userbase is currently me and one friend

i wrote a simple program to wiggle my mouse

you can guess why

it was a rip off from a coworker’s program

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!