What are some "toy programs" you've created?

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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

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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!

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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.

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I built a Tasker program that blocks unknown numbers if toggled and allows back-to-back calls through. It uses a Minimalistic Text widget for control.

I also built one for background images. Every time I turn my screen off, my background changes to a new (blurry, gray) picture of my wife. Double tapping will unblur and color it. I can toggle switching if I like a particular picture.

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i wrote a simple program to wiggle my mouse

you can guess why

it was a rip off from a coworker’s program

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One I miss the most is one I had on my Nokia N900. It would take a photo with both cameras, aquire the current GPS position and upload all those things to my server. Then it would check for a file on my server and if it existed would create an SSH tunnel, allowing me to SSH into the phone from my server.

It was supposed to be an anti theft measure. Never needed it. Was still cool that the phone had this possibility.

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It was to keep the screensaver from coming on while watching a movie with your date, right?

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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

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I started self-hosting as a hobby and while I enjoy it, I was getting frustrated with file transfers between my computer, phone and two raspberry pi's. Since I was already using rsync, I created a tool for myself to help sort rsync commands into sortable files.

I can now lump together those files into a single command and run several rsync commands in one go.

It's definitely saved me some sanity by not having to refer to a wall of text full of rsync aliases.

I posted it on codeberg.

It is random code on the internet and it involves file transfers so if anyone uses it, those are the risks unless you care to read the code itself.

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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 to 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.

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A "full update script" so I don't forget a package manager. It should probably be an alias but whatever, I run the script

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Pi and touch screen photo frame . it reads a photos dir and just sets it as the background randomly every 5 mins using "feh" and "cron".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That’s a lot of comic books.

What’s the value of a collection like that?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I made a D&D character generator once.

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What are some "toy programs" you've created?