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

[landless2029@lemmy.world]

I did that too with a basic powershell loop hitting F15 (non existent keyboard key that's not mapped to anything)

[thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world]

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

[thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world]

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.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[victorz@lemmy.world]

I read through the readme and the config file example. Looks pretty neat! I might take a look at that to see if I can use it too.

The last release talks about a future 1.0 release, and "experimental" stuff. But that was 4 years ago.

Is it inactive? 🫤

[agelord@lemmy.world]

You can run scripts without terminal emulator windows.

[neidu3@sh.itjust.works]

I think so, but it works well enough

[chunes@lemmy.world]

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.

[umbraroze@slrpnk.net]

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.

[victorz@lemmy.world]

Might give a go. Thanks for the tip!