A lot of recent tech has felt… well boring. I fell into this industry because it was fun / weird / creative and it’s felt stale for a hot minute.<p>What’s something fun you’ve done with tech recently that may or may not be overlooked?
I ran yt-dlp to download the metadata for the entire SNL youtube channel, which is over 6,000 videos. I loaded the metadata into a database and built a Flask app so I could browse one episode or season at a time in a convenient interface to flag which videos I wanted to download. The show has almost 50 seasons of history so the curation isn't trivial.<p>After I spent a few hours browsing through the titles and descriptions, I used yt-dlp to download the videos I wanted. It came out to be over 500. I added them to my Plex server, made some playlists, and now I can watch sketches on demand without youtube tracking me, showing me ads, making me go through their app, search/browse interface, etc. And without having to search and skip through full episodes.<p>I've been an SNL nerd for 30 years and while every episode has a range of good and bad content, what I do find rewatchable from its long history amounts to a pretty big library. I wanted to make it more easily accessible since there's a lot of good content that would otherwise get buried.
Honestly, Ruby on Rails in the last year has made me fall in love with programming again. I left tech a few years ago for the world of finance. However, in the past year I started building internal tools for my (albeit small) company and when I was trying to figure out what to use, decided to give Rails another go. It has been a blast. I had forgotten how wonderful web development is when you're not mucking around with tooling and dealing with yet another node issue. I think Rails certainly fits into the overlooked category, but it has brought back a lot of the joy I used to feel when I opened my code editor.
I think you're looking for something that isn't a shill, but I think our tech is pretty dope.<p>We've built a headband that monitors your sleep state, including EEG, and uses auditory stimulation to improve your deep sleep by up to 40%. The website is <a href="https://soundmind.co" rel="nofollow">https://soundmind.co</a><p>Building an EEG headband and learning about neuroscience and sleep has been really fun. Learning about the market opportunities has been great.<p>For the last few months I've been building our physical prototypes and figuring out how to fit the electronics and improving comfort and reliability.<p>I think there are a few different areas that are really interesting right now. We're based in Sydney, Australia, which has a few neurotech start-ups.<p>When I meet other health tech founders, I'm often hearing about really interesting and compelling stuff. Same with companies focused on environment.<p>Tech isn't that fringe anymore, so there isn't as much "weirdness" in core tech, the fun fringe is going to be in adjacent areas.
I wouldn't call it overlooked since it made the front page here, but I've been playing around with basic ways to get around internet restrictions, starting with a simple chat interface for supporting Wikipedia over WhatsApp messages: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463249" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463249</a><p>After learning more, I've gotten interested in broader internet restrictions, such as restricting mobile internet to Facebook/WhatsApp (see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/facebook-second-life-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-tech-company-in-africa" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/facebook-...</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31465741" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31465741</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-basics-internet-africa-mark-zuckerberg" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...</a>). I have a lot more to learn, but it feels like there's more here to explore.
I came across an "Eight Sleep" unit, which is a high-tech system for cooling a mattress topper. Apparently, someone had problems with leaks in the topper section and threw it out.<p>I took it apart. It has a custom ARM board with a removable 8GB micro-SD card containing the OS. The ARM board has a combo WiFi/Bluetooth unit and apps for Android and iPhone.<p>Turns out, this makes a heckuva cooling unit for my gaming PC without modification. It is completely silent and easily has the capacity to keep my CPU and GPU frosty. The price to buy one is prohibitive for this application, but the ol' "dumpster dive discount" makes it worthwhile.<p>I see why it is so costly. This thing is a combination of a robust Peltier heating/cooling unit, a high volume pumping system with auto-prime routines, two excellent Noctua silent fans, and a very capable custom Arm board. It's like a Bed Keurig.<p>That was fun!
Making apps in Flutter. Seeing the app change in real time as you code is awesome, and it's a lot easier to learn than normal Android development. First class support for Linux too, so I can test without a phone or emulator.
> fun / weird / creative<p>Recently had lots of fun testing software security in creative ways. For example found that various sites use the login page as an unwalled gate and don't validate an actual session, so anyone can jump in, no matter if cookies are encrypted. Also unpacked APK's and found all the Firebase keys in plain text. Put together a quick Firebase client in Javascript and accessed their DBs. It's a weird and amusing world, and I'm not even a security expert to enjoy the whole thing.
I think "Pockit" is a pretty fun piece of tech <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615959" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615959</a>
One of my favorite things in the world is learning a new software tool. I never do digital graphics or art, but I've spent hundreds of hours fooling around in photoshop because learning the tools, keybinds, workflows, documentation, etc is super fun.<p>Recently I found out about a very old piece of automation software written by 1 guy in India in like 2005. I've been using it to write botting scripts for a video game and its incredible. The documentation is purely 5 minute youtube videos where the developer types in notepad and clicks around the tool. Exploring the quirks, using it in uniqiue ways... really brings me back to being a kid with my first desktop computer. I'll never forget learning to dual boot linux, and now I'm in that same stage of discovery and awe. Everything is a puzzle of things I don't undstand and I need to be patient and creative to achieve what I want.
I've had a lot of fun with foldable devices!<p>From the UI challenges to fixing various OS issues, they're super fun to play with and explore!<p>Right now, I really like the X1 Fold with Windows 11: it still feels so weird to unfold my tablet! It's a fun device!<p>Also, it's hacker friendly: after fixing the most obvious stuff, I'm now digging into more obscure issues, like the 0x9F power issues: the fun thing is, they are common to quite a few devices, like the frame.work: <a href="https://community.frame.work/t/windows-11-bsod-bug-check-0x9f/11617" rel="nofollow">https://community.frame.work/t/windows-11-bsod-bug-check-0x9...</a><p>...yet nobody has solved them yet!<p>Intel SST (IntcAudioBus.sys) seems to be the cause: it has a suspend eisenbug where the watchdog can fail, taking down the whole device. That made me learn about IRP and how power saving works on Windows.<p>The latest Intel SST drivers are proposed as a solution, but based on my test, they only make the bug occur less frequently: it's very visible on foldable tablets are go into sleep several times per day.<p>Some people are happy with disabling PCIe ASPM, but I don't find that very fun or daring: I want to know precisely what is happening, and if there can be clever workarounds like toggling ASPM for the PCIe device to a given state right before suspend.<p>This is also my first time playing with WinDbg and that's a lot of fun too!<p>Sites like <a href="https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/the-complete-guide-for-debugging-a-stop-0x9f.33183/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/the-complete-guide-...</a> and were helpful: <a href="https://bsodtutorials.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/debugging-stop-0xa0-dude-wheres-my-irp/" rel="nofollow">https://bsodtutorials.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/debugging-sto...</a><p>Now I can go from a "0x9F_5_IMAGE_IntcAudioBus.sys" event message into the rabbit hole :)
I follow an incredibly talented musician Twitch streamer who creates covers of songs during his streams. He uploads vods of his streams to Youtube and these can be anywhere from 3 - 5 hours. I used yt-dlp and ffmpeg to process his videos so I could create a table of contents that contained a list of timestamps of when he starts playing each song. The 2nd step (which I haven't done yet) is to create a small site that lets me search for different song covers and create playlists out of them.<p>One of the reasons I enjoyed building this was because it was just for me. There was no pressure for it to be production-ready or to make a profit.
Gadget wise I've been really delighted with the new Playdate console in a way I haven't been by technology in a long time. It's simple but so much of it is designed with care, and the third party game ecosystem is really taking off. I'm a few weeks into the game release schedule, and they are fun, but I'm spending an inordinate amount of time on some of the third party games.
I love small / weird projects that I can bang out in a couple of weekends / evenings. Most recently, I built <a href="https://nozama.dev" rel="nofollow">https://nozama.dev</a>, a way to parse the CSV that Amazon lets you generate of all your past purchases. I was honestly shocked at how much I've spent there over the years....
I’ve recently dived into frontend development.<p>Im having a really good time reading about „whats new” and „whats cool” and see that everything frontend has „innovated”, last few years,
is just a rehash of something we already had for a loooong time but didnt have a „catchy” name.<p>Seems like WAT was only the beginning.
After waiting about 2 years, I got my Flipper Zero in the mail a week ago. Yesterday I bought a second one and I am getting excited about tinkering with C because the firmware is open source.
Playing with disco diffusion is cool <a href="https://github.com/alembics/disco-diffusion" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alembics/disco-diffusion</a>