Some tiny personal programs I've written
I code every day, even when my job has me busy with other things that aren&#x27;t coding related. I love banging out tiny programs and scripts to solve problems.<p>When I didn&#x27;t have a problem of my own to solve I&#x27;d hang out on the Unity3D forums and write little time waster demos of questions that people had such as &quot;how do I make a snowboard game?&quot; or &quot;how do I make a fishing line and have it sag in the middle?&quot;<p>I wrote a space invaders game for my online resume.<p>I&#x27;ve made a number of interactive touch screen and motion controlled robots and laser pointers on robot arms as cat toys over the years. Made one that streamed video and let people control the laser pointer via a web browser.<p>I&#x27;ve made a litter box cleaner robot that outsourced each cleaning to Amazon&#x27;s Mechanical Turk. Robot arm controlled via web browser, video feed, Mechanical Turk assigns a &quot;cleaning job&quot; to a worker (human).<p>I wrote a script that would take all the video from a bunch of cameras and process them, down rez the video, and properly label it for a bunch of tutorial videos I created.<p>A voice controlled &quot;artificial intelligence&quot; assistant producer to help me record tutorial videos &quot;Hey producer, roll VT, and give me a close-up on camera 1.&quot;<p>I lost a bitcoin wallet address - it wasn&#x27;t a lot, a few dozen at most. I knew which computer the wallet was originally on, and I snapshot a picture of my desktop every few seconds and store the images on a file server. So I wrote a script that would take all the images and batch process a text recognizer on Linux to look for when the wallet was open. Et voila, my seed phrase.<p>I wrote a script that monitors our street facing front door via video camera for packages and sends an alert if a package is detected on the front porch.<p>A PowerShell script to move Chia plots from the plotter to the farmer.<p>A MACH driver for my weird little NextWave Piranha desktop CNC. A script that will generate the g-code to cut dove tails on my CNC for me, but also the Ruby code to generate the dove tail view in SketchUp too before I perform the cut.<p>When doing some extensive travelling for work back in 2013&#x2F;2014&#x2F;2015 I created a small Android app that would count down the amount of time until my wife and I got to see each other again and show where we each were on a google map.<p>I run Timesnapper on my Windows machines to capture images of my active desktop usage, so I created a similar, though much simpler application for Linux and macOS to do the same thing.<p>A script to emulate a macOS Fusion drive, marrying a RAM drive and an SSD for super fast builds AKA fast tiering.<p>And a bcache kernel driver for ESXi that would put a RAM drive in front of the SSD array for VMs that were doing builds or lots of drive activity AKA fast tiering.<p>Back in 2016 I figured out a script for Linux that would spoof the OS identity so that Linux machines could connect to the corporate VPN, masquerading as an iPhone.<p>An NDI plugin for Unity3D.<p>And a bunch of bots to play or multibox various online MMORPGs and hack-n-slash games. Which lead to paying work with a couple of companies who wanted me to figure out ways to stop that sort of thing.<p>And a computer vision game playing bot for a few online games that I didn&#x27;t want to grind on.<p>A parallel 3D printer partioning system to farm out jobs to 3D printers at our local makerspace.<p>An out-of-the-box VPN proxy running on OpenWRT so that any device connected to the OpenWRT router was automatically on the VPN.<p>A C# wrapper around the FFMPEG library.<p>A SenseCam application and associated hardware.<p>A chrome &amp; firefox plugin (no longer maintained) for a People You May Know sorter for Linkedin.<p>I created a voice activated application that can open and close the garage door for me &quot;open the pod bay doors hal&quot; and also switch the dust extractor on and off when I am working, though I have since replaced the dust extractor power function with a dedicated device that detects power tool usage.<p>I created an application that will copy USB sticks en masse for my wife&#x27;s technical conferences, and also update a USB stick with any appropriate updates such as new slides or presented papers as speakers submit them.<p>I wrote a script that would go through each of the conference papers and put the IEEE copyright footer on them before submission.<p>My mother-in-law was a research librarian and she and a few colleagues needed to run a study, and they had applied for a $10K or $20K grant to conduct the study to determine which journals a group of universities should continue to subscribe too. Grant application denied. $10K-$20K of research to save a few hundred thousand. I wrote a script in a couple of hours, and got paid a large gourmet pizza, that gathered all the results needed and dumped them into a spreadsheet, and so a group of universities saved a bunch of money on journals they didn&#x27;t need.<p>I wrote a script that captures video of multiple in-office cameras that captures my activity in my office throughout the day, and wired it up to a button that lets me pause the recording, or erase the last 30 seconds, five minutes or hour. It is hooked up to an &quot;on air&quot; light so my wife is reminded not to walk in my office partially dressed when the camera is active. It gathers all the video feeds, and the depth sensor data and dumps it on a server.<p>I wrote a little in home dashboard that tracks our wallets, our phones, our cats, weather for the week, upcoming meal plan, appointments, and so forth.<p>A &quot;Waterfull ring toss&quot; game with a big button, just like you remember from your child hood, made from a 55&quot; Samsung TV I found on the side of the road.<p>A bunch of time zone synchronized wall clocks in our upstairs hallway, with VFD displays showing location weather, financial headline to give you something to talk about with your client in that time zone, exchange rate, and so forth.<p>A neural network to pick horses in a race, that eventually turned in to a small side business.<p>I&#x27;m currently tinkering with a gesture controlled viewer dependent holographic display made from those spinny LCD fans with HDMI input you can buy through Aliexpress.<p>And dozens more over the years. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever stop working on random ideas like this.