Since we have an article about having fun by creating at #1 right now, I thought this would be a good time to ask: What cool project are you tinkering with this week? Please limit it to things that aren't seeking profit.
It's a a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup or cost. It's also open source if you want to run your own.
ntfy looks great! I love these "do one small thing right" tools in the OSS ecosystem!
A few months back, I was looking for the opposite. A way to bring notifications from my phone onto my laptop. I tend to usually keep my phone in a different room during the workday, and have to keep jumping in everytime I need something like a SMS 2FA or to just check if I have any new notifications. Whatsapp Web+TOTP take a lot of the pain away, but it would still be great to have a way to seamlessly get notifs from phone (Android if it makes building it easier) to laptop (Ideally cross-platform, but Linux). Any idea of any tools that do that?
I just helped a friend connect his iPhone availability polling script to ntfy.sh so it could be run remotely and still notify him when the latest iPhone was available at a nearby Apple store. It worked wonderfully, and now my friend has a new iPhone!
Thanks for making and maintaining such an amazing tool!
Thanks for the kind words, especially since your friend is using the iOS app, and that's super buggy and neglected. I wish I had more experience with iOS development (especially the Core Data part) to fix those annoying bugs that make messages not show up in the app after they arrive. One of these days I'll spent more time with iOS again.
If ntfy.sh is used (not your selfhosted server), then messages are also forwarded to FCM and APNS (unless the X-Firebase header is set to "no"). For selfhosted servers, Firebase/APNS are not used. Since Firebase is pretty slow in delivering messages instantly, the Android app also has an "instant delivery" option which keeps a JSON stream or WebSocket connection open at all times.
With Firebase, the reported battery consumption is 0% obviously. Without Firebase (i.e. with the instant delivery option) it varies depending on phone and usage. On my phone it is usually around 0-1%. Others that use it to deliver their Matrix chat messages have reported higher numbers up to 12% (though that is rare).
If you "allow background services" for the app, Android will kill it less often. Though some manufacturers are quite aggressive even with that option.
As for who pays the bills: The public server is run in EC2 ($25/month, though it could run on a much smaller instance), and the Apple developer license is $100/year. Other than that, there are no costs. Up until a month ago, i was carrying all the costs. I have recently started accepting donations, and now all the costs are carried by my awesome sponsors (see https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier)
I'm interested in making a "chat with yourself" program I'm calling Soliloquy [1].
The idea is to let you explore different sides of an argument, or different sides of your psyche. For example, you might choose the three characters, "optimist", "pessimist" and "judge" to hold a group conversation that looks like a mobile phone chat, as a way to work through a difficult challenge in life that needs reflection and long-form thought.
The reason I'm building this is I find that I often don't complete a thought before negating myself--I cut short embarrassing or superficially trivial feelings, but I believe they sometimes deserve more stage time. Sometimes it's exploring thoughts that relate to uncomfortable feelings that yield the highest return on time spent.
Soliloquy is being built with neutralinojs, so it will work on any desktop OS (Mac/Linux/Window). It is "local only"--no network connection, so you can rest assured your private conversations are your own. I intend to publish it with MIT license but haven't got around to that yet :)
I would be interested in something where I'm given a topic and position to argue for, and I argue against another person who has the opposite side, and then other people vote on who did it best. Obviously a lot of details there to work out to avoid sybil attacks but I think that would be stimulating.
I think you're really on to something there. It's quite along the lines of something I've been practicing the last 18 months or so, particularly not stopping short when uncomfortable feelings come up as I examine an issue or feeling and try gain a proper perspective. It's something I consider part of my own mindfulness techniques, which have really been powerful and profound mental exercises for me. I think something like Soliloquy could really not only help people with the intended goal of the project but even to just expose more people to the very idea of truly exploring things from different vantage points.
How cool, I’ve been wanting to try just such a conversation between two of my characters. I might give this a try!
That conversation will relate to my own project, in which I’ve lost the fun aspect of working on it. There’s something important about doing a thing purely for fun.
https://letsblock.it has been on a slow but steady growth trajectory since it's January ShowHN[1]. The public instance served 290 customized lists this week, and operations / project upkeep are a pretty light time commitment.
It's a companion project to uBlockOrigin, working towards improving the internet's signal/noise ratio by filtering out low-value content and nags. While cosmetic filtering is very powerful, its learning curve is steep, so the project provides customizable templates maintained by the community.
I'll be giving a talk about the project, titled "Designing an Open-Source project for low maintenance" this Thursday at Ory Summit[2] and will share the recording on HN once it's public. You can still watch the conference's live-stream for free!
After that, I'll need to update the website's copy and simplify some UX, to prepare for another visibility push later this year.
I'm interested to understand why you find this provocative.
My ambition is to build a dependable service that will be up for several years to come. For that to happen, I need to limit myself to a scope I am comfortable maintaining in the long run, instead of burning out under scope creep.
Until the maintainer team grows, I would be on the hook for updates and fixes, and I refuse to create an account on any of that company's sites.
Site is intended to be like the book Hacker's Delight, but recast into a game.
Or maybe like professional programming, where you're mostly trying to understand/modify other people's code.
Or maybe like programming in a post-GPT3 world where you're checking/fixing a transformer language model's plagiarized/regurgitated code. Our dystopian future.
Later this week I'll add a Hash Treap puzzle (the fastest and simplest balanced binary tree) following up on the reroot and remove-root puzzles (amazing little algorithms that allow treap insertion and removal, top-down, no rotations).
I'll launch the site properly once I have enough puzzles, maybe early next year.
It's a personal project, but completely free and without ads, (in the future I want to open source parts of it!).
The idea is to solve the problem that boards have out there that just puts everything as "worldwide" and in the end, it's not available for me as a Brazilian.
The time spent researching job boards it was easier to make a crawler. In the end I got a job.
Right now just want to focus on it being complete as possible, so there are a few bugs and some listing that slips.
It's a free tool to read & review research papers together with your colleagues. You can annotate, draw and comment on papers you upload. It's a tool that I wish I had when I was doing my research and super excited to finally work on it!
Please don't follow what Polar did to their project. I hadn't used it for a year or so, went back to use it, they had upgraded to a SaaS model (online account required) so I couldn't access my highlighted notes. I swear they were open source from the get-go, but the community has seemed to die down now.
Piano Gym is a learning and practice ecosystem focused on prioritizing music theory and performance skills acquisition through the use of flash cards. We use flash cards in order to pair them with modern learning techniques like spaced repetition, graded feedback, and progress tracking so that you can practice material and work through content that is managed by Piano Gym, and all you have to do is enroll in a school/course/lesson and do your reps! Just show up every day and do 15 minutes of reviews. You're going to make progress.
The website uses the Piano to navigate exercises as well as regular keyboard/mouse input. It works on browser technology and I'm looking to eventually make it mobile devices.
It provides content creation for everyone so that anyone can make their own schools/courses/lessons and the best part is each school gets its own landing page.
My goal is to do this for free. I believe that no one should be blocked from learning. And one of the issues with this at the moment is that it's just me currently working nights and weekends to make this happen.
This looks incredible and very similar to an idea that I was kicking around a while back. Please email me (see profile). I'd love to contribute to this.
In particular, something that would widen access to this platform is a microphone-based input method for acoustic pianos. There are only a couple of commercial platforms that have this and AFAIK, no completely free ones have it. There are some challenges of course -- out of tune pianos, different types and makes and models sound different, variations in how the piano is mic'd, etc., but I believe those can be worked around and have some ideas about how to make it happen.
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It's a a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup or cost. It's also open source if you want to run your own.
You can use it like this (more in the docs: https://ntfy.sh/docs/):
It's 100% not-for-profit and always-just-for-fun.A few months back, I was looking for the opposite. A way to bring notifications from my phone onto my laptop. I tend to usually keep my phone in a different room during the workday, and have to keep jumping in everytime I need something like a SMS 2FA or to just check if I have any new notifications. Whatsapp Web+TOTP take a lot of the pain away, but it would still be great to have a way to seamlessly get notifs from phone (Android if it makes building it easier) to laptop (Ideally cross-platform, but Linux). Any idea of any tools that do that?
I just helped a friend connect his iPhone availability polling script to ntfy.sh so it could be run remotely and still notify him when the latest iPhone was available at a nearby Apple store. It worked wonderfully, and now my friend has a new iPhone!
Thanks for making and maintaining such an amazing tool!
Anyway, thank you ;-)
If you do use the Google/apple push notifications, who pays the bill for those?
With Firebase, the reported battery consumption is 0% obviously. Without Firebase (i.e. with the instant delivery option) it varies depending on phone and usage. On my phone it is usually around 0-1%. Others that use it to deliver their Matrix chat messages have reported higher numbers up to 12% (though that is rare).
If you "allow background services" for the app, Android will kill it less often. Though some manufacturers are quite aggressive even with that option.
As for who pays the bills: The public server is run in EC2 ($25/month, though it could run on a much smaller instance), and the Apple developer license is $100/year. Other than that, there are no costs. Up until a month ago, i was carrying all the costs. I have recently started accepting donations, and now all the costs are carried by my awesome sponsors (see https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier)
More details:
https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#why-is-firebase-used
https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-...
https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/phone/#instant-delivery
The idea is to let you explore different sides of an argument, or different sides of your psyche. For example, you might choose the three characters, "optimist", "pessimist" and "judge" to hold a group conversation that looks like a mobile phone chat, as a way to work through a difficult challenge in life that needs reflection and long-form thought.
The reason I'm building this is I find that I often don't complete a thought before negating myself--I cut short embarrassing or superficially trivial feelings, but I believe they sometimes deserve more stage time. Sometimes it's exploring thoughts that relate to uncomfortable feelings that yield the highest return on time spent.
Soliloquy is being built with neutralinojs, so it will work on any desktop OS (Mac/Linux/Window). It is "local only"--no network connection, so you can rest assured your private conversations are your own. I intend to publish it with MIT license but haven't got around to that yet :)
[1] https://github.com/canadaduane/soliloquy
That conversation will relate to my own project, in which I’ve lost the fun aspect of working on it. There’s something important about doing a thing purely for fun.
It's a companion project to uBlockOrigin, working towards improving the internet's signal/noise ratio by filtering out low-value content and nags. While cosmetic filtering is very powerful, its learning curve is steep, so the project provides customizable templates maintained by the community.
I'll be giving a talk about the project, titled "Designing an Open-Source project for low maintenance" this Thursday at Ory Summit[2] and will share the recording on HN once it's public. You can still watch the conference's live-stream for free!
After that, I'll need to update the website's copy and simplify some UX, to prepare for another visibility push later this year.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057442
[2]: https://ory-events.vercel.app/
My ambition is to build a dependable service that will be up for several years to come. For that to happen, I need to limit myself to a scope I am comfortable maintaining in the long run, instead of burning out under scope creep.
Until the maintainer team grows, I would be on the hook for updates and fixes, and I refuse to create an account on any of that company's sites.
Site is intended to be like the book Hacker's Delight, but recast into a game.
Or maybe like professional programming, where you're mostly trying to understand/modify other people's code.
Or maybe like programming in a post-GPT3 world where you're checking/fixing a transformer language model's plagiarized/regurgitated code. Our dystopian future.
Later this week I'll add a Hash Treap puzzle (the fastest and simplest balanced binary tree) following up on the reroot and remove-root puzzles (amazing little algorithms that allow treap insertion and removal, top-down, no rotations).
I'll launch the site properly once I have enough puzzles, maybe early next year.
I decided now to put an interface on it and make it a website.
https://jsniffer.com/
It's a personal project, but completely free and without ads, (in the future I want to open source parts of it!).
The idea is to solve the problem that boards have out there that just puts everything as "worldwide" and in the end, it's not available for me as a Brazilian.
The time spent researching job boards it was easier to make a crawler. In the end I got a job.
Right now just want to focus on it being complete as possible, so there are a few bugs and some listing that slips.
https://www.scholars.io
It's a free tool to read & review research papers together with your colleagues. You can annotate, draw and comment on papers you upload. It's a tool that I wish I had when I was doing my research and super excited to finally work on it!
Here's a quick video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4
Piano Gym is a learning and practice ecosystem focused on prioritizing music theory and performance skills acquisition through the use of flash cards. We use flash cards in order to pair them with modern learning techniques like spaced repetition, graded feedback, and progress tracking so that you can practice material and work through content that is managed by Piano Gym, and all you have to do is enroll in a school/course/lesson and do your reps! Just show up every day and do 15 minutes of reviews. You're going to make progress.
The website uses the Piano to navigate exercises as well as regular keyboard/mouse input. It works on browser technology and I'm looking to eventually make it mobile devices.
It provides content creation for everyone so that anyone can make their own schools/courses/lessons and the best part is each school gets its own landing page.
For example I'm using the methods book from https://freepianomethod.com which is provided by Mayron Cole, and if you wanted to practice it without signing up or enrolling you could easily visit this link: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method
Even better when you find the piece you want to practice you can share it directly like so: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method?sheet_mu...
My goal is to do this for free. I believe that no one should be blocked from learning. And one of the issues with this at the moment is that it's just me currently working nights and weekends to make this happen.
In particular, something that would widen access to this platform is a microphone-based input method for acoustic pianos. There are only a couple of commercial platforms that have this and AFAIK, no completely free ones have it. There are some challenges of course -- out of tune pianos, different types and makes and models sound different, variations in how the piano is mic'd, etc., but I believe those can be worked around and have some ideas about how to make it happen.
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It's got a way to go to be a full replacement but it's already got a lot of the features and can handle huge amounts of images and videos.
It's fully open source and not for profit, if you also don't like our Google overlords having all your data, give it a try!