this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

A few years back, I made a python program that searched free-for-commercial-use Google Images and auto-adjusted them to fit Amazon Merch shirts and uploaded them to Amazon. This was, of course, a violation of their terms of service.

[–] Flames5123 2 points 2 hours ago

I have a python script that I run on my phone to scrape a few websites and return the current food trucks at my few local breweries with the times they’re there. It makes our once/twice a week dinner selections so much easier than having to manually visit 4 websites. Some sites have been updated, and I haven’t updated my script and I need to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

me and a few friends have a dumb chatbot we've been fiddling with for 15 years. started out on irc, moved platforms multiple times, and i'm currently porting it to matrix. it can do poetry, markov chains, tell you when the weekend starts, pull youtube videos, create email aliases, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

I wrote a powershell script to rename and reorder about 1000 comic books based off a reading order I put in a csv file once

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

My most used one is a two letter terminal alias (zz for zigzag) that copies all the track information from a specified playlist, or from my “download" playlist if none is provided. It can also read from CSV and text files in order to remove all special characters and repeated words from each name. Then it outputs a formatted version to my clipboard, which I then paste into another program's config file. Then I wait...

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That’s a lot of comic books.

What’s the value of a collection like that?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

Wow this is really cool. Thanks for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago

That’s really cool!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

i wrote a simple program to wiggle my mouse

you can guess why

it was a rip off from a coworker’s program

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

I made a website to practice reading my wristwatch: https://aadniz.github.io/niwa-practicer/ (works best on PC, and I'm well aware of many issues)

Since depth is important to recognizing the odd and even, quickly mapping them to the number, I made it "fake" 3D, tracing each layer in krita.

There was no deep motivation for this other than refreshing myself a bit of React from University. With my neverending list of project plans, I felt like this one was a good choice for that. Here is the source code: https://github.com/Aadniz/niwa-practicer

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago

I wrote a coin flip script that randomly calls qlmanage -p tails.jpg / heads.jpg (Mac) to flip a virtual coin.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I have one deployed project using a raspberry pi.

A water temp meter that reports the water temp at a local swimming hole to a private webpage. Built using a raspberry pi zero w, a timer, an MC battery, a DS18B20 sensor and a bash script running as a service on bootup.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Cowsay as a Service. A Go microservice that lets you send form or json http post with curl or whatever to an api over the internet and in return you get the cowsay ascii art you requested.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

orphankiller, because pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq) is too much to type

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

I basically rewrote all of polybar using eww widgets because I didn't like how polybar was too rigid in certain aspects.

So lots of scripts handling audio control, dark/light mode, i3 workspace switching, media control, login session management, weather widgets calling external APIs, etc. It was a whole ecosystem of tools and widgets.

I just recently bought a new computer with an AMD GPU so I'm finally running Hyprland, and now I'm using Waybar. But I might start a project to do it all again using Astal. Who knows. Or maybe Waybar will be able to suffice. We shall see.

[–] neidu3 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

script that saves the current buffer of my continously running screen recorder to a file

Curious to know why you are continuously recording your screen. Must fill up your hard drives really quickly?

[–] neidu3 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Why: I case I want to show something unplanned to someone. Freak accident in a game, for example.
Disk: It's only keeping the latest 30 minutes in a buffer. Saving basically means copying that buffer to a different file.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, cool.

Sounds kind of like the Nvidia tool for Windows.

Speaking of which, as well as your use case, I found this tool a while ago that looks and does pretty much the same thing: "GPU Screen Recorder", found on flathub via "com.dec05eba.gpu_screen_recorder".

I hope it comes to use for anyone!

[–] neidu3 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

I based my setup around ~~Replay Magic~~ ReplaySorcery. I'm sure there are other packages too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Replay Magic

Hmm. Trying to find that. Do you mean ReplaySourcery?

[–] neidu3 1 points 2 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago

I made a D&D character generator once.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

What kind of hardware do you need for all this crazy sci-fi shit? 🤯

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] jws_shadotak 3 points 1 day ago

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.