Ask HN: What fun have you had with tech recently?

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.

What’s something fun you’ve done with tech recently that may or may not be overlooked?

49 points | by kiernanmcgowan 673 days ago

23 comments

  • gdulli 673 days ago
    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.

    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.

    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.

  • richjdsmith 673 days ago
    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.
  • pedalpete 673 days ago
    I think you're looking for something that isn't a shill, but I think our tech is pretty dope.

    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 https://soundmind.co

    Building an EEG headband and learning about neuroscience and sleep has been really fun. Learning about the market opportunities has been great.

    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.

    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.

    When I meet other health tech founders, I'm often hearing about really interesting and compelling stuff. Same with companies focused on environment.

    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.

    • soared 673 days ago
      Reminds me of the time I spent in college fooling around with small one-way mirrors/similar materials, an rpi, and a small screen to build really shitty AR mounted on baseball caps!
    • scotuswroteus 673 days ago
      LOL why did you pick such a hairy ear as your homepage's stock photo
      • pedalpete 673 days ago
        What can I say? My ears are hairy :)

        It's a baby ear, they are often hairy I think. Stock photography. We'll be re-doing the site as we get closer to launch.

      • ajvpot 673 days ago
        Looks like it's already gone.
  • otras 673 days ago
    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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463249

    After learning more, I've gotten interested in broader internet restrictions, such as restricting mobile internet to Facebook/WhatsApp (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/facebook-..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31465741, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...). I have a lot more to learn, but it feels like there's more here to explore.

  • zelienople 673 days ago
    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    That was fun!

  • xdfgh1112 673 days ago
    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.
    • raptorraver 671 days ago
      I'm currently working as a backend dev but decided to use Flutter for my side project for an app idea I've had for few years. Just got things set up and did my first hello world. Now skimming through some documentation to learn how it works. So far looks promising and fun!
  • ffhhj 673 days ago
    > fun / weird / creative

    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.

    • methusala8 671 days ago
      This sounds fun. How does one get into something like this?
  • jasonjmcghee 673 days ago
    I think "Pockit" is a pretty fun piece of tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615959
  • soared 673 days ago
    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.

    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.

    • nahmean 673 days ago
      I'd be interested to know which automation software you're referring to. I've spent a bit of time (particularly when I was younger and more interested in gaming) doing the same leveraging things like AutoIt all the way up to C#. I'm interested in what makes the automation software you've found inspiringly unique!
      • soared 673 days ago
        https://www.murgee.com/auto-mouse-clicker/

        Looks similar to a nocode version of autoit maybe. Its one of those tools that is challenging to understand but has incredible amounts of power. If you're familiar with old school runescape, it lets me set up a pretty nuanced bot for almost any acitivity in the game in about an hour. There are 150 actions, and a ridiculous number of settings. Many of the actions are ones I wouldn't think of when doing automation, but turn out to be useful (ie waiting for the count of colors within a certain area to be above or below a threshold).

        Surely one of those things most people here would look at and prefer to write python on their own!

        • doppp 672 days ago
          This is really cool actually. Do you know of any use cases for such automations (clicking or moving of mice) in the work setting?
          • soared 672 days ago
            One I have used for years is because one of our vendors doesn’t have an api and only allows 30 day timeframes for data downloads. So to get one year of data you have to download 12 reports manually, switching the dates, etc. or I open murgee, click f2, and wait 2 minutes.

            In adtech a lot of people are very technically adept but never learned to code so tools like that can fill needs quite well. Even if a vendor has an api I’d have to get product to dedicate hours/etc etc, or I can write a little automation and skip the api.

  • csdvrx 673 days ago
    I've had a lot of fun with foldable devices!

    From the UI challenges to fixing various OS issues, they're super fun to play with and explore!

    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!

    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: https://community.frame.work/t/windows-11-bsod-bug-check-0x9...

    ...yet nobody has solved them yet!

    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.

    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.

    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.

    This is also my first time playing with WinDbg and that's a lot of fun too!

    Sites like https://www.sysnative.com/forums/threads/the-complete-guide-... and were helpful: https://bsodtutorials.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/debugging-sto...

    Now I can go from a "0x9F_5_IMAGE_IntcAudioBus.sys" event message into the rabbit hole :)

  • j-rom 672 days ago
    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.

    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.

  • moonka 673 days ago
    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.
  • runnr_az 673 days ago
    I love small / weird projects that I can bang out in a couple of weekends / evenings. Most recently, I built https://nozama.dev, 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....
    • BoyBlunder 672 days ago
      This is very cool, thank you!
  • pojzon 673 days ago
    I’ve recently dived into frontend development.

    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.

    Seems like WAT was only the beginning.

  • f0e4c2f7 673 days ago
    VR. Facebook/Meta have tamed it a little bit but it mostly still feels like wide open country.

    Weird, hacky, interesting.

    I love it.

    • hacful-tonteg 673 days ago
      Vrchat or something else?

      What hardware is needed for playing around with this?

      • f0e4c2f7 673 days ago
        VRchat is a great example. There is also Altspace VR. Though that is PC only. Pavlov VR is an fps but some of the maps are experimental and interesting.

        The most cost effective way to get started is a quest 2. With a link cable you can use it as a pcvr headset as well.

        It does however require a Facebook account.

        One place you can look for some of the more unusual content on the quest is https://sidequestvr.com/

        • jnsie 673 days ago
          Just to add...Air Link works pretty well for those without a link cable. I've played a few Rift games on my Quest 2 and it's been pretty flawless.
        • hacful-tonteg 671 days ago
          Thank you! I am going to check out the quest 2.
  • evilbob93 671 days ago
    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.
  • sinenomine 672 days ago
    Playing with disco diffusion is cool https://github.com/alembics/disco-diffusion
  • giantg2 672 days ago
    I work in tech, therefore tech is no long fun (even outside of work).
    • dpe82 672 days ago
      Ditto. I left Google in January, extremely burned out after 7 years. I'm taking some time off to let that settle down and to rediscover my love of software. It's coming back, but slowly.

      I find myself in a similar boat to the poster. When I joined Google the world was trying to figure out how to run cloud applications. NodeJS, no-SQL and other new server technologies were relatively new; we didn't have good patterns, tools or libraries for rich web client development, and mobile development was just getting going. There was a lot going on in pure software. But then I joined the insular (and relatively advanced) world of GOOG, during which it seems the outside world has figured out a good amount of how to do large server applications, the client frameworks are getting decent and mobile is very mature. So I'm not sure what the big, new, interesting problem spaces are but it seems like we're near the end of a technology cycle.

      This feeling could just be me. I'm a pretty experienced engineer at this point and have seen a lot. I've done late-90s LAMP stack development, PC desktop development, early rich web development (my startup built a collaborative browser-based video editor in 2014) and then within GOOG saw and touched a ton of stuff. Maybe because I've seen so much my bar for "what's interesting" is a lot higher than it used to be?

      Either way, I still find myself asking: what's the next cycle? - Is AR/VR going to really stick this time and be a big thing with lots of interesting problems and products? - Is ML going to result in some really killer apps that aren't just iterative improvements on current stuff? - Is anything in Crypto non-BS? This space seems to have sucked a lot of air out of the room, but there SO MUCH NOISE it's hard to know if there's anything really there. - Have we hit peak pure software and the really interesting stuff from here on out is software applied to atoms? Eg. automation, robotics, etc.?

  • rdubs333 673 days ago
    Design System based on natural processes: https://mtrees.io
  • nostrademons 673 days ago
    Drones. $15 HoverStar from Costco can fly around the room, do tricks, respond to hand gestures. The kids love it.
  • e9 672 days ago
    I started using Meteor again and OMG it’s so fun I just can’t stop building stuff
  • sydthrowaway 673 days ago
    How about shaders?
  • jyu 673 days ago
    programming in rust for nft tech. nfts are in the toy phase, which makes it easy for many to underestimate the implications.