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What is a software you wish existed?
I've been feeling pretty bored for a while and my job isn't really giving something fulfilling to do, So I want to make something.
However, I don't want to make something useless. unfortunately, I can't think of any software I'm in a particular need for. I would love to make something that solves a real problem for a real human.
So, please tell me, what's something that you wish existed because it would reduce suffering in your life that little (or big) bit?
Edit: Wow wow and wow, I didn't expect this thread that I made on a whim to blow up so much. So many idead!
I'm upgrading my phone after 6 years and found out to my dismay that Hacker's Keyboard has been a dead project for about that long, and it no longer runs properly on modern Android versions. I can't find another Android keyboard that isn't just a variation on the basic google keyboard, and indeed most recommendations online seem to deem every single one of them inferior to google's offer.
If you'd like to create a terminal-friendly Android keyboard for power users, that would be super useful. I understand this is also actually quite complex as there are many APIs and security implications to deal with.
You might try the unexpected keyboard, unsure if it is completely comparable to the Hacker's keyboard, but it comes in clutch when I need those uncommon characters. I also like the way it works
I will try it, thank you for the recommendation.
Futo Keyboard is another one worth checking out. It also has a fully on-device speech-to-text engine, which is also available on its own as a separate app if you want to use it in combination with a different soft keyboard.
I started using Futo a couple weeks ago but the lack of any option to have two active languages is killing me. Having to swap all the time between Spanish and English is a PITA. Swiftkey was much better in that regard.
As a shameful monoglot I'm afraid I can't sympathize.
I am thoroughly enjoying HeliBoard.
Pretty good, I think this is the one I'll stick with for now. It's multi-language friendly which is important (english and portuguese) and plenty customizable.
I do wish they let me move the symbols to the number keys (in accordance with the standard keyboard layout for the selected country) when the number keys row is enabled. It's annoying that they are in nonstandard locations. Biggest flaw, I'd say.
EDIT: Looks like there may be a deeper rabbit hole here than what I thought at first, I'll have to look into it later.
I'm trying it right now and I'm loving it. Multi language without the need to swap, suggestions are decent and ui is good.
I'm still using it on my Samsung S21, but I'm going to be very upset if it breaks on an update.
A Dvorak keyboard layout for Android with an intelligent autocorrect that implements a Pruning Radix Trie would be amazing. I use OpenBoard, but its recommendations for autocorrect are abysmal, likely because it doesn't use an English lexicon sorted by frequency.
I don't have a suggestion, but I am a graphic designer, so if you wanna work together (also looking for fun projects) shoot me an email. My website is in my Tildes bio. Free of charge, of course, we're just trying to have fun
The first one that comes to mind is a mobile app that allows you to set alarms based on solar time, like sunrise, solar noon, and sunset. Ideally, this could be programmed with an offset like "five minutes before sunrise" or "fifteen minutes after solar noon".
The second one is basically adding features to an open source project that is super useful to me. Like, if you could add features to solvespace or (dare I ask) improving their solver so that it doesn't fail so easily.
FWIW automations can be built in HomeAssistant to do that, using their Sun integration.
For anybody interested in building out this function, here's a good starting point for that data. You could either implement a full calendar, or have it scrape the table data generator for a latitude/longitude.
Have you looked at Suntimes, and especially the Suntimes Alarms extension? I'm not sure of the total functionality, but it is based on setting alarms based on celestial events, including sun- and moonrise/set, along with others, I believe. I don't know if it has the capability of the "five minutes before" thing, but maybe worth a look if you haven't already.
Plus it's FOSS :)
Suntimes is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks! But I'll keep trying to think of an interesting project.
An app to set different alarms for different days would be great. I couldn't find a good one on iOS.
I’m the maintainer of Storyteller, a self-hosted platform for automatically syncing audiobooks and ebooks, and I’d love to have some more contributors to the project if you’re interested! I don’t know what programming languages/frameworks you’re comfortable with, but the Storyteller backend is Next.js (Typescript, React, SQLite) and the mobile apps are React Native with some native Kotlin and Swift code
I wish for a simpler internet, with no tracking and no ranking and none of that advertising garbage. Just gimme back my early 2000s internet please. Maybe a forum/friends list that is genuinely only there to connect people to each other, not connect tech bros to wealth.
Edit: like Tildes. But more of it.
Then you might want to look into Gemini, sadly likely no support for forums, but gives that smallweb indie vibe (because it is) without the jump scares and random [censored for sanity] of the early 2000s.
Oooh the familiar white background, black San serif text, blue links and nothing but text!
Very nice , thank you !
Metafilter.com is still out there living the Golden Age of the Internet.
The issue has always been economics. Either you make it ad supported or you paywall it. The problem with pay walling is that most of the young hip and interesting people aren't rich. So your platform becomes populated almost exclusively by older people who have disposable income.
There is a third option: publicly funded as a common good.
You might get inundated with AI projects, but here's one. Give me an application that quickly tells me what to say when I'm in an uncomfortable social situation.
I don't think you should rely "AI" on that 😅
Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Didn't even need to click. IT Crowd is mandatory viewing for anybody who has done desktop support.
My go to is always to ask some kind of question to lead the conversation away from what making things uncomfortable.
Yeah but what would be cool is given some context, i.e. audio or text, and or some common prompts to choose from, a uniquely nuanced response that works for any situation.
I’ve thought about this recently and I think a topical conversation starter is usually all that’s needed to continue conversation on my own. Typically in an awkward situation both people just kind of stare dumbly waiting for the other person to spark a jumping off point.
If somehow you could incorporate news of the day/week and any other generic icebreakers (e.g. “see any good movies recently?”) you could do slightly better than this small talk calendar (which is admittedly geared towards college students).
Observational humor
This is usually what leads to uncomfortable situations.
A robust and FOSS command line movie renamer similar to TVNamer with an option to rename folders while keeping files the same. The standard convention is
Title (Year). Also, a reliable FOSS command line subtitle downloader which I can use with my Opensubtitles account.A CLI version of subsync (subtitle synchronization through language aware audio analysis).
The reason I want command line tools is that they usually make it easier to batch process so I can do all my files with a single command.
Some of those technically exist but are not in an usable state. I think Filebot does it all but it is paid now. And when you convert from US dollars everything is kinda expensive to me.
Mediaelch is free and great for getting images (posters, etc) and metadata but its renamer is not very smart. It can't deal with all the extra characters found in "alternative releases".
An automation tool for Linux that is just as easy, comprehensive, and well documented as Autohotkey on Windows.
A Linux distro or tool that does for all Windows applications what Steam did for Windows games.
There is Autokey that is well documented and more powerful in many ways, but only works on X11 desktops.
Then there is ydotool that takes the desktop and turns into a headless browser basically, requires a lot more work for scripting but can do anything you can do on the desktop. Only supports Wayland.
I have tried using Autokey multiple times before. It was unreliable and the documentation wasn't helpful to me. I had no idea how to do anything. But that was years ago, it may have greatly improved since then. Thanks.
Building the naming thing is precisely my pet project. I built one for my uni thesis. It was about 99% successful across about 10TB of media. But 99% successful is 100% useless. One day I'll return to this problem
Not really right? If you present a good interface on which ones have failed, 99% is way better than nothing.
Hmmm, you might be right.... I'll bookmark this to remind me to go dig it out, see about version 2 (I imagine the apis I was using for imdb, tmdb, Wikipedia etc are all broken now 8 years on).
Yeah... one mistake in a 100 is pretty good actually. Especially if the program can tell me that an error occurred so I can fix it manually.
Check out bottles, it is as easy to use/adjust as Steam's compatibility tools
I have used Bottles because I'm a nerd. It is still a far cry from something most regular users would consider acceptable.
I've used bottles and while it's great, there's an absolutely massive gulf in how usable it is compared to Steam's Proton compatibility tools in terms of UX.
I disagree. The only difference is you provide the installer, or use the community prebuilt configs. It provides an interface that combines Wine/Protontricks and ProtonUp-QT in a package that gives immense power in an easy to use way.
It's kinda power-usery, but that's optional, and any tweak in a Bottle is at least two steps easier than in Proton, with WINE version changes being just as easy. The only issue I can imagine is one has to understand WINE's design to get the most out of it, but the same applies to Proton.
It's a little slower on executing changes for reasons I don't get, but I won't dock too many points for that.
I have used Bottles extensively and recently. Maybe it's super trivial for the average Tildes user. Even when it works well I do not believe it's good enough for a regular non-techie user. And it doesn't always work right.
Unless Windows programs on Linux reach a state where my 68-year-old mother can seamlessly install and use a basic program just by hitting "Next" or using some kind of easy to understand store or front-end without calling me, it is not good enough.
I don't need that myself. I can use apt, pacman, whatever. And I barely ever need any Windows program on Linux. I really meant the request for the benefit of users who are not computer nerds, and that will never be computer nerds.
Given the excellent state of Windows "not-emulation" on Linux, that feels like a reasonable step forward. Package it on an awesome GUI that is possibly integrated with each distro's GUI software store. When required, let people insert their Microsoft/Adobe credentials or whatever, and give them a nice big "INSTALL" button that is guaranteed to work every time. Maybe run on top of some Windows package manager such as Scoop, Winget, or Chocolatey? IDK, I'm not a programmer. Just an idea that popped in might head right now.
If Bottles presented the app installers initially it would be closer to what you describe but considering the hoops one would have to jump through to do the same thing without Bottles one doesn't have to be a power user to get deep on Wine installs with multiple environments, versions, and library/addon collections. However anybody who wants to run non-native apps on an OS is likely going to quickly fall into even the shallow end of "power user," whether they're all GUI driven or manually doing WINEPREFIXes, IMO. If your mother decided she didn't like Windows and could get Ubuntu installed she could probably figure out Bottles.
I also sort of grade Linux UX by "How often do I need to touch the command line?" Bottles requires no commandline, so I would feel comfortable giving it to my brother who has repeatedly not done anything with Linux that requires technical knowledge beyond the bare minimum to use it (which is roughly equivalent to Windows, with different details).
To run a Steam game using Proton, I need to click a single checkbox in that game's steam settings. Bottles is great, but it isn't that easy even in the easiest case.
I've also failed to install apps through Bottles when they didn't have prebuilt configs and I couldn't figure out the right configs to get the application to run.
FWIW I use GPT for this purpose and it is almost flawless.
I feel like Sonarr and Radarr might be of use to you. Even if you don't use it for downloading stuff via torrents you can still use them to import your libraries of media and auto rename them based on the formats you specify.
Gods yes. The existing tools for this are a giant pain in the posterior. I'm stuck using TinyMediaManager at present because it's the least destructive option. I still have to do a manual touch up on things before merging them into the library. I think the best one I've ever used was Ember Media Manager but that's been a dead/defunct project for years now. In fact most of the projects in this space like GCstar and Video Hub are also dead. I think they all died about the time streaming services convinced people never to bother owning physical media or keep local copies ever again.
Closest thing I know of to what you're looking for is FileBot, it's also long in the tooth. There's a killer GUI tool for Windows called 1-4a-rename that has deep renaming capabilities, perfect for manually cleaning up a big mess in a hurry.
Frankly I'd settle for an operating system that can open a folder that has 50,000 media files in it without going into vapor lock for two minutes trying to collect all the metadata. Can I just get a damn list without trying to generate thumbnails and load twenty columns of metadata from the files please? I still have to fall back to midnight commander sometimes. I want that window open in ten seconds at most and I don't care if there are a million files in the folder, get better. Far as I can tell, every operating system still fails utterly at managing large numbers of files. By the time you hit 10k files it's lagville city. My music collection had to be sorted into artist folders from aa to zz just to get around this problem.
File systems suck. All of them, and the entire general concept of them as well. Why they haven't been replaced permanently by something more database driven (and thus vastly more performant) is still a mystery to me. /rant
Also, as for that last item... Ubuntu is rumored to be working on native windows app support. The .exe gets run under an emulation layer. Supposed to be simple as right-click and pick 'open under windows' to launch them. I'd love it, but I'll believe it when I see it, as this is a pretty spicy technical challenge to pull off. Right now one can do this using VMWare workstation, it just runs the apps in the windows VM and integrates their GUI elements with the host operating system. They seem and feel native, including clipboard integration.
At first when I read your section about a more database driven file system, I did not agree. I thought file systems and databases solve different problems, and there isn’t much of a reason to have overlap. But it stuck in my mind. I think I just want atomic database transactions. Imagine being able to do a copy or file change and, if there are errors, ROLLBACK; Now I really want a sql file system.
have you seen mnamer? I've tried it before and it worked at least as well as TheRenamer used to.
I haven't used FileBot but I think at least some parts of it are open source: https://github.com/filebot
yep. AutoHotKey is a true gem. I recently converted a script to evdev and it is a lot more verbose:
evdev version: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/computer/blob/main/bin/wheel.py
13 vs: 81 lines...
These are based on evdev so I think they could handle more advanced remapping:
Unfortunately, all of these programs require root access which is probably one of the big reasons that there isn't an equivalent to AutoHotKey on Linux. Doing anything interesting requires working around X, Wayland, etc but on Windows it seems like non-Admin users still have quite a bit of low-level hardware access
What does that mean?
Steam on Linux allows for everyone to play games that are only available for Windows on Linux easily, requiring no additional configurations. It would be nice if that ease of use was also extended to Windows programs that are not games.
Have you had issues with it not working for arbitrary programs? I have used Proton to launch all kinds of windows programs without issue.
I haven't really tried. I don't have a lot of Windows programs I'd wanna run on Linux myself, I just think it would be a game changer to a lot of people if all they had to do was press a button like they do on Steam.
You can almost do that by adding the windows executable as a "game" on steam. I have done that on several occasions and it has worked quite well so far. Windows Forms applications look a bit strange but all seem to work just fine.
Check out Bottles
I mentioned this on tildes before but I honestly don't see why there isn't one central app for "reviews" and logging media.
I've been using letterboxd for years and I'd like to also log and categorise my games (backloggd), shows (serializd), books (Goodreads) and music (Rateyourmusic), but I have no interest in having 5 separate apps each with their unique accounts, UI and flow. I just want to log stuff, add things to my "watchlist" and eventually read reviews and information about media (what actors were in this, who sang what instrument on this album, what studio made this game etc.)
These apps are so similar they are only divided by their media type, and they have no reason to exist separately.
To make it also an inherent benefit of having it combined, if you liked the Metro games the app could also recommend you not only similar games but also the Metro books. Bit of a silly simple example but you get the idea.
I wouldn't ever start such a project myself because it's a front end heavy app and it's not my strong suit, but it's honestly the one thing I would really want to have and haven't found any alternative atm (except a spreadsheet).
This is appealing to me too. If I had to guess why it doesn't exist, it probably has something to do with the database work involved (lots of tables with lots of columns) as well as sourcing for all of the requisite metadata to make such a thing useful. Selecting a single type of media mitigates these issues to a significant degree.
That said, it's doable, but would probably need to be subscription-supported in some way (maybe only for advanced features) to be sustainable.
Hmmmm, to go about making such an app would require integration with many 3rd party services if someone doesn't want to gather all the data themselves. I think the biggest roadblock to such an app is the great differences between each field, e.g. movies generally have actors but games don't, Music has bands but books don't. So the information aggregator is out of the question for such an app.
So let's consider a small scope: An app that would only display a titles, and optionally contain links to sources so you could read more. Even then, for each media category there needs to be an integration with an api that hopefully doesn't charge exorbitant amounts.
A site like that has been my dream for a long time: cross-media logging, cross-media recommendations, and an all-in-one wishlist for stuff you're interested in.
What games might you like if you enjoyed watching Black Mirror? What music might you like if you read cozy mysteries? A site like this could give interesting answers to those questions.
Another hard part of it though would be building a big enough userbase to have meaningful data to answer those questions and cover costs. I've seen quite a few indie logging/review sites come and go because they can't get enough people on them to be sustainable.
The lack of a thing like this is what lead me to build one of my own:
https://david.reviews/
Unlike all the other sites you mentioned, it's not a site where anyone can sign up and post. Its just a front end for my reviews database, which has movies, games, and books. That removed a bunch of headaches (storing login info, moderation, etc) while still giving me what I wanted (to be able to share my reviews).
Of course, there's also no community or algorithm recommendation features, but that's an ok trade off.
The whole front end is open source. The backend is airtable, but I've been meaning to publish my schema in a reuseable way (at least so people can produce similar results). All the data entry is automated too, so I just type a review and thoughts.
Anyway, all that is to say, a spreadsheet with some automation is probably best if you're just tracking for you! cc @ButteredToast
Something I've been wanting (to build) for a while, but never get around to, is a calendar type tool for tracking recurring events based on the last occurrence. For example, I need to deworm my cat monthly. Say I do that on the 1st of May, it then should happen again on the 1st of June. If, however, things go drastically awry and I don't get to it until the 10th, the next deworming should be on July 10th, not the 1st! Similar structure works for things like mowing the lawn, cleaning, etc. Nothing I've found so far is able to manage this sort of recurrence.
You may be interested in Todoist (see the "Original date or the completion date" section):
The "every!" notation sounds like it would do what you want. I use Todoist for everything that needs to get done, whether on a schedule or otherwise. I'd be lost without it.
On Android I use this feature everytime. You can create occuring event (every week, month, etc) and if you change latest event - like move a date forward or backward you will get question like 'do you want to change current event only or apply change to all events?'.
I haven't used it in ages, but I seem to recall that Remember the Milk does this. The next task is scheduled from the point when you mark the previous done. My only issue was that I couldn't mark things as being done on a previous day, if I hadn't gotten around to marking it done until the next day.
If you're on iOS, Sometime handles this use case quite well.
This is cool, thanks for sharing. I wish it had a desktop/browser app too... seems like that's hard to find these days.
Tech companies employee growth over time.
Who is growing?
Who is shrinking?
The data is all there.
Fuck it, if you don't build it, I will.
And I don't even know how to code beyond ChatGPT & Google.
Let me know.
Question: why are you interested in this data, as a job searcher or investor or some other reason ?
Both. Which companies should I apply to. Which companies should i invest in.
Also, if it's in a database with stock info, maybe I can ask some interesting questions. Is the pullback in tech hiring driven by revenue shrinkage or valuation shrinkage? Is it specific to unprofitable startups, shrinking tech giants or is it across the board?
Honestly this sounds like a great first project. Get some front-end library and a graphing plugin and find the data. If it is not there, you could use Python and Pandas/Polars to compile it yourself.
Oh you mean employee count?
Is that data really easily accessible? it sounds like a fun idea purely just for the discussions it would generate. Could you elaborate more?
FINVIZ has it.
Just snapshot yoy % change along with yoy % change in market cap, revenue, earnings, FCFF etc...
Which companies should I apply to? Those that are hiring like mad and growing revenue like madder, and maybe even free cash flow positive.
Which companies should i invest in? I am not a fan of companies that are growing profits by cutting costs, it works in the short term, but in the long term it's not a strategy for growth.
Is the pullback in tech hiring driven by revenue shrinkage or valuation shrinkage?
Is it specific to unprofitable startups, shrinking tech giants or is it across the board?
Isn't this what stock screening tools do?
The job search site Otta pulls in company staff growth/decline percentage when you review a job posting. I assume you want something more broad, though.
There's a few sites that keep track of tech layoffs, but not sure if anyone is doing the opposite.
I saw a site with this exact data on hacker news a week or so ago. Let me see if I can find it.
Edit: I found the original site along with a few others.
https://layoffs.fyi
https://www.warntracker.com
https://intellizence.com/insights/layoff-downsizing/major-companies-that-announced-mass-layoffs
idk how involved you wanna go but every audiobook player on android sucks so so so so so much for various reasons.
Audiobookshelf is too confusing to set up, Smart Audiobook Player doesn't make it POSSIBLE to play your books faster than 3x which is just ridiculous, I listen usually at 4x now, Listen Audiobook Player has no labels such as "unstarted" or "finished" (and neither has a label called "dnf") so both of them force you to regularly delete files rather than have them pollute the top of your currently-listening view. LAP does let you listen faster than 4x but you can't just type say 4.5x nor slide a slider past 4.5x. No, you have to tap in .05x intervals up to 4.5x (that's clicking it 10 times for those keeping track) and god forbid you accidentally tap the slider thats like 5mm away from the place u are supposed to be tapping +0.5, you will reset your progress back to 4.
Anyway if you are interested in making an audiobook player for power users but not-quite-so-power-users-that-they-want-to-install-something-via-docker-ffs I can give you a lot more specifics about what I want from a mobile audiobook player.
This is rather surprising. Aren’t most audiobooks just AAC files with embedded chapter metadata? That doesn’t seem like it’d pose too much of a challenge technically.
No, the format varies wildly, especially for older ones where it used to literally be an audio cd and someone chapterized it manually
tbh i dont even give a shit if it's chapterized, id be happy to have a ""music player app"" that sometimes i want to listen to at 4x speed and sometimes i dnf albums, etc, lol
Interesting. I wonder what would be the quickest way to quickly procure a sufficiently varied sample set of audiobooks to test with.
Alright now this is interesting! It's small enough to be doable by one person yet large enough to be useful. I'm definitely interested in a detailed specification about what you want from an audio book player. I'm especially interested in why you would want a particular feature, and were current audio book players fall short.
Also interested in knowing which players you have tried, and where they fall short, especially if they're open source.
awesome, i listen to a LOT of audiobooks and I'm definitely down to be involved throughout the process as a dedicated beta tester. Writing up a detailed spec will take me a while, but for now I can point you to Smart Audiobook Player and Listen Audiobook Player. There's a general consensus in the audiobook community that nothing else is even worth considering.
Audiobookshelf probably has every feature I want, but using it requires self-hosting a server which requires, well, self-hosting a server. I can't figure it out lol.
You may want to check out their project!
I'm also happy to chat in Discord, I have friend requests off but if you DM me your ID i'll add you! (I'm River (which is also why I have friend requests off haha))
Wow, I've never even tried speeding up an audiobook, I miss too much stuff as it is. I just checked the main app I use, and it only does 2x. But if that's not a dealbreaker otherwise, I use Voice Audiobook Player (I use F-Droid, but linked the play store for ease).
It's pretty bare-bones, you drag your audiobook in a folder, which works well if you manage your collection elsewhere anyhow.
I use Voice as well for books and podcasts (already had it installed and wanted to listen to some offline shows). It actually does more than 2x. If you drag the slider all the way over it resets 2x to be the center and then gives you the option to push it to 3x all the way at the right. Haven't tried pushing to see how fast it'll go. But I can confirm it at least does 3x!
Looks like 3.5x is the limit, TIL.
If you haven’t looked at audiobookshelf in a while, I would check it out again. It now supports running in windows as a single executable file. It literally could not be easier to set up.
I tried installing that application, but is there something more you have to do besides have your phone & pc on the same local network? connecting to my pc's IP address doesn't work
Nope, IP and port should get it working fine. Windows firewall may be giving you some issues? I personally despise windows, and have almost succeeded in removing it from my life, so I can’t really help you there.
it's possibly windows firewall but I have no idea, and I have no idea how to troubleshoot. the discord server has also been pretty unfriendly in the past so I'm reluctant to ask there.
If anyone here wants to help me troubleshoot I would greatly appreciate it, I would love to use abs!!
I hate using flowchart tools (visio, lucidchart, miro....), but often need to. I don't if this would improve it, but I envision being able to talk to the system to add or move things around.
"Add a box labeled Kafka and connect it to the box labeled database"
"Move the Kafka box to the left of the database box and add an arrow to the database box"
It would keep everything lined up, the same size, and arrows straight.
I feel like with all the NLP tools around it's really close to being feasible.
Have you tried PlantUML? You write up text and it converts it into an SVG diagram for you.
I feel like text-based drawing tools are very convenient to edit. For example,
Excalidraw is kinda magic in its ease and simplicity - just start using those hotkeys!
Code2Flow isn’t what you asked for but might be interesting to you.
I'm with you on this. I tinkered with something very basic along similar lines a couple of years ago, but as so many things I don't have the time/energy/will/drive to see it through.
The goal was slightly different, in that I was aiming for automatic layouting to minimize input, as I would primarily use it for trying to understand more complex connected networks of related items.
I also wasn't using NLP but just setting up a natural language syntax for it.
I got so far I could take input files like this:
and automatically turn it into something like this: image
Differentiating implicitly and explicitly defined nodes was an important aspect for me at that time, which is why the nodes have different styling and why I declare them explicitly in the input.
You were able to configure your own set of instructions (here: "<x> exists" and "<x> is connected to <y>") and how the elements they affected would be styled (e.g. shape of node, type of line, arrows for directed connections, etc.)
As far as I remember though, with the tool I used for the layouting (graphviz dot language), having more explicit control on exactly how objects are placed relative to each other isn't really possible, or at least it's very much not trivial to automate.
One thing I did use it for was mocking up a flowchart for my understanding/interpretation of basically the state machine underlying stealth rules in D&D 5e, as a basis for discussing this with some of my players: image. Not the prettiest, and I'm sure it's not fully accurate to the rules, but it helped me reach a mutual understanding with the person mostly using stealth in that campaign as to how we would use it.
Unfortunately your images are not available anymore. The state machine for 5e sounds useful though.
Thank you for letting me know! I guess discord is doing some access management on the attachments. Reuploaded them to imgur so should now be available. They're very basic, but still.
In their efforts to curb sending malware through Discord, the links periodically refresh, it is automatic on Discord but outside Discord the links die instead of being refreshed/replaced.
I love Mermaiddiagram for this. You write your diagrams in a declarative way and it generates a consistent version for you. I have a whole workflow using the CLI and Nodemon to have hot reloading diagrams.
Mermaid diagrams are great, as long as you limit the output to browser-based solutions. As soon as you want to put the diagrams in a PDF (or any other non-browser-based environment), you'll run into troubles.
https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/2485
A native Linux version of Photopea. Problem that it solves? Ideally a native version would overcome the performance limitations of the in-browser JavaScript. And it preserves the Photoshop workflow I’m used to. I just like the feel of native apps more than web apps too.
That’s a pretty tall order, but yknow, dream big and all that.
Native is also cool because it’s a complete, fully offline binary, meaning that it can be run for the foreseeable future (even if this eventually requires hacks, compatibility layers, VMs, etc). Web apps are subject to sudden disappearance if the maintainer loses interest, no longer has the time/money, something happens to them, etc.
Native would likely be too temperamental and severely limit the potential of mass usage (and thus, community dev efforts) likely. Best case would be developing it in a native language, and focus on WASM builds (you can run WASM applications as native executables as well!), that way it can run on the web (or as an application) on desktop and mobile. I tried finding a project, but I can't seem to find anything? Closest is Bitmappery (great name), but doesn't seem as finished or comparable to Photopea, nor does it want to.
Edit (sort of, haven't even posted it yet): I found one, apparently I had even starred it on GH, but Graphite seems to be exactly what we (me?) are looking for. Seems to be incredibly comparable at first glance. They are releasing native builds later this year, but you can already use it in the browser as a PWA.
If you really must have it be native, then Gimp (yes, I know...) is actually really great and comparable when you enable the PhotoGIMP plugin.
I also tend to use Inkscape as a Photoshop more than anything these days, it's solid, and does what most people use Photoshop for (quick edits, and vector editing), it's most similar to Corel Draw or Illustrator (but certainly more Corel Draw).
Wow, Graphite looks promising! Thanks for sharing it.
As for PhotoGimp, the amount of crashes the stable release of gimp has during regular operations turned me off of it completely.
I’ll need to take a closer look at Inkscape and Graphite to see how they compare to Photopea right now.
edit: Graphite looks promising but is too buggy right off the bat. I'll keep an eye on it as it grows.
It really isn't, the real problem with GIMP is not the interface, that you can get used to - and it's not that bad in the modern releases, one of the reasons it was terrible on Windows was because until relatively recently it used to use an old and buggy release of GTK which introduced some unintentional GUI papercuts. The problem is that it's lacking features that Photoshop had 20 years ago (no exaggeration). Some of the most important ones, like non-destructive editing through filter layers, are coming soon in Gimp 3, others not yet.
Graphite looks pretty great though.
SponsorBlock for podcasts.
I too have really wanted this. I wonder if this kind of app would get banned from the iOS store? I’m not sure explicitly what rule it would violate but it just seems like the sort of thing they wouldn’t allow.
I do this with their youtube streams. I run a cronjob every hour to pull with yt-dlp and then I have a php script (check my history) to generate the feed itself. It isn't perfect, but its good enough.
I would love a proper one.
With dynamic ad insertion, sponsor block as it exists on YouTube isn’t possible for podcasts. You would have to train some sort of ML model to try and identify sponsor segments.
This probably doesn't answer your question because it isn't something you can really write, but I wish the program mp3tag had a Linux release, with integration into gnome/mate/whatever.
Are there no Linux alternatives? It feels like it's such a basic utility that there would definitely be alternatives.
Ok while writing this comment I made a quick search and I found those
https://kid3.kde.org/
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG
Where do they fall short?
Lol yeah it is basic. Haven't tried those, but I've been using mp3tag for something like 20 years and I don't want to change. This is a me thing.
Check out Picard -- it can auto tag if matching music can be found in the musicbrainz db
I would love a single app that can consolidate all the various healthcare apps into one for me, including the pharmacy I use. Like, There is an app for my PCP, one for each of my specialists, one for the pharmacy (like I said before), one for my therapist, one for the lab I use, and one for my insurance. And none of them talk to one another.
I do understand a lot of it has to do with HIPAA and privacy laws, but that was the ONE good thing when I was still with Kaiser, there was ONE app and everything was in one place. I have things set up in my health app on my phone, but that's still not quite what I need.
This seems like something that would require integration with each of these services, right? Seems like a simple CRUD app that only an ambitious company could pull off, mostly due to the nightmarish amount of paperwork that would need to be done.
Even then it's most likely gonna be limited to a specific geographic region, due to differences in laws and standards and whatnot between regions. So yeah, definitely a wish :D
It sure would be nice if things could be integrated, though.
I know some of the various orgs are working on at least being able to link accounts through Epic, but that only goes so far.
A simple app that lets me take a photo of something I just cleaned or tidied.
And shows a list of all those things I cleaned, ordered by time.
There are so many manage-your-housekeeping apps, and they're all bloated.
Most of them are all about scheduling stuff in the future.
We need the dark sky of housecleaning apps :)
I just want to glance at it and see how many days since I last cleaned the fridge.
This is something I didn't knoe I needed!
A Mac application to launch Firefox with different profiles.
Currently, an old, no-longer-supported version of this works, and it's called MultiFireFox.
The original author's website is here:
https://davemartorana.com/multifirefox/
Source code from github is here:
https://github.com/themartorana/MultiFirefox
Homebrew can install an Intel version here:
https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/multifirefox
Unfortunately this software appears to be abandoned, and you can only get the old Intel version which means it's not running natively on any newer, modern Macintosh that uses an M1, M2 or M3 chip. There is an issue on github from 2023 asking if Apple Silicon builds will be coming, but it's left unanswered.
On Linux and Windows, there are launchers but I'd like a Mac version.
I still use MultiFirefox all the time - to me, it's far better than Firefox's multi-account-containers feature which is designed to help you isolate your cookies when using different accounts on the same website. And you can launch different profiles by going into about:profiles each time but it's incredibly inconvenient.
Anyway, if you're a mac developer this seems like a fairly straightforward project!
Firefox devs are working on creating a better profiles function.
Thanks for that - I didn't realize they were working on this, but it appears to be still quite a ways away.
In any event, I suppose that means I can keep going with MultiFirefox until that is ready; hopefully Rosetta 2 will not be made obsolete by Apple before then!
There is a auto container addon in Firefox which can automatically open each tab in a new container. Plus, you can force certain sites to always open in a certain tab if you want.
I would love a comic reader with panel by panel view for Android, on iOS I used Smart Comic Reader.
Now on Android I am using Comic Trim but it's not been updated in a long time, the design is dated, and it's not open source.
PS: I just saw Comic Trim is actually not available on the Play Store anymore.
I also tend to make the things I need. What programming languages and technologies are you comfortable with? Do you write shaders? Plugins? Websites? Backends?
Currently I don't feel like there is anything I need, otherwise I tried making that. For better or worse, every time I think about some problem I wanna solve, I find that someone has already made a solution for it. My remaining problems belong to some large OpenSource apps that are waay beyond my current level.
I'm comfortable using almost any technology. My day job is already Web Development with all the backend and frontend stuff. I would prefer to make self-contained stuff, so nothing large enough that it would require a message queue. a tool to help someone have an easier time with something.
I see. I asked because I have an endless amount of pending ideas and ongoing projects but I didn't want to pitch helping with any of my projects to you if you'd rather do something small and self-contained, as seems to be the case! Plenty of ideas around here though, I hope you find something.
There's a plethora of online photo libraries out there, but from the ones I've test drove, they're lacking in the ability to quickly do super basic editing.
I don't really care about advanced editing, but I want a web-based open source photo library with:
Doesn't even need file upload capabilities, because the photo dumping is done via other tools.
I have another. Many years ago, possibly a decade or two, I had in my computer a rudimentary program that used my Webcam to detect my gestures to toggle Play/Pause on a video. It wasn't better than simply using the keyboard so I forgot about it. But what I really wanted now and back then was for a program which detects when I am in the room watching and when I am not, and accordingly toggled Play/Pause on whatever video player I was using (it would have to be flexible here, and work on any video player that had the focus). It would have to work 100% locally, off course. That would be neat!
I played a bit with an eye movement tracking software that detects certain movements patterns, which people can then use to make to whatever. I'm sure it's way better these days for hand gestures and other accessibility/convenience tools
Cool. To me in particular just toggling Play/Pause according to my presence in the room would be awesome. Eye tracking would not be required for me, as I would want it to play if I'm in the room even if I was looking at something else.
I wonder if this would be achievable with some Zigbee sensors and a few HomeAssistant integrations. They definitely sell cheap presence sensors. Surely there’s a HomeAssistant plugin for various media programs though I’ve never looked.
HA could definitely do something like that. ESPresense would work pretty well pretty cheaply. It uses BTLE to track the location of your phone/watch/etc. You could also use some mmWave presence devices. They work really well, but they are like $60+ per tracker.
I wish there was a Firefox or Chrome extension that used AI to filter reddit headlines for anything fucked up. I never want to know about animal cruelty or new horrors against women, and I try to come up with good filters to prevent seeing these things, but posts always get through the gaps.
I don't need to know that Logan Paul deliberately tried to kill his dog for content. That would never cross my mind as a possibility, and it's on the front page and now installed in my head.
Hmmmm... That sounds doable.
I was thinking "just don't go to reddit" but remembered negative stuff might surface on Tildes as well, so I thought about a way to implement a general solution for this type of problem.
The solution I'm envisioning consists of a client-side browser extension, and a server-side sentiment analysis engine.
The analysis engine should be something you can download and install locally on your machine.
The extension is configured with a CSS selector that selects the text you wish to be hidden e.g. titles of tildes posts. You should be able to configure this manually for any site. The extension now has a list of elements containing text. It sends this list to the analysis engine which responds with sentiment scores. If the score is bad, the extension hides the offending titles or replaces with with some warning.
For the analysis engine, there seems to be promising tools:
https://spacy.io/api/large-language-models#sentiment
https://github.com/socius-org/sentibank
The challenge would be making this installation as easy as possible. I think it will be better to distribute the backend part as a dockerfile.
I would love for someone to suggest a better approach.
For the server, I would check out replicate.com. I used it for the clip model that powers all search at audiobookcovers.com. The api and client libraries are really nice, and if you use a somewhat popular model, you don’t have to worry about cold starts. If you do all other processing client side, that could be the only server you have to deal with. And the models can run locally using Cog. It looks like a thin wrapper around a Dockerfile, but it takes care of cuda/hardware acceleration for you.
An open source e-commerce platform with a cart that makes editing products easy and integration with any payment processor (not just stripe and PayPal) is something I'm struggling to find. I expect to have to do some dev work to get the payment processor I use working, but it'd be nice if it was all contained in an easy to use GUI after that.
Bonus points if you can get it to work in cloudflare pages/workers so it doesn't require hosting costs (at least at low volume).
This feels like it's more of a FOSS platform that someone would need to set up, rather than the "tool" I was envisioning haha. All things finance seem to have a knack for sucking out your soul :')
There are a lot of existing solutions for self hosted ecommerce (wasn't so long ago that was the only option) all with their own pros and cons. Just do a search for open source shopping cart. OpenCart is a pretty good option.
I would absolutely love a tracker for anything --- have imdb, isbn, etc etc all available for movies, tv, and books -- but also discogs for music and more. And not just media, let me track recipes, objects on loan, car payments, whatever... but an all in one platform for this that isn't a spreadsheet... which is already perfect for everything.
FEM electromagnetism solver and visualizer integrated with KiCad for e.g. signal integrity verification and antenna, filter design.
I subscribe to a podcast, and I would love to edit the episodes to remove the intro (usually 3-4 minutes that is always the same and I have heard enough times that I don't want to hear it.) There are certain phrases the podcaster uses at the end of the intro and it would be interesting if there was some kind of audio editing app where you could type in a phrase for the app to "listen" for and set an in/out point X seconds before or after the phrase so you could cut. I suspect this is ripe for abuse, though.
Smart idea to listen for trigger words. Not sure of an app that does that.
If you have iOS, you can set Overcast to skip the intro or outro by however long you’d like. Open the podcast’s main page>three dots> podcast settings>skip intro
I've looked around a bit and 99% sure there's nothing like that...yet.
I'm mostly Android but do have an iPad for games... thanks, I'll check it out!
A self-hosted, FOSS, online PDF editor that allows anyone with the link to annotate the PDF with sticky notes, which kick off an email notification a configurable number of hours after the last change was made. Consider the following workflow:
When viewing the PDF, the web server loads the flat file (e.g., json file), restores the annotations on-the-fly, then sends the modified PDF back to the web browser.
Ideally, the installation would be something like:
Stirling PDF goes part of the way. Solving the problem end-to-end would take more glue.
See the workflow diagram (noting that the flat file format for storing the annotations doesn't matter, even CSV could work).
It’s focused on enterprise, but I am pretty sure SmartSheets can do this. I have no idea if you can even get it as a normal consumer though.
I'm looking for self-hosted, not SaaS, but thank you. Also, the software is doing way too much for my needs. A simple solution without collaborative editing. From Reddit:
Honestly, yeah, smartsheets is pretty awful. I’ve had managers say it’s super flexible and powerful, but it really isn’t. But its main headline feature always seemed like exactly what you are looking for.
So, just imagining this software, say you upload a PDF, get lots of comments. Then you make some revisions and re-upload it. What would happen to the existing sticky notes? Would you have access to the history? Would you have to manually mark each one as complete?
The upload script deletes the annotations file (i.e., filename.yaml in the diagram). I don't need a history. For my purposes, I take the annotations and collate them into a separate document.
There's a really specific VST that I wish existed. It's pretty simple (at least how I'm thinking about it), but I know next to nothing about coding. Ideally, a person taking on this project would know a little bit about music and VST programming, but even this may not be a hard requirement.
I enjoy playing microtonal music. I've wrote about the subject on Tildes before if you wanted a lot more detail, but basically it is a type of music where notes are tuned to different frequencies (and more importantly, ratios of frequencies) compared to normal '12-equal' tuning. Now, most in-the-flesh instruments do not support microtonal tunings, but if you have a MIDI keyboard, it can be linked to any instrument VST, and some of those do support microtonal tunings, by way of custom 'tuning files' like .scl and .tun.
The ability to use custom tunings has really opened up my musical explorations, but it does have some inconveniences that I suspect would very easy to work around. To begin with, I've never found a VST that allows you to swap tuning files using a bound hotkey or external controller. The ability to do this would make it a lot easier to perform something that requires using multiple different tunings without having to interrupt performance to navigate a file system.
Another issue, and perhaps the more important one, is that creating tuning files is kind of a headache. There are websites that expedite the process, though frankly I've always resorted to just editing the file in notepad, because the format is pretty simple and I've mostly worked using the 24-edo tuning system, which is pretty easy to describe in the 'cents' measurement that .scl files use. However, there have been many times where I've been using a specific tuning, and thought 'hey, I bet this would sound a lot better if I played a G half-sharp instead of a G'. So now I need to go find the tuning file, copy it (if I feel like the tuning I was just using was worth preserving), edit it to match my new idea, and load it into the instrument VST anew.
My idea to fix these inconveniences is to have a standalone VST that you use to manage custom tunings. You can point other instrument VSTs to a single tuning file, and when the new VST makes changes to this file, it pings other VSTs to reload that same tuning file so the changes take effect. The new VST could have a much more sleek graphic interface that allows you to select a key (or more typically, all keys that are separated by octaves, e.g. A1, A2, A3, A4 etc.) and change its tuning. All of this would need to be relative to a 'root note' which can also be specified (instrument VSTs that support .scl tunings usually have this feature themselves). Input could be formatted to support 'equal division of the octave' tunings - where you might type '5edo22' pick out the fifth note of 22-equal - as well as just intonation tunings, where you could type something like ji7/4 to pick out the harmonic seventh interval. A final option would be type '1057c' to select a note 1057 cents above the root, which would be useful for free intonation type music.
Nothing world changing comes to mind but I have an extremely niche issue on Linux if you want to tackle.
I among a few other users use caps lock instead of shift to capitalize (quickly double tapping caps lock is faster/more comfortable than holding shift to us), Linux handled lock keys very weirdly compared to Windows, on Windows they get toggled on press, while on Linux, turning a lock key on gets togged on press, but turning it off gets toggled on release. Cue people writing things like “I am DEmonstrating THe ISsue” because they often turn off caps lock while they are pressing the next key.
I’ve seen some solutions, some which may or may not work depending on the DE/Distro, some which may not work for x11 or wayland, but the common point between them is that they’re all kind of a hack, editing some keyboard OS files or running an xmodmap are the solutions I’ve seen. The former doesn’t work on Immutable distros and the latter is x11 only.
I’ve seen intercept-tools being mentioned before as a solution but that one is well past my knowledge level.
A nice web frontend for systemd timers would be cool.
A nice gui (web or otherwise) frontend to imagemagick would be the bees knees.
A quick search lead me to this https://github.com/TeaM-TL/FotoKilof
Is it suitable for your needs?
I think GUIs for all things low-level linux would be great. Linux is severly lacking in simple UI options to tweak systems settings, which imo stifle adoption, which means not enough businesses care about Linux users.