laserboot VS ppp_thing

In this way I estimate I create about 32 new programs a day for only my own personal use. But in many cases I only use each one once. ^R makes it easy to use them again a few times, but in other cases I save them into a shell script to make them easier to distribute to other machines, parameterize, and maintain. The one I most often use is probably a user interface for YouTube via youtube-dl or yt-dlp that consists of a few such shell scripts.

My main editor is Emacs. If I want to do the same thing repeatedly (e.g., delete a line containing the string .LVL) I create a keyboard macro with F3 and F4 (or C-x ( and C-x )) when I do it once, then run it repeatedly with C-x e. I probably write about 4 programs a day in this way.

Emacs has a M-: command to evaluate Lisp expressions, which are programs. Recent programs I have written in this way include (/ 43.2 1.7), (* 9.3 1.2), and (+ 8 3 2.50 3.50 3 7 3.50 3 1.50 4.50 6 5.50 6.50 6 3 2.50 2.50). Probably I write about 1 program a day in this way but I only use each one once. Longer Lisp programs like this can be written in scratch and executed with C-j or in .emacs (or .emacs.d/init.el) and executed with C-x C-e. For example, (global-set-key [f5] 'recompile). I use my .emacs file constantly every day but probably only add something to it about once a month. An outdated version is at https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e....

Sometimes I write bigger programs for my own personal use too.

A few years ago I wrote https://github.com/kragen/pytebeat for a livecoding performance of bytebeat in a bar. I finished writing it in the train on the way to the bar.

In https://github.com/kragen/laserboot I wrote a simple parametric 2-D CAD system for laser cutters in PostScript.

For Dercuano http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano I wrote a kind of shitty HTML rendering engine that generates a PDF file, as well as a simple CMS for generating a tree of HTML files from a directory of Markdown.

The other night I wrote a bytecode interpreter with a graphical display in C as a sort of mockup for the operating system of a small computer I recently got the parts for; it's in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/erika.git.

I've also written compilers, interpreters, ray tracers, database engines, parser generators, graphics libraries, logic circuit optimizers, 2-D game engines, etc., for my own use. Some of the recent ones are in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3.

I wrote a PPPoE client with failover so I can keep the session even when one of my gateways fails or is rebooted (this lets me do regular maintenance without interrupting my internet connection); I put it on github[1], but I doubt anyone will use it. I hope there are few people left with the scourge that is PPPoE, and my OS choice means many people would need to switch OSes to use it, so yeah. Also, I don't care to make it easy to use or to promote it, really. (I've mentioned it once or twice and did a Show HN that got less than ten votes, which I kind of expected).

I've also got my personal (network) monitoring software, some 'IoT' stuff to capture temperature and humidity data around my house, and I'm working on a ESP32 based alarm clock pulling data from iCalendar.

[1] https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing

I just published https://github.com/russor/ppp_thing which lets me (and maybe you) failover my PPPoE session between two FreeBSD hosts, so I can do regular maintenance without losing my IP or impacting TCP sessions.

I used to let my DSL modem handle PPPoE and NAT, so failover was easy, but found out fragmented IPv6 crashed the leased modem, and the replacement modem also sucks, so bridge mode + a custom PPPoE client (but from netgraph pieces) it is. Sadly useful in 2021, because PPPoE is somehow still a thing.