mctimer VS Conkey

It's a super simple time series data storage. You don't even have to register an account, just do "curl -X POST https://pushdata.io/[email protected]/temperature/47" and you've stored your first value. I use it a lot to log various stats about all the things I've built, like user signups or whatnot.

Then I wanted to create simple crosswords with image clues to help my kids learn to read. That resulted in a crossword generator backend and a simple game: https://puzzlepirate.net

Puzzle pirate is great, but I wanted to print the crosswords on paper also, so I slapped together https://crosswordcomputer.com. The UI is rather ugly (like Pushdata) but you can create pretty cool crosswords for kids with it.

Then I wanted to create more flexible shields.io so I created https://supershields.io - basically a shields.io but with programmable (in Lua) logic for the shields you create. I'm not using it myself anymore though so not maintaining it very well and it seems there is something funny with the Lua execution right now. It is using AWS Lambda servers to run Lua scripts, perhaps they're not firing as they should or something. If someone wants to use it, get in touch and I'll see if I can get the Lua execution operational again :)

I also wanted to backup private photos and videos from household phones to a USB memory on a local storage server (Raspberry Pi) and then have that server automatically back everything to the public cloud but encrypted (as I don't trust public cloud providers to keep my data safe forever). I couldn't find a good solution for this, so I wrote some shell scripts that do the trick: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/savethepictures

My daughter was playing Minecraft too much, on our own server, and I created a small Python program to enforce "screen time" in Minecraft: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/mctimer

I once needed to simulate broken DHCP clients and couldn't find a good tool to do so, so I wrote "dhcptool": https://github.com/ragnarlonn/dhcptool

All of these taught me a lot, especially the later forays into full-stack development after having been pretty much clueless about frontend stuff for a long time (still clueless but at least I can create ugly UIs now).

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

For a ~50-year-old program, Emacs’s support for multilingual input — and really, it’s all-round flexibility — continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but I’d happily use Emacs’s own input methods if that would be sufficient.

(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support… I’ve used ‘unicode-fonts’ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesn’t work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, it’s at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)