mctimer VS kindle_clippings_webapp

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).

This is the approach I use in most of my hobby projects. It's simpler, and faster and there are no loading screens.

In my kindle-clippings-manager (https://github.com/karlosos/kindle_clippings_webapp) I import highlights from Kindle and store them in localStorage. The major drawback is a size limitation (10MB). This should not be a problem in most cases but if you need to store more data then indexedDB (Web Storage) can solve the issue.

Linear (https://linear.app/) uses its sync engine to store the data in Web Storage. With optimistic updates, it feels like an offline app. You can read more about the sync engine here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519448

Live demo • Source code

Source code: https://github.com/karlosos/kindle_clippings_webapp