I have a three year old daughter. In her three years of life, I have recorded hours and hours of high quality audio of her. I've also encouraged her to bang on keyboards and drum pads and guitars, and recorded all of that, as well. I then took that material and chopped it, mutilated it, sequenced and mixed it, and released two albums of what I'm calling "classic industrial music", all under a pretend band name, with the credited musicians being my daughter, and our teenaged dog, who is also featured on many of the recordings.
Naturally, I then released these two albums to the world, where they have sold roughly 0 copies. This doesn't bother me, though; that was never the point. It is, in essence, a long-term elaborate "performance art" piece, that is intended for my own amusement, and possibly my daughter's amusement, once she gets old enough to "get" the joke. In the immediate time, I get value out of seeing her enjoy playing instruments and making sounds. And I'm giving her the experience of making music, in whatever way she sees fit, before she ever gets taught a bunch of nonsense about what ways are OK and not OK to make music through more formal training.
Any project that naturally holds your interest, is probably worth pursuing, regardless of the overall value to humanity. At least for a little bit. Because you're generally going to walk away with knowledge you didn't have prior to starting it, and benefits you wouldn't have predicted had you not gone down the path at all.
Oh yeah, also; don't take advice from me. I make horrible choices, then I commit to them.
I collect bookmarks of things I want to read, but inevitably will never have time to read. Sometimes I go back and look and the webpage domain is expired, or the page 404s. But I still meticulously folder and tune my bookmarks
I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but it feels good to get that off my chest
I think that needs to be coupled to something implementing Douglas Adams idea of an Electric Monk:
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
I did the same for a while, but it was a mess (700+ unsorted bookmarks on my main computer, 100s more on others).
I tried shaarli, but soon after I tried to build something myself, and I created share-links.
It's an open-source Django app that you can self-host, and that lets you store (and share!) links, titles, descriptions, and tags. Then it display them in a nice way (for me : not much css, a simple page with no js).
It took some dozen hours to get to the point where it's really usable, and it still have problems now (comments are not moderated, I just realized that you can't add a description in links or tags, but I will fix this soonTM).
One cool feature is to set your browser homepage to the url that loads a random page : each day I get a cool article to read/concept to discover! (here's my own instance random link url: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/)
That's my useless side project (because shaarli already exist and it's way more mature).
I feel seen. I have bookmarks folders named “To Read $NUMBER” from 10 years ago. Why do they end by a number? Because I create a new folder every time the previous one feels overwhelming.
From time to time (~6 months) I review all of them. Quickly delete most, make effort to process the rest and save the 'few' that I will not take an immediate action on a topical markdown note.
e.g. Let's say that I find a book interesting. I go to '~/fun/read/read.md' paste the URL, delete the bookmark and forget about it.
Oh boy... I'm the king of useless projects. From time to time I get an idea, and develop this whole idea to an mvp or fully complete it and then I'm to dumb to sell. I don't know why I always have to develop my shitty ideas.
There's a typo on one-folder.com/en/home/: "With one folder are your worries about your documents gone!" -> "With one folder aLL your worries about your documents are gone!"
I create monthly mixtapes of leftfield house, techno and disco, and spend an insane amount of time digging through recent digital releases and then mixing/uploading to YouTube (now working on adding visuals with Disco Diffusion). What blows my mind about this whole process is there is so much new music published daily…
In an upcoming mixtape the intro track has been on YouTube for 3 weeks and has received only 3 plays. I want this project to unearth such classic electronic tracks and get them out to a wider audience. I can’t see myself ever stopping this project or ever regretting the time spent.
You just got yourself a new subscriber, cause I’m trying to get back into music curation and DJing like I used to when I was in college, and this is right up my alley as far as genre and finding fresh tracks!
Most of my work is stuff that I feel very few people find interesting.
Yet, I treat each project as if it is a Fortune 50 corporate initiative; with ultra-high-quality code, reams of documentation, full test suites and/or harnesses, etc.
I do it, because the occasional project that I do, that matters, benefits from the habits I establish. I've been working on one of those, for the last couple of years (closed source, so I can't link). It's coming along great.
Oddly enough my least valuable project was my most successful (so far, I hope!). It was a tinker project while I was learning Laravel, no target market at all.
It was very specific - a database/API of YouTube videos and metadata for a YouTube group, the Yogscast.
It ended up being used as the backend data for a viewer-controlled cinema that let users vote on and pick videos to watch during livestream downtime to keep the audience engaged during a charity drive.
Can't take much credit, of course the actual video playing code was the meat and potatoes of the operation during downtime and the actual stream content during the daytime, but it was vaguely involved in raising millions for charity haha
Regrets none, only reason it's not still about is that it turns out YouTube don't like you making a database of YT videos that you allow others to access, they killed my API key eventually
I have a couple apps that only I use or are used by a handful of friends. For hobby projects, I never regret building things that I think are useful but I can't be assed to try to market them to others.
1. Mototripper - live streams my location when I'm on a long distance adventure motorcycle trip so my kid knows I'm still alive and moving.
(e.g. <https://www.mototripper.app/track/~knobbies> - a trip through Finland, Sweden, and Norway I took a couple weeks ago.) Built with Sveltekit.
2. Vatinator - an app to apply OCR to Estonian receipts to claim VAT reimbursement. Built with NextJS.
The UX is pretty terrible, honestly. But I thought I could get away with it since I didn't expect anyone to sign up.
I also built https://sudokurace.io based on an idea my wife and I shared while talking. We talked about it for years and I finally decided to build it, only for us to play it for a day or two and now we never really touch it.
This one is one of mine from way back in the day, a 6502-based ternary computer emulator with an assembler, a simple operating system, and a compiler for a dialect of C adapted to base 3: http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/
It had a user base of like 3-4 russian ternary computing enthusiasts, dunno if it still even compiles. Fun project though.
As with all of my projects (even those that bring value to others), I do them for myself so as long as I find value in them I'll keep putting time on them. No regrets.
I kinda find my writing funny, very mathematically rigorous and ambitious. http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/docs.html
Not really sure who I thought the audience would be.
You can make it into a nice product. Just make the state save-able (including comments) and share-able by a link. Would be a good tool for designers & their customers to quickly leave some comments.
Cool site, nice one. There's potential to save a lot of time when going back and forth between cropping tools. One of my usual workflows is reading big PDFs and I want to pick out the parts that are relevant to me. I could use a highlighter, but that wouldn't filter out the rest of the document, so I typically use a screenshot tool to grab specific areas and save them as pictures. But it can only make one screenshot at a time, which is a lot of overhead.
It would be cool to enhance this site so that it takes a PDF with multiple pages and allow you to do the same for that. But that's probably a lot of work compared to uploading a single picture file!
I am still working on my never to be finished at this rate dream 4x-god-sim. The mindset to have with projects like that is entertainment. I enjoy the process. I could be reading sci fi or watching TV or tinkering in the shed or playing a sport or playing with a dog or raising children or whatever instead; those are also useless passtimes that are done for their own sake. I choose this one (among others), why not?
I also learned a lot of new tech from such useless projects in the past, but that is just a nice little extra, just like with the other ones
My girlfriend sells self-made clothes online. In 2015 I made her a a small Tapestry 5 webapp to manage her orders and, this was the crucial feature, to determine payment status from her copy'n'paste online banking's transactions list.
Today, it has integrations for Paypal, Etsy, Shopify, DHL and HBCI (no more copy and paste, finally) and basically covers the whole order cycle with minimal fuss and gives her a quick way to publish new products which she does a lot as fabrics come in / get sold out.
I guess that's not that useless but of course it simply can not be worth the time I spent on it.
Yet, I don't regret doing it in the least because for me it literally is a labor of love. Plus, I learned a lot doing it and I can go down crazy paths like this one time I made an android app to cut out the background of her product photos. Didn't turn out to be useful in the end but eventually I did use OpenCV via JavaCV for something else in the software.
Currently I am in the process of rewriting it in Kotlin / Multiplatform (JVM+JS) and again, I'm learning a lot and making the software a lot sleeker and more functional. That's not going to be worth it either, I am sure.
Anyway, I wish I had day job were I was in constant contact with users to built them something of tangible utility and value.
My timeline thing. It gathers all my crap and puts in onto a timeline. It's a more fine-grained version of scrolling to a specific date on my photo stream.
I had no expectation that anyone else would ever use it, but it suited me just fine, and I used it every day for years, both at work and on my other personal projects. It's still one of the first things I install on a new machine.
I have been reverse engineering a 25-year-old proprietary (PlayStation 1 based) system used in a number of well-known arcade games for almost a year, digging into every single detail and uncovering what even MAME developers ignored.
The end purpose was initially to enable homebrew game development but, with the prices these boxes are fetching on the used market, I know nobody is ever going to bother. Moreover, as far as reverse engineering existing games goes, the most interesting parts (i.e. the copy protection) have already been figured out two decades ago and most of the games are perfectly playable through emulation. Still, reverse engineering an unknown platform that isn't too serious about security is fun and rewarding.
[+] [-] notakio|3 years ago|reply
Naturally, I then released these two albums to the world, where they have sold roughly 0 copies. This doesn't bother me, though; that was never the point. It is, in essence, a long-term elaborate "performance art" piece, that is intended for my own amusement, and possibly my daughter's amusement, once she gets old enough to "get" the joke. In the immediate time, I get value out of seeing her enjoy playing instruments and making sounds. And I'm giving her the experience of making music, in whatever way she sees fit, before she ever gets taught a bunch of nonsense about what ways are OK and not OK to make music through more formal training.
Any project that naturally holds your interest, is probably worth pursuing, regardless of the overall value to humanity. At least for a little bit. Because you're generally going to walk away with knowledge you didn't have prior to starting it, and benefits you wouldn't have predicted had you not gone down the path at all.
Oh yeah, also; don't take advice from me. I make horrible choices, then I commit to them.
[+] [-] hailpixel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwoutway|3 years ago|reply
I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but it feels good to get that off my chest
[+] [-] arethuza|3 years ago|reply
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
[+] [-] sodimel|3 years ago|reply
I tried shaarli, but soon after I tried to build something myself, and I created share-links.
It's an open-source Django app that you can self-host, and that lets you store (and share!) links, titles, descriptions, and tags. Then it display them in a nice way (for me : not much css, a simple page with no js).
It took some dozen hours to get to the point where it's really usable, and it still have problems now (comments are not moderated, I just realized that you can't add a description in links or tags, but I will fix this soonTM).
Here's the link of the repo: https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links/
One cool feature is to set your browser homepage to the url that loads a random page : each day I get a cool article to read/concept to discover! (here's my own instance random link url: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/)
That's my useless side project (because shaarli already exist and it's way more mature).
[+] [-] quaintdev|3 years ago|reply
Now I can peacefully forget these bookmarks!
[+] [-] tbassetto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lobocinza|3 years ago|reply
e.g. Let's say that I find a book interesting. I go to '~/fun/read/read.md' paste the URL, delete the bookmark and forget about it.
[+] [-] trumpablehump|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pakdef|3 years ago|reply
I tag mine instead... and I read them first (before bookmarking)
[+] [-] preezer|3 years ago|reply
Here the most useless project: https://wikipedia-changes.com/ Get a chart how often an article on wikipedia is changed.
Or few others:
https://quiz-app-maker.com/ // Create an quiz app (ios and android) by an excel sheet of questions
https://github.com/berti92/mega_calendar // calendar plugin for redmine
https://one-folder.com/ // A whole dms
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.devbert.cam... // Camping log, where you can create stories about your holidays. Buggy to be fair...
https://release-notifier.com/ // Get notified when a new release on github is released
[+] [-] sodimel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] processing|3 years ago|reply
In an upcoming mixtape the intro track has been on YouTube for 3 weeks and has received only 3 plays. I want this project to unearth such classic electronic tracks and get them out to a wider audience. I can’t see myself ever stopping this project or ever regretting the time spent.
https://youtube.com/channel/UCH57ad2Wx5le11zuCulIyNw
[+] [-] Otternonsenz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
Yet, I treat each project as if it is a Fortune 50 corporate initiative; with ultra-high-quality code, reams of documentation, full test suites and/or harnesses, etc.
I do it, because the occasional project that I do, that matters, benefits from the habits I establish. I've been working on one of those, for the last couple of years (closed source, so I can't link). It's coming along great.
Here's links to much of my work: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away
[+] [-] corobo|3 years ago|reply
It was very specific - a database/API of YouTube videos and metadata for a YouTube group, the Yogscast.
It ended up being used as the backend data for a viewer-controlled cinema that let users vote on and pick videos to watch during livestream downtime to keep the audience engaged during a charity drive.
Can't take much credit, of course the actual video playing code was the meat and potatoes of the operation during downtime and the actual stream content during the daytime, but it was vaguely involved in raising millions for charity haha
Regrets none, only reason it's not still about is that it turns out YouTube don't like you making a database of YT videos that you allow others to access, they killed my API key eventually
[+] [-] somethingor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BTBurke|3 years ago|reply
1. Mototripper - live streams my location when I'm on a long distance adventure motorcycle trip so my kid knows I'm still alive and moving. (e.g. <https://www.mototripper.app/track/~knobbies> - a trip through Finland, Sweden, and Norway I took a couple weeks ago.) Built with Sveltekit.
2. Vatinator - an app to apply OCR to Estonian receipts to claim VAT reimbursement. Built with NextJS.
[+] [-] robotguy|3 years ago|reply
Geiger Tube-->ESP32-->MQTT-->Raspberry Pi-->Node Red-->InfluxDB-->Grafana
Regret? Nah, I learned a lot and it's a great conversation piece.
[+] [-] perilunar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abatilo|3 years ago|reply
The UX is pretty terrible, honestly. But I thought I could get away with it since I didn't expect anyone to sign up.
I also built https://sudokurace.io based on an idea my wife and I shared while talking. We talked about it for years and I finally decided to build it, only for us to play it for a day or two and now we never really touch it.
[+] [-] yscodes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
It had a user base of like 3-4 russian ternary computing enthusiasts, dunno if it still even compiles. Fun project though.
As with all of my projects (even those that bring value to others), I do them for myself so as long as I find value in them I'll keep putting time on them. No regrets.
I kinda find my writing funny, very mathematically rigorous and ambitious. http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/docs.html Not really sure who I thought the audience would be.
[+] [-] kiru_io|3 years ago|reply
All the tools allow to "crop" an image, but not really extract all regions.
Ended up making PhotoCutter[1]. It is totally useless for everyone except a few.
[1] https://photocutter.kiru.io/
[+] [-] klntsky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] als0|3 years ago|reply
It would be cool to enhance this site so that it takes a PDF with multiple pages and allow you to do the same for that. But that's probably a lot of work compared to uploading a single picture file!
[+] [-] landmark3|3 years ago|reply
Well done
[+] [-] 0xCAP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yunohn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elashri|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hallo2|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sershe|3 years ago|reply
I also learned a lot of new tech from such useless projects in the past, but that is just a nice little extra, just like with the other ones
[+] [-] cas14655|3 years ago|reply
Today, it has integrations for Paypal, Etsy, Shopify, DHL and HBCI (no more copy and paste, finally) and basically covers the whole order cycle with minimal fuss and gives her a quick way to publish new products which she does a lot as fabrics come in / get sold out.
I guess that's not that useless but of course it simply can not be worth the time I spent on it.
Yet, I don't regret doing it in the least because for me it literally is a labor of love. Plus, I learned a lot doing it and I can go down crazy paths like this one time I made an android app to cut out the background of her product photos. Didn't turn out to be useful in the end but eventually I did use OpenCV via JavaCV for something else in the software.
Currently I am in the process of rewriting it in Kotlin / Multiplatform (JVM+JS) and again, I'm learning a lot and making the software a lot sleeker and more functional. That's not going to be worth it either, I am sure.
Anyway, I wish I had day job were I was in constant contact with users to built them something of tangible utility and value.
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/nicbou/timeline
It serves no purpose, but somehow it attracted one contributor.
It's pointless on purpose. It's the thing I work on when I want to forget about work, and build purely for myself.
[+] [-] pattle|3 years ago|reply
A game that teaches you how financial decisions impact your life but it's turned into more of a nostalgia trip for Windows XP users
[+] [-] yscodes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marssaxman|3 years ago|reply
https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette
I had no expectation that anyone else would ever use it, but it suited me just fine, and I used it every day for years, both at work and on my other personal projects. It's still one of the first things I install on a new machine.
[+] [-] dstock|3 years ago|reply
https://dannstockton.com/icebreakers/
https://dannstockton.com/ml-meeting-notes/
https://dannstockton.com/new-music-archive/
https://dannstockton.com/thisjesusdoesnotexist/
https://dannstockton.com/wj/
All of them are single-page apps, all of them are jokes started by a conversation with a friend. No ragrets.
[+] [-] rich_sasha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avgJ03|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicyjpeg|3 years ago|reply
The end purpose was initially to enable homebrew game development but, with the prices these boxes are fetching on the used market, I know nobody is ever going to bother. Moreover, as far as reverse engineering existing games goes, the most interesting parts (i.e. the copy protection) have already been figured out two decades ago and most of the games are perfectly playable through emulation. Still, reverse engineering an unknown platform that isn't too serious about security is fun and rewarding.
[+] [-] adamius|3 years ago|reply
But my 68k emulator has more spark.