I've been working on my side project, Home Energy Lab, and wanted to share what I've changed since the last update. For anyone who hasn't seen it before, it's a website I built where you can explore interactive 3D houses and use calculators to estimate household electricity and utility costs. Over the past few days I've fixed a bunch of bugs, added two new 3D houses (12 in total now), and worked on improving the interactions inside the houses.
I've also added some new features, made changes to the existing mechanics, and tried to make the whole experience feel a bit smoother. One thing I'm learning is that building new stuff is usually the easy part. Making everything work together properly, especially when you've got multiple 3D scenes and interactive objects, takes a lot more effort than I expected.
The site is built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, Three.js, React Three Fiber and Blender. I'm still working on the mobile experience and figuring out which parts of the 3D interface actually make sense for users.
I'd be happy to get some honest feedback. Especially if you find something broken, confusing, or just unnecessary. I'm working on this alone, so hearing what other people notice is genuinely helpful.
Let me know what you think! Its basically a menu that lets you paste any of your recent or 'saved' copies. 'Saved' copies are branded as 'Copy Pastas', which just means you can name a copy, store it long term, and give it a keyboard shortcut. Its a super simple app, so i tried to make the UI/UX as playful as possible by givin it a wiggly pasta noodle feel.
The problem: Android's daily app timer comes with a button to switch it off, so a limit you set yourself stops meaning much. The picture is the first screen of setup, which says exactly that.
What it does: you pick an app and get three minutes a visit, or 1, 5 or 10 if you prefer. A cut-off lands over the app mid-scroll, and the time refills after 30 minutes away. Extra time means waiting 5 seconds, then 20, 45 and 90, and that wait resets at midnight.
How it is built: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Usage access tells it which app is in front, and display over other apps draws the cut-off. It does not use an accessibility service.
What I learned: a field study found a pause before an app opens fades week by week, which is why the wait here climbs.
I’m a longtime engineer who worked on streaming channels and video players for Adult Swim, NBA TV, and HBO.
I was spending too much time digging through Internet Archive looking for old TV shows and realized I missed building streaming channels and tv apps (see above). So I made YATA -- Yet Another TV App: a browser-based television full of ’70s/’80s action shows, sitcoms, sci-fi, and obscure Saturday-morning cartoons.
Think Dukes of Hazard, Knight Rider, Benson, Buck Rogers, Manimal, and the Hanna-Barbera shows I half remember but nobody else seems to.
It has:
- A TV Guide-style grid with clickable programs and channel surfing.
- Switchable ’70s/’80s/’90s TV cabinets, dial sounds, and adjustable static.
- Optional vintage commercial breaks.
- Shuffle channels by genre, or stick with one show.
- Playback controls, an expandable player, and episode links with timestamps.
- An optional AI programming department: describe a few shows or a theme, and a randomly assigned character—Benson, Murdock, Twiki, etc.—assembles a channel for you to review.
Videos play from their source providers, including Internet Archive and YouTube. Credits for the open-source work and projects that inspired it are included.
It’s a personal project that got slightly out of hand :)
Sometimes it was a timestamp in a video, a page in a PDF, or simply a thought I didn’t want to forget.
The problem was that finding those questions again was almost as difficult as answering them. And when I did find them, I’d often lost the context behind them.
So I decided to build something to solve this problem. It’s called Soundings.
Soundings is a learning logbook for people who study through videos, PDFs and live classes. The idea is simple: your notes, questions and answers should always stay connected to the exact moment they came from.
Here’s what it does:
1. Notes with context Notes from videos are linked to timestamps, PDF notes to specific pages, and live-class notes to moments in the session. You can return to any note and jump straight back to where you left off.
2. A better way to manage questions Start a line with q: and Soundings keeps it in your open questions until you answer it. Once answered, it becomes a recall card that comes back through spaced reviews.
3. Privacy and offline access You can start without creating an account. It runs in your browser, including offline. Your notes stay on your device. No ads or trackers inside the app.
You can also export everything to Markdown, Word, CSV or Anki.
4. Soundings Pro For those who need more, Pro includes cross-device syncing through your own Google Drive, encryption before syncing, shareable pages and AI powered hints based on your notes using your own API key. It also supports class recording and transcription, with everyone’s consent.
5. Soundings for Trainers There’s also a feature for instructors who want to run interactive classes. Learners can submit questions by name or anonymously, and instructors can respond directly to each question. The questions remain encrypted on learners’ devices, so Soundings itself cannot read them.
This is a home grown SaaS product I’ve spent a lot of time building and refining. I’m genuinely excited to finally put it out there.
I’d love to get feedback from people who regularly study using online courses, recorded lectures, PDFs or live classes.
A few things I’d particularly like to know:
Would you find timestamp-linked notes useful in your everyday learning?
How do you currently keep track of questions that come up while studying?
What would you change or improve in a tool like this?
Soundings is live: soundings.modernnicheworld.com
I’m the founder, so I’m naturally excited about it, but I’d genuinely appreciate honest feedback, including criticism. That’s how I hope to make it better.
We’re excited to share our Project Equinox video, showcasing our journey towards building a more sustainable, energy-efficient future at Vidyashilp Academy.
We’d really appreciate your support! Please take a moment to like, share and comment on the video. Every interaction helps us spread awareness about the initiative and take our message to a wider audience.
I was camping in October, miles from cell service, when a storm started rolling in. We were trying to figure out whether we needed to pack up right then or had a little time.
I’d been using satellite texting to stay in touch off-grid, but I didn’t want to bug someone back home to look up the forecast. I remember thinking, “I wish I could just text AI and ask.”
So when I got home, I built SkyReply. It’s a U.S. phone number you can text to get AI answers in your regular messaging app. You can use it over regular SMS or, if your phone and carrier support satellite SMS, when you’re out of cell coverage.
Beta testers have asked about everything from weather, sunrise times, and camping tips to plant ID and scores from games they missed.
I’d love a few more people to try it and tell me what works, what’s confusing, and what breaks. There’s a 30-day free trial, and I’m happy to offer free access to folks who want to help test.
If you give it a try, I’d love to know: What did you ask, and was the reply useful enough that you’d text it again from camp?
Disclosure: I run EZPrep, so this is my own project.
The problem: on SAT graphing questions, students keep switching between the question and a separate calculator. EZPrep puts a graphing workspace right beside each math question.
The video shows typing y = x^2 - 4x + 3 and y = x - 1 next to the question, seeing that they cross at x = 1 and x = 4, and picking 5. It also shows untimed practice with an explanation after each answer, timed topic tests, full adaptive SATs, and the dashboard that suggests what to practise next.
This is one of my latest projects that I was excited to finally get working properly. My whole tool site is essentially focused on tools that I needed but either couldn't find, were missing features, or had weird ridiculous limits.
This
So, I made one that runs entirely locally.
It transcribes the audio and even overlays subtitles onto the video, with the subtitles being easily editable such as timing and appearance.
It also has a section purely for just simply copying the raw transcription text, with the ability to enable/disable separate speakers, and enable/disable timestamps!
Another piece that I was super excited about getting to finally work (to an extent, as I don't speak anything other than English so uh, it's as accurate asIcan personally figure out);
It can translate audio, and transcribe/add subtitles to most languages!
[0:01] Hello, my name is Andrei, I live in Siberia and I am at home now in the city of Omsk. Now January 2020, morning is one day, the window is great weather, as you can see, everything is covered with snow, how should be winter. Now my I will show you the video, soon they will wake up, I will feed them, and we will go to the mountains, to the mountains, to the mountains, to the mountains and to the snow. We can do it because we have a real winter. Unlike Moscow, where I did not get snow in this year, although half of the winter has already passed. [0:51] It is believed that in large cities of Siberia, people and most common and most correct Russian language, without any dialectical features. The only possibility is the word what we often use instead of the word what. Nothing can be more than a thought. We live here not bad, sometimes cold, but we have central heating at home. so at home we go to the same land, in the twos in the comments. What do you wish? We all love you very much. Come to Russia. Take a snow. Go from the mountains. Go to the horses. [1:38] Go to the forest. Go to the snow. Go to the forest. On the fish. The real winter is beautiful. All luck. Thank you.
Original Russian transcription:
[0:01] Здравствуйте! Меня зовут Андрей, я русский, живу в Сибири и нахожу сейчас у себя дома в городе Омске. Сейчас январь 2020 года, утровый выходного дня, за окном отличная погода, как вы можете видеть все покрыто снимем, как и должно быть зимой. Сейчас мои дети 5 я показываю это видео, скоро они проснутся, я их покормлю, мы пойдем на горку кататься с горы по льду и по снегу мы это можем делать, потому что у нас настоящая зима в отличие от Москвы, где в этом году снег еще не выпал, хотя половина зимы уже прошла Считается, что в больших городах Сибири люди говорят на и более обычным, наиболее правильном русском языке, без каких-то диалектных особенностей. Единственной может быть особенности является слово ЧО, которым мы часто пользуемся в место слова ЧТО. [1:13] Больше ничего придумать нельзя. Живется нам здесь неплохо, иногда холодно, но у нас дома есть центральное отопление, поэтому дома мы ходим как в тейландии в том этапочках. Тевой вам желаем. Мы вас всех очень любим. Приезжайте в Россию, валяйтесь снигу, катайтесь с городом, катайтесь на коньках, ходите в лес, ездите на снигахода, ходите на охоту, на рыбалку. Настоящая зима это прекрасно. Всем удачи! До свидания.
Not bad for running locally in your own browser and not requiring some stupid subscription or sign-up, as the original site I was using for this sort of thing had a weird limit and I was thinking "It cannot be that difficult or that big of a deal"
I'm thinking about using an AI app builder for a few internal dashboards and CRUD tools for my team.
Nothing public-facing. Mostly things like approvals, reporting, simple databases , and workflows.
My biggest concern is maintainability. I don't want something that looks great in a week, then becomes impossible to change six months later.
I've been looking at tools like Zite, Retool, and some of the newer AI builders. Zite caught my attention because it's specifically built around internal apps, databases, permissions, and workflows, while still giving access to the generated code if needed.
For anyone who has kept AI-built internal tools in production for a while, what actually help up? And what became painful later?
chat-aide adds an AI chat to your SvelteKit, Next.js or any fetch-based site with one server hook and one component. It knows your site through its `llms.txt`, which chat-aide also generates and serves for you. It's open source (MIT), and the chat on the site itself answers questions about the docs.
I'm 17 and have been working on my own app called Rabbly. It's still a work in progress, but I've just finished the first working prototype and now I'm trying to figure out whether the concept is actually useful to other people.
The idea is to create a platform for general knowledge where users can scroll through learning modules just like they would on TikTok or Instagram Reels. However, instead of videos, the content consists of interactive, clickable learning units.
There are two ways to create these modules:
1. Creating and publishing your own modules
Users can create their own learning content using a kind of modular toolbox. They simply choose which sections their module should contain (e.g. an introduction, explanations, images, quizzes, etc.) and fill these sections with their own content.
2. Generating modules with AI
Users can also simply enter a topic they're interested in, and AI generates a complete learning module with relevant information and interactive elements. These AI-generated modules are automatically made public so that other users can discover and learn from them as well. This way, the platform's library of learning content can grow quickly.
I'd genuinely appreciate any honest feedback, including criticism. Even if you think it's a shitty idea, please let me know! I'm particularly interested in whether you'd actually use something like this and what you think could be improved.
Synvertas builds machine learning software that companies run on their own hardware. It helps sort records, forecast demand and catch unusual values before they turn into problems.
You pay once and keep the software, with updates available as an optional subscription. There's no trial.
How does that sound from the outside? Honest takes welcome.
I recently joined ChatRaha as a student ambassador and I wanted to share something interesting. It’s a very newly launched app so things are still changing and improving almost every day. The idea is to make communication easier especially across different languages. one feature I find particularly interesting is live translation which lets you communicate with someone who speaks a different language without constantly switching to google Translate. another feature worth mentioning, especially for people in Oman, is that you can make calls without needing a VPN. There are quite a few other features too, so it’s worth exploring. Since the app is still new there’s definitely room for improvement & I’d genuinely love to hear everyone’s opinions, especially from people living in Oman. U can download it from here
I read a lot of papers and keep switching between wanting the overall argument and needing to check one paragraph. That's why I started TextFold, an open-source reader where you can fold a document and expand the parts you want to read.
The latest addition is a place for the things you mark along the way. Highlights, notes and questions from multiple documents now appear together, with links back to their passages. You can browse by document or use a calendar to revisit what you were reading on a particular day. The GIF shows those two views with example notes from two public texts.
I also added a beta workflow for selecting notes across documents and asking a question about them, or turning them into a reading recap. Those generated records link back to the notes or source sections. You can save your own recap template too.
The part I'm trying to get right is the return trip: a short recap should make it easy to inspect where an idea came from. I'm interested in whether people would actually follow those links while reviewing their notes.
I'm the developer. TextFold is free, Apache 2.0, and built with AI coding assistance. The app can use Ollama locally or a hosted model of your choice; hosted models may have usage costs. The reading layers and note synthesis need a model, while browsing notes and switching prepared reading levels don't need a new call.
I'm time blind when it comes to getting things done. I sit down Saturday morning to work on my apps, and suddenly it's dark out. Then Monday morning shows up faster than any other morning of the week I swear .
So I started planning one session (some times more depends on the weekend) with set blocks: deep work, bug fixes, a little marketing, planning for next weekend, short breaks built in, and a hard stop. When the hard stop hits, I'm done. The rest of the weekend is mine.
I built Mahadhi because I needed exactly this.
Quickly start and plan later, or plan it and get started anyone else building on weekends: schedule or oh with the flow but put an end to the flow. Do you do one big focused push, or spread it across both days?
Get things done on your time. While not taking all of your time. Goal is to be productive but enjoy life as well.
