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Quitting my full-time job to pursue my side-projects was the best thing I could have done for my health and sanity this year. I am now working on a bunch of id

by alin23 9y ago

Quitting my full-time job to pursue my side-projects was the best thing I could have done for my health and sanity this year. I am now working on a bunch of ideas that I hope will help some people around here: 1. A Pocket-to-Kindle service that syncs (almost) instantly to your Kindle whatever article you save, formats it like a professionally edited book, cleans up ads and takes advantage of the new typesetting engine inside the new Kindle firmware. 2. A Spotify music discovery website. I'm trying to make a two-click-playlist-generator by using Spotify APIs to look at the top artists/genres of a user and create playlists on the fly with tracks that the user could like. I use Spotify daily and found myself overwhelmed by how much music there is available. Because of that, I'm mostly listening to my saved songs, Discover Weekly/Release Radar and trying out playlists that usually have the same too popular songs. 3. An adaptive brightness/contrast app for external monitors. Adjusting brightness using the monitor's controls is always annoying to do. 4. A morning alarm that starts playing an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist each time, with fade-up volume, external speaker support, adaptive algorithm based on likes/dislikes and self-updating alarm times based on day moments (twilight, sunrise, golden hour, dusk etc.) 5. A detector for processes that eat up all your CPU and battery. I started writing this in Rust so I can make it cross-platform and learn the language at a lower level.

jekie2675 9y ago
Was looking for same Poket->Kindle app, found nothing appropriate. Spent some time googling to gave up with idea of building such app. I thought nobody use kindle to read web this days. Solve my problem with push-to-kindle browser extension and manual file copying.
T2_t2 9y ago
Dude, LINKS! My mate was looking for almost that exact spotify thing!
- alin23 9y ago
  None of those ideas are ready for public use yet. I mean they work, I use them daily, but the interface for non-programmers is still in the works. https://github.com/alin23/spfy https://github.com/alin23/spfy is the core of that idea. If you want I can help you or your friend set it up. Or I can let you know when the finished website is ready.
city41 9y ago
I just recently joined Spotify. I have found their "we will play similar music after your music ends" feature to enable me to discover lots of new artists. I find it interesting you found Spotify lacking here, because I am finding the opposite.
- egwor 9y ago
  I found it ate so much data that I had to turn it off :/
- Kuraj 9y ago
  I agree! I love this feature. It's so good that I sometimes don't even notice that my music ended.
- alin23 9y ago
  I'm a long time Spotify user. I love that feature too and it worked very well for me when it first launched. But after a while it started playing the same songs that I have already heard many times. Spotify's algorithm is very unpredictable so I can't say it will work out the same for you. But if it will, at least you can have another try with what I'm trying to build ^_^
  - city41 9y ago
    Gotcha. That makes sense. I could see how over time that feature gets less useful. Looking forward to trying your tool, if you have a website or mailing list for it, please share.
pancho111203 9y ago
I would pay for that pocket-to-kindle service
- tobylane 9y ago
  Instapaper have a send to Kindle option on a daily or weekly frequency.
- alin23 9y ago
  I would let you pay for it if it was ready I can make you an (unofficial, free) beta tester if you want. I'll have most of the basic functionality by the end of January. If you're interested let me know here: alin.p32@gmail.com
- mhasbini 9y ago
  Have you tried https://p2k.co/ https://p2k.co/?
  - alin23 9y ago
    Yes, I've used it for a few months. That's the reason I've started working on my thing. I felt that it didn't have the features that I needed the most (hyphenation, dropcaps, ad removal etc.) and I would have felt like a jerk to ask for these things from the developer. These are not common needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - jwq1 9y ago
      They're my needs haha, I sent you an email to become a beta tester
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - raihansaputra 9y ago
        do you need any more beta testers?
diweirich 9y ago
What did you do to prepare for leaving your job? Do you have another source of income?
- alin23 9y ago
  I don't have any other source of income. I had a pretty good paying job for the past year and managed to save one year worth of savings. I can survive with what I have until June (I think). I'm doing my best to create something that helps at least a few people, and maybe get some money from that too. Even if I don't, I have already learned and practiced so much more skills than I could if I had a full time job and that makes it worth it.
anotherevan 9y ago
I would consider offering Instapaper as well as Pocket. I generally find Instapaper does a better job overall. The number of times Pocket just either redirects to the original article, or drops salient bits of text (in particular, unordered list items) is really annoying.
- alin23 9y ago
  It already works with Instapaper too, I just explain it as a Pocket to Kindle service because that's what people use the most these days. Personally I use Instapaper more for reading because of all the premium features being free and keep Pocket in sync using IFTTT for their good recommendations.
piotrkubisa 9y ago
Ad 1. I am really interested of about the progress of development of your service. I would love to see it as "Show HN" submission. Personally, I am thinking about developing an online service, which will be offerring general-purpose providing distribution of content to Kindle or other ebook-readers. Initially, I thought about creating only a app which will extract a article tag from website and create ebook from it (pandoc) or exactly a Pocket-to-Kindle. But when I was thinking more about it more ideas had come to my mind, HN-frontpage scrapper, simple notebook/orgmode adapted to Kindle Experimental Browser, markdown-files-to-ebook, arxiv-to-ebook converter, some kind of IFFTT pipeline (stream X from Y and save it as a ebook) and even trying to implement most of features known from Calibre application... If I could somehow help you as a developer or you are interested in bootstrapping some online service together I really would like to receive an e-mail from you. My e-mail address: (put my HN nickname here) at gmail.com

by alin23 9y ago

jekie2675 9y ago

Was looking for same Poket->Kindle app, found nothing appropriate. Spent some time googling to gave up with idea of building such app. I thought nobody use kindle to read web this days. Solve my problem with push-to-kindle browser extension and manual file copying.

T2_t2 9y ago

Dude, LINKS! My mate was looking for almost that exact spotify thing!

alin23 9y ago
None of those ideas are ready for public use yet. I mean they work, I use them daily, but the interface for non-programmers is still in the works. https://github.com/alin23/spfy https://github.com/alin23/spfy is the core of that idea. If you want I can help you or your friend set it up. Or I can let you know when the finished website is ready.

city41 9y ago

I just recently joined Spotify. I have found their "we will play similar music after your music ends" feature to enable me to discover lots of new artists. I find it interesting you found Spotify lacking here, because I am finding the opposite.

egwor 9y ago
I found it ate so much data that I had to turn it off :/
Kuraj 9y ago
I agree! I love this feature. It's so good that I sometimes don't even notice that my music ended.
alin23 9y ago
I'm a long time Spotify user. I love that feature too and it worked very well for me when it first launched. But after a while it started playing the same songs that I have already heard many times. Spotify's algorithm is very unpredictable so I can't say it will work out the same for you. But if it will, at least you can have another try with what I'm trying to build ^_^
- city41 9y ago
  Gotcha. That makes sense. I could see how over time that feature gets less useful. Looking forward to trying your tool, if you have a website or mailing list for it, please share.

pancho111203 9y ago

I would pay for that pocket-to-kindle service

tobylane 9y ago
Instapaper have a send to Kindle option on a daily or weekly frequency.
alin23 9y ago
I would let you pay for it if it was ready I can make you an (unofficial, free) beta tester if you want. I'll have most of the basic functionality by the end of January. If you're interested let me know here: alin.p32@gmail.com
mhasbini 9y ago
Have you tried https://p2k.co/ https://p2k.co/?
- alin23 9y ago
  Yes, I've used it for a few months. That's the reason I've started working on my thing. I felt that it didn't have the features that I needed the most (hyphenation, dropcaps, ad removal etc.) and I would have felt like a jerk to ask for these things from the developer. These are not common needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - jwq1 9y ago
    They're my needs haha, I sent you an email to become a beta tester
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - raihansaputra 9y ago
      do you need any more beta testers?

diweirich 9y ago

What did you do to prepare for leaving your job? Do you have another source of income?

alin23 9y ago
I don't have any other source of income. I had a pretty good paying job for the past year and managed to save one year worth of savings. I can survive with what I have until June (I think). I'm doing my best to create something that helps at least a few people, and maybe get some money from that too. Even if I don't, I have already learned and practiced so much more skills than I could if I had a full time job and that makes it worth it.

anotherevan 9y ago

I would consider offering Instapaper as well as Pocket. I generally find Instapaper does a better job overall. The number of times Pocket just either redirects to the original article, or drops salient bits of text (in particular, unordered list items) is really annoying.

alin23 9y ago
It already works with Instapaper too, I just explain it as a Pocket to Kindle service because that's what people use the most these days. Personally I use Instapaper more for reading because of all the premium features being free and keep Pocket in sync using IFTTT for their good recommendations.

piotrkubisa 9y ago

Ad 1. I am really interested of about the progress of development of your service. I would love to see it as "Show HN" submission. Personally, I am thinking about developing an online service, which will be offerring general-purpose providing distribution of content to Kindle or other ebook-readers. Initially, I thought about creating only a app which will extract a article tag from website and create ebook from it (pandoc) or exactly a Pocket-to-Kindle. But when I was thinking more about it more ideas had come to my mind, HN-frontpage scrapper, simple notebook/orgmode adapted to Kindle Experimental Browser, markdown-files-to-ebook, arxiv-to-ebook converter, some kind of IFFTT pipeline (stream X from Y and save it as a ebook) and even trying to implement most of features known from Calibre application... If I could somehow help you as a developer or you are interested in bootstrapping some online service together I really would like to receive an e-mail from you. My e-mail address: (put my HN nickname here) at gmail.com