The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past week

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Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

Show HN: Transductive regular expressions for text editing

An extension of regular expressions for text editing, with a grep-like command-line tool. If you, like me, struggle with group logic in regular expressions, you might find it useful.<p>I wanted to do this for a very long time. It is more of a sketch or prototype. I'd really appreciate your feedback!

Show HN: A website that heatmaps your city based on your housing preferences

For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions:<p>- Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about?<p>- Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about?<p>Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places.<p>I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a major park. Given that public transportation networks can sometimes make close things hard to get to and far things easy to get to, it's not always obvious whether a neighborhood actually even fits my criteria or not!<p>The overarching goal of theretowhere.com is to allow you to make more informed moving decisions while also making things more convenient than they are today.<p><a href="https://ibb.co/pBsX2HjN" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/pBsX2HjN</a><p>It can generate detailed travel time breakdowns for individual listings and addresses, making it easier to determine whether a listing is worth applying for without juggling Google Maps tabs. This is great for questions like “How far is this apartment from my friends, work and dancing gyms?”<p><a href="https://ibb.co/mVBjwPrJ" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/mVBjwPrJ</a><p>It also has the powerful ability to heatmap a city based on which parts of it are close or not to the people and places you care about. This is great for questions like “Where in the city would I be reasonably close to work, friends and a woodworking studio?”<p><a href="https://ibb.co/vCynPSRK" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/vCynPSRK</a><p>You can add these heatmaps to sites like Zillow and Streeteasy to make things super convenient (this was very fun to make).<p>The main thing that's on my mind is whether this is useful or not. Like, is this something you would actually use? I also have other ideas I'd like to eventually intergrate into this (crime heatmaps, noise heatmaps, etc)

Show HN: An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"

So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos.<p>Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty.<p>I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it at the same time.<p>Freezing a frame (by clicking) seems to often yield something close to the original. My method is to cycle between 1 and 30 lines, with spaced out pixels, and then iterate the whole buffer to draw fainter and fainter points within a radius from any point that's already lit, while also amplifying the ones that were lit before and shifting their colors slightly at the same time.<p>Anyway, I did this tonight but I've been thinking about it for weeks, so, I hope someone enjoys it. Cheers!

Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

Show HN: SQLite disk page explorer

Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

I built this product back in 2018 as a small side project: a tool that turns short videos into physical flipbooks. After launching it, I didn't touch it for years. Life and work took over, and it sat idle. But it kept getting a few orders every month, which made it impossible to forget. So in December 2024, I decided to rebrand and revive it.<p>The initial version relied on various local printing offices. I kept switching from one to another, but the results were never quite right. Either the quality wasn't good enough, or the turnaround times were too long. Eventually, me and my wife bought all the necessary machines and moved production in-house.<p>Now, it's a family business. My wife and I handle everything: printing, binding, cutting, addressing, and shipping each flipbook. On the technical side, it’s powered by Next.js, with FFmpeg extracting frames and handling overlays, and ImageMagick used for adding trim marks and creating the final PDFs.<p>After many years of working in IT, working on something tangible feels refreshing. It's satisfying to create something that brings people joy. And that is not hard to sell (like dev tools, for example haha). There are still challenges: we're experimenting with different cover papers, improving production, and testing new ideas without making things confusing. But that’s part of what keeps us moving forward.

Show HN: Lume – OS lightweight CLI for MacOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon

We just open-sourced Lume - a tool we built after hitting walls with existing virtualization options on Apple Silicon. No GUI, no complex stacks - just a single binary that lets you spin up macOS or Linux VMs via CLI or API.<p>Why we built Lume: - Run native macOS VMs in 1 command, using Apple Virtualization.Framework: `lume run macos-sequoia-vanilla:latest`<p>- Prebuilt images on <a href="https://ghcr.io/trycua" rel="nofollow">https://ghcr.io/trycua</a> (macOS, Ubuntu on ARM)<p>- API server to manage VMs programmatically `POST /lume/vms`<p>- A python SDK on github.com/trycua/pylume<p>Run prebuilt macOS images in just 1 step: lume run macos-sequoia-vanilla:latest<p>How to Install:<p>brew tap trycua/lume<p>brew install lume<p>You can also download the `lume.pkg.tar.gz` archive from the latest release <a href="https://github.com/trycua/lume/releases">https://github.com/trycua/lume/releases</a>, extract it, and install the package manually.<p>Local API Server: `lume` exposes a local HTTP API server that listens on `<a href="http://localhost:3000/lume" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:3000/lume</a>`, enabling automated management of VMs.<p>lume serve<p>For detailed API documentation, please refer to API Reference(<a href="https://github.com/trycua/lume/blob/main/docs/API-Reference.md">https://github.com/trycua/lume/blob/main/docs/API-Reference....</a>).<p>HN devs - would love raw feedback on the API design and whether this solves your Apple Silicon VM pain points. What would make you replace UTM/Multipass/Docker Desktop with this?<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/trycua/lume">https://github.com/trycua/lume</a> Python SDK: github.com/trycua/pylume Discord for direct feedback: <a href="https://discord.gg/8p56E2KJ" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/8p56E2KJ</a>

Show HN: Lume – OS lightweight CLI for MacOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon

We just open-sourced Lume - a tool we built after hitting walls with existing virtualization options on Apple Silicon. No GUI, no complex stacks - just a single binary that lets you spin up macOS or Linux VMs via CLI or API.<p>Why we built Lume: - Run native macOS VMs in 1 command, using Apple Virtualization.Framework: `lume run macos-sequoia-vanilla:latest`<p>- Prebuilt images on <a href="https://ghcr.io/trycua" rel="nofollow">https://ghcr.io/trycua</a> (macOS, Ubuntu on ARM)<p>- API server to manage VMs programmatically `POST /lume/vms`<p>- A python SDK on github.com/trycua/pylume<p>Run prebuilt macOS images in just 1 step: lume run macos-sequoia-vanilla:latest<p>How to Install:<p>brew tap trycua/lume<p>brew install lume<p>You can also download the `lume.pkg.tar.gz` archive from the latest release <a href="https://github.com/trycua/lume/releases">https://github.com/trycua/lume/releases</a>, extract it, and install the package manually.<p>Local API Server: `lume` exposes a local HTTP API server that listens on `<a href="http://localhost:3000/lume" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:3000/lume</a>`, enabling automated management of VMs.<p>lume serve<p>For detailed API documentation, please refer to API Reference(<a href="https://github.com/trycua/lume/blob/main/docs/API-Reference.md">https://github.com/trycua/lume/blob/main/docs/API-Reference....</a>).<p>HN devs - would love raw feedback on the API design and whether this solves your Apple Silicon VM pain points. What would make you replace UTM/Multipass/Docker Desktop with this?<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/trycua/lume">https://github.com/trycua/lume</a> Python SDK: github.com/trycua/pylume Discord for direct feedback: <a href="https://discord.gg/8p56E2KJ" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/8p56E2KJ</a>

Show HN: ESP32 RC Cars

This is a projected I started that blends both the fun of playing a split screen multiplayer driving game and controlling real rc cars.<p>The cars can also be controlled via bluetooth gamepads and is meant to be easily hackable.

Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

Hi! I've been building a debugger on my nights and weekends because it's fun, and I personally need a better debugger for my work. GDB and LLDB pain me greatly; we can and will do better!<p>As explained in the README, it's still very early-days and it's not ready for use yet, but check back often because it's improving all the time!<p>Check out <a href="https://calabro.io/uscope" rel="nofollow">https://calabro.io/uscope</a> for a more detailed explanation.<p>Thanks for taking a look!

Show HN: Uscope, a new Linux debugger written from scratch

Hi! I've been building a debugger on my nights and weekends because it's fun, and I personally need a better debugger for my work. GDB and LLDB pain me greatly; we can and will do better!<p>As explained in the README, it's still very early-days and it's not ready for use yet, but check back often because it's improving all the time!<p>Check out <a href="https://calabro.io/uscope" rel="nofollow">https://calabro.io/uscope</a> for a more detailed explanation.<p>Thanks for taking a look!

Show HN: Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio

I’ve recently released my solo project Audiocube<p>I wanted to make a 3D DAW, where spatial audio, physics, and virtual acoustics are all directly integrated into the engine.<p>This makes it easy to create music in 3D, and experiment with new techniques which aren’t possible in traditional DAWs and plugins.<p>I’d love to get any feedback on this software (Mac/Windows) to make it better.<p>You can download it for free through the website.<p>Thanks, Noah

Show HN: Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio

I’ve recently released my solo project Audiocube<p>I wanted to make a 3D DAW, where spatial audio, physics, and virtual acoustics are all directly integrated into the engine.<p>This makes it easy to create music in 3D, and experiment with new techniques which aren’t possible in traditional DAWs and plugins.<p>I’d love to get any feedback on this software (Mac/Windows) to make it better.<p>You can download it for free through the website.<p>Thanks, Noah

Show HN: Meelo, self-hosted music server for collectors and music maniacs

I've been working on this alternative for Plex for almost 3 years now. It's main selling point is that it correctly handles multiple versions of albums and songs. As of today, it only has a web client.<p>It tries to be as flexible as possible, but still requires a bit of configuration (including regexes, but if metadata is embedded into the files, it can be skipped).<p>I just released v3.0, making videos first-class data, and scanning + metadata matching faster.

Show HN: I Made an iOS Podcast Player with Racket

Show HN: Bagels – TUI expense tracker

Hi! I'm Jax and I've been building this cool little terminal app for myself to track my expenses and budgets!<p>Other than challenging myself to learn Python, I built this mainly around the habit of budget tracking at the end of the day. (I tried tracking on-the-go, but the balance was always out of sync.) All data is stored in a single sqlite file, so you can export and process them all you want!<p>The app is built using the textual API for Python! Awesome framework which feels like I'm doing webdev haha.<p>You can check out some screenshots on gh: <a href="https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels">https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels</a><p>Thanks!

Show HN: Bagels – TUI expense tracker

Hi! I'm Jax and I've been building this cool little terminal app for myself to track my expenses and budgets!<p>Other than challenging myself to learn Python, I built this mainly around the habit of budget tracking at the end of the day. (I tried tracking on-the-go, but the balance was always out of sync.) All data is stored in a single sqlite file, so you can export and process them all you want!<p>The app is built using the textual API for Python! Awesome framework which feels like I'm doing webdev haha.<p>You can check out some screenshots on gh: <a href="https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels">https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels</a><p>Thanks!

Show HN: 3D printing giant things with a Python jigsaw generator