[utensil4778]

Several years ago, I picked up an old SmartBoard projector. The thing has no buttons, it's meant to be plugged into a remote control module attached to the board, or controlled over serial as part of a room system, or through its Ethernet connection.

I don't remember how I got started initially, there was some investigation of the network protocol it used. It was some crusty old standard that used an odd command scheme, but I managed to divine what magic packets to send to wake it up and select an input.

I ended up rolling it all into my first and only Android app. It eventually became a full remote control for the thing, including a sleep timer that would turn it off after an hour.

It was extremely basic and horribly ugly. I never looked into automatic discovery of the device on the network, so it had a hardcoded IP address. But it worked well enough to get a free projector running.

Apart from that, every programmer has thrown together innumerable scripts and throwaway programs for one-off tasks. My most recent was a thing that takes in a Diablo 2 save, then sets the version number and recalculates the checksum. My pirated copy is a bit old and won't accept saves made with modern editors. I don't know how many scripts I've written that walk through a file system to find or change something in the contained files.

I also have a version of Klondike solitaire written in C++ with SFML. I initially wanted to build a neural network to play solitaire, but after building the game itself, I found in my research that solitaire is actually a very difficult problem and far beyond my skills.