I Built 9 Apps That Make My Life Easier

I used to waste a lot of time on small repetitive tasks. Managing YouTube assets, setting up Python apps, cleaning disk space, fixing broken links, tracking work for quarterly reviews. None of it was hard, but I found myself doing these same things again and again. So instead of looking for tools to try and reclaim this time, I built my own. And honestly, it's never been easier. With a tool like Clawed Code, spinning up a small app or script to solve a personal problem is something any of us can do now in a reasonably short amount of time. So, in this video, I'm going to share with you nine small, fun apps that I built to make my life easier. From desktop apps to CLIs to browser extensions, they're simple, they're practical, and every single one of them solves a real problem that I run into regularly. All the code is on GitHub. It's open source, and for most of them, I'll also show you here how to run or deploy them yourself, though they all are very well documented. And chances are, you've run into at least one of these problems, too. So, let's go ahead and take a look at these, with the first one being my YouTube creator app. So, I needed a place to organize my YouTube workflows and projects. Yes, I write and markdown in Obsidian, and I even use the Conbon plugin there sometimes, but what about notes, video ideas, where can I save the final video? How can I stay organized and meet deadlines, and all that ideally managed in one central place? Well, that's why this app was built. This is a NextJS app that uses a simple SQLite database, which is all you really need for these types of apps, and Prisma as the OM. I can create a project, add tasks, move them along the stages of the project. I can write and store all of my scripts here. I can create notes, maybe in planning or along the way. I can add project assets and even select a storage location, which of course is my NAS. It's very simple at the moment, but the key with these types of apps is to not rush building features. Build just what you need to help you use it regularly and as you see more opportunity or need additional capabilities, only then add those on. And since I can copy these scripts to markdown for blog posts, I'll probably add on an AI feature next to create blog posts out of these scripts. To run this, you can clone the repo and follow the readme to run it locally. To deploy this to a server, just copy the deploy.env.ample file to deploy.env and fill in the variables. Then run the deploy.sh script to deploy the app in a Docker container. Note that I am using traffic in my private home network for TLS. If you're not, then again, check the readme to tweak the deployment for your specific configuration. In side note, I'm going to release a series of videos soon on setting up your first home lab in 2026, and I'll cover in that how to generate real TLS certificates for all of your private home apps. And another side note, Gemini is great for creating simple logos for these applications. You can even add these apps to your phone home screen for easy access. The logos are set up in this particular app to display there. So, see how I did that if you're interested. Second, we have what I call the worklog app. Tell me if this resonates with you. You have a yearly or quarterly reviews at your job and you need to come up with all the great things that you've accomplished during that time to tell your boss and you really haven't taken notes on all of the particulars and you're having a hard time recalling all the things you worked on. Well, I built that one feature. I improved the performance of the database. And what else did I do for all that time? I know I did a lot, but I just can't remember the particulars. Well, this app takes care of all of this for you. This is a desktop app built with Tori, which is a cross-platform framework built on Rust. And then you can choose from a number of frontends, which I usually just choose TypeScript. And how it works is at the end of each day, you just add what you did that day, your daily achievements, and they get entered into your work log and of course saved on your computer. But they aren't just entered word for word. The AI capabilities take your tasks over time and summarize and categorize them into separate achievements. Like if you add in achievements for each day and then on day nine you add in another, the AI will take what you enter and find what that is a part of and combine it into a nice and neat summary. So 6 months later when you have a review at work, you have this nice categorized summary of all the things you've achieved which can even be exported into a number of different reports. Just add your OpenAI API key or local API key and you're on your way. clone the repo and run npm run torydev to run it locally and npm run tory build to build the application on Mac or Linux. On Mac, you just build it and drag it into applications. On Linux, which I'm running Omari these days, there are a few extra things you may need to do. For instance, I have this other Tori colon build command that also adds a no strip environment variable which will lead to a successful build for Arch Linux. And to launch it, I have an Nvidia GPU unfortunately. So, of course, I have to add a few other configs to the launch command. But let me know down in the comments if you want the particulars. I can create a blog post with instructions on how I run these apps from the application launcher. And before we look at the third app, I need to pause for a minute and give a shout out to the sponsor of today's video, an app that I've been using for like 2 years for all my YouTube videos called Story Blocks. Storylocks supplies me with an endless arsenal of B-roll videos so you don't have to stare at my face the whole time. Music that I can run in the background for tutorials. sound effects, images, professional templates for Da Vinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and others, and one of my favorites, vectors, because I'm horrible at design. They provide unlimited downloads of a wide range of highquality media at one predictable subscription cost. Many of these types of services give you a certain number that you're allowed to download and use per month. Storylocks doesn't, so you can test and experiment to make your videos just the way you want them to be. So, say you just started a channel and you're talking about your experience working on server racks and then how it stresses you out and instantly you have loads of videos to run while you talk and say you're using Premiere Pro to edit and need some cinematic transitions. Well, again, you have much to choose from and you can test as many as you need with no limit. Their library is authentic. The content is created by real artists and you don't have to worry about licensing which YouTube will ding you about. Like I said, I've been a paid customer for two years now with only positive things to say. So, be sure to go and check them out. To get started with unlimited stock media downloads at one set price, head to storyblocks.com/travismedia or click the link down in the description. Now, back to the video. Third, we have the file manager desktop app. And sorry, I've just not given any time to name these. So, I have an older MacBook Pro M1 that has a 512GB hard drive. I've since moved away from that machine, but I had these issues where I would always run out of space on my hard drive, especially with video editing, and I need to hunt down any large files that I didn't need in order to free up space. Well, this app, also a Tori desktop app, scans any folder I tell it to and lists the largest files and folders within it in descending order according to size. I can then doubleclick on any of them and it will open in the Finder, and from there, I can delete if needed. In addition, I found that most of my space was taken up with node module folders, which are huge and really can be deleted until you need to run the app again. So, we all have like 50 apps on our computer and we only really mess with two of them. We just forgot about the other ones and all of them hold these huge node module folders. So, there's a second feature to this app where you can scan folders specifically for node module folders and you can delete these and free up lots of space by doing so. For this app, run it locally with npm run torydev or build the application for use with npm run tory build just like the previous app. Fourth, we have the Python scaffold CLI. So I often spin up simple Python apps for various things and I always dread the steps involved. You have to create the virtual environment with Python 3-m venv and then activate it and then create the main.py and all that tedious. And I know that the UV package manager makes it a bit easier to do, but I wanted a simple oneliner. Well, this particular app allows me using an MKPI command to create Python apps activated with a main.py and a toml file in one shot. To install it, clone the repo, run this tool command, which essentially turns the project into a globally runnable CLI tool, and then add this function to the bash rc file or zshrc file. Reopen the terminal and you can spin up a Python project with MKPI and the name of your project. I have a blog post all about this if you want to read more about it. Link below. Fifth, we have an app called Payup Dad. This is kind of a fun app. Again, Nex.js, SQLite Database, Prisma. But when you have kids and they start to grow up, you want to give them work to do around the house. I mean, why have kids and then do triple the work you already have to do while they sit around and play games? Divvy it up. But as they get older, they'll start to need spending money. And they can either come and ask you for it or they can earn it and use their own. So give them some ways, some extra ways to make money. Well, this app is a simple chore app. You add a kid and they can either run a timer or enter their time manually as they do tasks you ask them to. It calculates what I owe them at the end of the week, and I don't have to go and track anybody down or have them forget their times. They can just enter it when they do the work. Like the other apps, you can follow the read me and run it locally or you can deploy it with the deploy.sh SH script after updating the variables. See the read me for particulars. Sixth, we have the new tab URL redirect browser extension. When I open a browser, I get this customized dashboard with my home lab stats, my calendar, and my links that I use regularly. This is all provided by an app called homepage. And there's even this quick launch to open up apps and pages. It's great. But when I open a new tab, I get a blank slate. You can configure what page opens when you open your browser, but you cannot choose what page is there when you open a new tab. Thankfully, there are some Chrome extensions that provide this capability to choose what happens when you open a new tab, but I'm a bit paranoid with some Chrome extensions. Some of the options out there have way too much code for such a simple functionality. I mean, it's just a redirect and then an option to choose where to redirect. I don't know what all that extension is doing, nor do I really have the time to audit it. And with modern LLMs, I can create a solution in minutes. So, I built my own new tab URL redirect Chrome extension that is under 100 lines of code. It just redirects to whatever you set. Very simple, very easy. Now, I haven't submitted this to Chrome yet as an extension, and I'm not really in a hurry to do so. But if you want to use it, download the zip from the GitHub repository and extract it. Open Chrome, and go to extensions, enable developer mode, click load unpacked, and select the extracted folder. Pin the extension, rightclick, open the options, and enter the URL you want every tab to redirect to. That's all. Like the others, I have a blog post explaining it all. Link will be below. The next app is the Astro link validator. So, I use Astro for my website and I went through a phase where over time I had accumulated lots of broken links on my site throughout my blog. URLs change, assets get reorganized, things like that, and links break. And again, while there are a couple of solutions out there, I wanted one that was simple, basic, and one that I knew exactly how it worked. So, I built my own that runs on every single build. It scans all of the HTML files in the dist output folder. It finds href and src and src set attributes. It confirms internal links exist and can optionally check external URLs using HTTP requests if you enable that, though it can take some time. And overall, it gives a detailed report if it finds broken links. To install, just do an MPM install straight from GitHub. Add it to your Astro config and run your build as normal. If broken links exist, the build fails and outputs the details. Set check external to check external links, but again, this can take some time as it performs HTTP requests. So, I'd suggest to enable that maybe once a month. Other options like fail on broken links, including excluding specific files, verbosity, and even pointing to your redirects file to check that those are valid is an option as well. I have an extensive blog post write up on this as well as a comprehensive readme if you want to check those out. Now, the eighth app is the HEIC to JPG converter. So, you take a photo with your iPhone, you airdrop it to your computer, and it's in HEIC format. Yes, I know now that you can change this setting on the iPhone, but for those who don't want to, here's a simple drag, drop, and convert app to convert those HEIC formats to JPG format. This again is a Tori desktop app. So, npm run Tory dev or build depending on what you're doing, same as the other desktop apps that we've mentioned. And then number nine is the income first calculator. So this is an old one that I featured in a past YouTube video, a desktop app built with Slint that I recently rebuilt with Tori. If you've ever read the book Profit First, the whole premise is that you should always scrape your own profits first when you get paid. But there is this additional discussion of four categories of percentage. Taxes, owner pay, profit, and operating expenses. Self-employment tax in the US is like 30%, complete theft. Owner's pay I set at 55%. Operating expenses I put at 10% and profit which is just money to go and enjoy I put at 5%. So every time I get paid in my Travis Media business I calculate this and I use WAB to budget and track everything. So say I get paid a,000 bucks. I just enter it into my app and it breaks it up for me so I know where to assign everything. Simple, but I've used it for a couple of years regularly and it served me well. So those are nine apps that I built recently to make my life easier. I actually have a few more like the website comment system that I'm building, but that's enough for this video. I think I would encourage you with the help of LLMs to explore spinning up your own personal apps that can help you out dayto-day. It's fun to build. It's fun to use something that you've built and you never know when it might just take you somewhere. Let me know what you think below and tell me what you're building. If you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, consider doing so and I'll see you in the next video.

Thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video! Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks: https://storyblocks.com/travismedia I used to lose hours every week to small, repetitive tasks: managing YouTube workflows, setting up Python projects, cleaning disk space, tracking work, fixing broken links, and more. So instead of hunting for tools, I built my own. In this video, I walk through 9 small, practical apps I built, desktop apps, CLIs, and browser extensions, that solve real problems I run into regularly. All are open source, documented, and ready for you to use, if you choose to do so. 🕒 Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:53 1 YouTube creator app 02:45 2 Worklog app 04:52 Sponsor 06:08 3 File manager app 07:17 4 Python scaffold CLI 08:08 5 Pay Up Dad 08:58 6 New tab URL redirect 10:26 7 Astro broken links checker 11:44 8 HEIC-to-JPG converter 12:11 9 Income first calculator 13:04 Outro 📢 Video mentions Python scaffold blog - https://travis.media/blog/scaffold-uv-python-projects/ Astro link checker blog - https://travis.media/blog/astro-broken-links-validator/ New tab redirect blog - https://travis.media/blog/open-url-in-new-tab-chrome-extension/ 📢 Project Repos YouTube creator app - https://github.com/rodgtr1/youtube-creator-app Worklog app - https://github.com/rodgtr1/worklog-app File manager app - https://github.com/rodgtr1/file-manager-desktop Python scaffold CLI - https://github.com/rodgtr1/uvmk-python-scaffold-cli New tab URL redirect - https://github.com/rodgtr1/new-tab-url-redirect Astro broken links checker - https://github.com/rodgtr1/astro-link-validator HEIC-to-JPG converter - https://github.com/rodgtr1/heic-to-jpg-converter Income first calculator - https://github.com/rodgtr1/profit-first-income-calculator-tauri 🎥 Watch These Next 🎥 https://youtu.be/995-SYn6960 https://youtu.be/EMWNZtCYg5s https://youtu.be/F3j_1AEQkHk FOLLOW ME ON Twitter - https://x.com/travisdotmedia LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/travisdotmedia FAVORITE TOOLS AND APPS: Udemy deals, updated regularly - https://travis.media/udemy ZeroToMastery - https://geni.us/AbMxjrX Camera - https://amzn.to/3LOUFZV Lens - https://amzn.to/4fyadP0 Microphone - https://amzn.to/3sAwyrH ** My Coding Blueprints ** Learn to Code Web Developer Blueprint - https://geni.us/HoswN2 AWS/Python Blueprint - https://geni.us/yGlFaRe - FREE Both FREE in the Travis Media Community - https://imposterdevs.com FREE EBOOKS 📘 https://travis.media/ebooks #aiprogramming #buildinpublic #developertools