During my spare time, I often do some experiments, try to bring some ideas to life, or contribute to existing projects (sometimes on my own, sometimes together with other people). Not all of them see the light of the day, but each one of them is important, in the learning process and to strengthen my skills in different areas. Below, you can find some examples of projects I formerly worked on or am currently working on:
Past Projects
Hawkpost
Using GPG is not an easy task for many non-tech savvy users. This often leads to people to sharing credentials and secrets through insecure channels, such as email, and leaving it there in plain text. Hawkpost was developed to address that issue.
The tool helps you in situations where you want to receive certain information securely. You just need to generate a link, share it, then anything submitted on that URL is automatically encrypted (in the sender’s browser) and forwarded to your email.
Source: https://github.com/whitesmith/hawkpost
URL: https://hawkpost.co
Kinspect
Small web-based tool that parses PGP public keys and displays several details about them. I built it because I regularly need to inspect different keys that are shared with me and didn’t want to load them into my “keyring” just to look at one or two details.
More info can be found in this blog post.
Source: https://github.com/dethos/kinspect
URL: https://kinspect.ovalerio.net
Small Experiments
Clipboard-watcher
This little project was built to understand if it was possible to keep track of what applications are accessing the clipboard on Linux. Currently, it only works with X11.
For more details about how it works and why it was built, I suggest taking a look at the original post: “Who keeps an eye on clipboard access?“
Source code: https://github.com/dethos/clipboard-watcher
Worker-planet
RSS aggregator that builds a single web page, plus related feed, from multiple RSS sources. It can be used to easily build community pages based on the content produced by its members on their own blogs/platforms.
A more detailed description can be found here. This project was awarded a swag box from CF developer challenge.
Source: https://github.com/dethos/worker-planet
Worker-ddns
Small DDNS system that makes use of Cloudflare’s APIs and Workers. The main idea was to use workers to overcome the lack of granularity in the permissions one can set for API tokens.
A more detailed description can be found here.
Source: https://github.com/dethos/worker-ddns
Webhook Logger
This tool was developed as a small experiment for a blog post about working with “websockets” on a Django project. In the end it provided quick and useful functionality, so I kept it online for almost 4 years.
However, when Heroku announced the end of their free tier, I decided it was time to shut it down. The source is available on GitHub.
Source: https://github.com/dethos/webhook_logger
Bundlr’s Opera extension
At the time when I was an Opera user, some web services that I used didn’t have an official extension to this browser, which made me waste screen space to add that functionality using bookmarklets. Bundlr was one of them (the service is now dead), so I built an extension that used their bookmarklet. It was later the foundation for their official one.
Note: This project is no longer available
URL: https://blog.ovalerio.net/archives/46
Rapido
This one wasn’t a specific need, but was born as a way to test new technologies. In this case, this project lets users create and share public “to-do lists”, that can be edited by several people in real-time, also having a discussion section for each element in the list. Later it was turned into a Firefox OS app as described here. It is no longer running, but the code is publicly available.
Source: https://github.com/dethos/rapido
Other Contributions
Soundy
This project intends to be a huge repository of short sounds (no more than a few seconds), that can be used as reactions on on-line conversations or for any other purpose where Gifs are also used nowadays. To put it simply, it’s Giphy but for sounds.
I’ve been part of the team since the beginning, but I no longer contribute to the project.
neo-python
Through my exploration of the cryptocurrency and blockchain world, I ended up working a bit with the NEO blockchain and developing some smart-contracts on that platform. For that purpose, I used the neo-python project and while working with it, I found some security related bugs. That was the beginning of my participation on the City of Zion community.
Repository: https://github.com/CityOfZion/neo-python