I’m self hosting on an old laptop, and I’m a convert for life. Self-hosting is amazing. Looking for other people’s weirdest examples of what they’re doing as inspiration.
My example, I recently set up a grammar script, where I have a couple 8b LLMs and an html landing page. I upload a doc and it corrects grammar and highlights changes it made, or just proofreads and I make changes manually. I can upload a novel before bed, and have suggestions based on specific writing styles in the morning. All local, perfectly suited for my own work.
I host a bunch of small web sites, i guess the most unique is one i made recently about the “Interface Series” (also known as “Mother Horse Eyes”). It’s a big old web fiction that was published (10 years ago) as a series of 100 reddit comments in unrelated threads. Just recently someone recorded an audiobook of the whole series so it motivated me to finally get this project done. Basically it’s a place where you can listen to each post, and read it karaoke style, and it also links back to the original reddit comment. I’ve also made it so you can listen to each of the interwoven narratives as a standalone audiobook. It is hosted here : https://interfaceseries.art/ .
Other than that i am an avid collector of old content from French television like tv shows, old american series dubbed in French etc… so i have a couple of sites where i show this collection. Can’t really link to it as it’s not really legal but it’s a lot of fun. I love the feeling of “linear streaming” as opposed to VOD : i love turning on the TV and watching whatever’s showing at the moment rather than scrolling endless lists of content so most of my websites work like that. I open-sourced the tech, it’s not much to look at, just a lighttpd server and some client-side logic to determine what’s showing at the moment on each channel.
My ultimate goal would be to create a “French TV from the 90s” simulator where, depending on what day of the week and what time it is, you get what would probably be showing at that moment on French TV in the 90s. It’s paused right now as i negociate with some guys who digitized a bazillion TV magazines from that time, and their data would allow me to get a really high def simulation.
Llm that reads my whatsapp chats and extract events then make calendar events for me
Oh, that seems like it could come in handy often.
I have a lot of custom stuff, esp. regarding HomeAssistant integrations. But my favorite “stupid/not stupid if it works” solution is the following:
I have an LG TV and attached Nvidia Shield. The Shield is the only input we ever use on the TV, and since its remote also can turn the TV on/off and control volume, its all we need. Which is pretty neat, only one remote.
Except for image settings (i.e. proper bright picture during the day, different less bright image mode during the night). I don’t want to keep the extra remote on the couch just for that, but unfortunately, these settings are not exposed via HDMI CEC.
They are, however, exposed via a web API on LG TVs. So my utterly stupid solution is this:
- install quick actions app on the shield
- reconfigure Netflix button on the shield remote to open quick actions popup
- add two quick actions, night and day, that curl simple HTTP endpoints on a VM I set up
- on the VM, a simple flask server listens, and then sends the (too complex for the quick actions app) API request to the TV.
(I feel the need to add: the TV is in an isolated subnet and has never once communicated with the internet, and it will damn well die an internet virgin.)
Anyways, this has been working flawlessly for 2+ years! I also have toggles in HA for the same endpoints, but honestly, never use them. It’s so nice to just be able to toggle the image via remote.
did you think about automating even the switching of the brightness? HA could do this based on the day-night cycle, dawn, etc. or it could also work with a room brightness detector
That’s cool, and I’m glad you’ve made the TV take a vow of solitude!
Respect the hustle. This sounds useful for me, as I lower the brightness for the kids so I dont burn in their content.
I just aint setting that up! Nice work.
Do you need a Github link? Assuming recent-ish LG, should he the same.
I selfhost podsync. Even for podcasts that have their own feed, I love getting chapters embedded…
I have wireless wyze cameras in my house that are connected to a private network segmented away from internet access.
because of that, it’s impossible for them to retrieve updates. So I wrote a proxy in crystal-lang that can proxy web requests over my private network to the public internet.
this allowed me to pull the new hacked firmware and installed them from github while maintaining network privacy.
a year or so later I began selfhosting gitlab and now I just have a job that pulls a clone there and all the cameras pull from within my networks.
I setup a simplex alerting bridge so grafana can create lab alerts to a simplex group, messages disappear when alerts are resolved.
Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the movement of local transit (BART trains, and buses) so I can check their ETA’s and locations from a phone browser. There are existing apps and sites for this but they unfortunately suck. They always answer “when will the next bus/train arrive at stop XYZ” which is almost never what I want to know.
What I want is usually either “I’m on the #123 bus RIGHT NOW and want to get off at XYZ, how many more stops do I wait?”, or else “my friend is on BART and just passed station X. When will she get to station Y where I’m supposed to meet her?”. Anyone implementing anything like that, please take it into account. The transit agencies usually have API’s to get the relevant data.
Oh, yeah, that’s a tough one, but seems workable.
It doesn’t seem so technically difficult if you can get the transit data. The phone GPS supplies your current location for the bus version, or alternatively you can just identify the most recent stop you saw. San Francisco has around 1000 city buses (I looked that up a while back) and you can put fairly precise coordinates, bus number, and route number of a bus into 4 or 5 bytes. So the complete locations of all the buses is around 20K which is less data than the javascript bloat that nextbus.com sends on every new visit. You do want the route maps (from transit agency) and street maps (openstreetmap) but overall it’s not huge.
Yeah, and things like arrival times could be flipped around, so time until your stop is also just the ETA of that bus to the stop anyway. Just changes to how you slice and dice the same data.
There might be other buses ahead of the one you are on, en route to that stop. You really want the phone GPS to figure out what bus you’re on, maybe showing a selection of possible bus numbers or route numbers. It would be great if you then see a route map showing your location as you move.
I didn’t implement this because it stopped being needed, but a text to print converter for my hearing impaired and non-techie elderly mom. Basically an email gateway running on VPS so if she got an email or text from a family member, a raspberry pi in her bedroom would immediately print out the message on a receipt printer where she would see it. I was going to use a cheap thermal printer but another family member objected (I guess reasonably) to the toxic crap in thermal paper, so I found someone selling a still affordable impact receipt printer on craigslist. Nothing actually happened with this, but I liked the idea.
I am selfhosting HomeAssistant and one automation is for my ceiling lamp. As I don’t whant to touch the electrical wiring or alter it permanently, I control it via IR and imitated the signal from the original remote via the ESP32 and some IR led. This on his own does not build a full feedback loop, so the ESP does not know if the light changed after the signal got send out. I lacked the correct light sensor in my inventory but remembered that my clock got one for display brightness control. The clock supports MQTT and also exposes the light sensor values in HomeAssistant. So after the ESP sends a signal to turn off or on the light, the automation looks at the light value from the clock to validate that it worked, else it tries sending it again.
Ugh, I absolutely love this. What clock is it?
Home assistant, is the light of on?
I don’t know, let me ask the clock.
I kind of love this.
I play Schafkopf, a card game usually played by 4 players. It was always a burden, especially before group chats existed on mobile, to figure out if we’ll be four players coming Friday.
So for 20 years I host a webpage for the 5-6 of us. It shows a calendar, user clicks the dates they want to play. Days with already registered players show in different colors. If a 4th player registers, all 4 are notified via email.
Afterwards the page asks players for the monetary result, generates stats and graphs about money, game nights over time, individual player participation etc.
In 288 game days I made 1278 EUR. I missed 53 game days.
Wow small world. Have you played Spitzer?
Never heard of it. Schafkopf is quite popular here…
Got meshtastic once a day doing a weather report. Its very unique to my area. Its just a python script.
Ive got a script that syncs my crosspoint books and bookwyrm. Its just a python script.
Ai honeypot. It works really well. Guess what python script.
I’ve written a Signal bot that listens for messages from my wife and me. It’s for sharing pictures of our daughter with a small list of people that want baby pics. The images we send it get blurred and sent as a preview, with an unblurred version sent as a “view once” image. Each blurred image contains an ID so that recipients can request the images again.
Does the signal bot need its own phone number?
I think I read somewhere, that Signal just recently allowed registration without phone number (“just” a spare device and a one-time payment, it’s in Android Beta, apparently), so that’ll work now.
Yep. I keep an old phone for the bot to be a linked device.
God that sucks.
Why not use SimpleX or Wire or Matrix?
What would be the advantage?
No phone number needed. Can run directly on a non-phone server.
Also more secure and trustworthy because it’s open source.
Also more secure and trustworthy because it’s open source.
But Signal is open source…?
Getting a phone number was relatively cheap and easy, so for a one-off implementation, Signal was an easy choice as it’s what many friends and family already use.
The phone number part significantly degrades your privacy and security
Also the signal app depends on non free software blobs, which is a huge risk to security. Claiming that Signal is open source is disingenuous. Parts of it are open source. As a whole, it is not.
That’s very cool!
I have a script that reads over one of the Canada Lemmy groups I am in and sees if a petition has been posted from ourcommons.ca than shares it in the Lemmy group if it has not been shared yet.
so, I’m self hosting for many years, with many many tools that i tried out and a couple that stuck.
not sure if this counts as weird, but I guess the most fitting example is the following:
i have a matrix server, which basically only a few relatives use to communicate with me, but I make heavy use of the bridges, so i don’t need to run those shit apps like Whatsapp on my phone.
anyway, i really dislike voice messages, because most of the time i read messages at the computer or in the tram and i don’t want to get headphones out, or simply don’t want to listen to five minutes of car noise to get the information off the words. so when my next productive episode comes I’m planning to set up a matrix bot that sends those audio files to some stt engine and returns a transcript to the chat. I’ll set up the bridge to ignore this bot, so the whatsnot user doesn’t get spammed.
Doesn’t the bridge require you to run whatsapp on a phone anyway?
yeah, Whatsapp really stinks in this regard. i have it in an isolated environment on my phone (called shelter), where it is frozen most of the time. you need to switch it on once every two weeks, and the bridge will tell you when.
at some point I’ll dump it on a phone which is just in a drawer at home, together with all the other BS apps.
i tried waydroid as alternative, but somehow didn’t really make it work (didn’t put much effort into it though)
If you manage to make an account on WhatsApp and move it to waydroid, they’ll ban you.
Meta’s game is (meta)data collection and selling your data. They’ll delete your account if they can’t get all your phone’s data (eg if it’s an emulator then they can’t uniquely identify you)
the app doesn’t have access to any of my phones data now. it runs in an isolated environment once every two weeks for about a minute, otherwise I’m only using their web API. so they might ban me, but yeah, it’s not that i would care much ;)
It has access to your phone’s fingerprint, which is then linked to all your other activity that you do on the phone, because it has the same fingerprint.
It doesn’t need access to the phone data. All it needs is the fingerprint.
I built myself a ‘new masked email’ workflow. I copy and paste the site url into the form and click create. It generates my random masked email, generates a strong password, prompts me for my keepass password then saves all the things and copies the generated password to the clipboard. Here are some screenshots. I did a test entry to demonstrate for you.
![Dark-themed web form titled "New masked email". The intro line reads "Mint a per-site alias at [redacted domain] and save a login to KeePass." Below it are a "Domain or URL" field with the placeholder "amazon.com · https://infosec.pub/", a "KeePass master password" field with the placeholder "used once, never stored" and the note "Used in memory to open the synced database, then discarded. Never written to disk or logs.", and a teal "Generate & save" button.](https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/f97152b2-5fe3-4919-a381-847f464c91d8.png)
New form.
![The same form after a test run for google.com. A green check reads "Saved to KeePass · Logins / google.com (qvkk8729)". Below it are the generated email "google.qvkk8729@[redacted domain]" and a random 30-character password, each with a copy button, the URL "https://google.com/", and a "Mint another" link.](https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/924cc668-a1db-4095-88d8-69452b456b89.png)
I type in my KeePass password and I get this screen while the entry is automatically saved to KeePass.
This all runs on an Intel NUC in my office and is accessible over my local network.
You might want to check out pass - the standard Unix password manager
I have and use pass for system secrets but for service where I’m logging in via the browser, I prefer KeePass.
This is awesome.
