I self hosted searxng, but the problem is after I was done I realised that defeats most of the privacy benefits of searxng: If I’m the only one using it, then I might as well just be using the search engines themselves directly.

So now I also have firefox running in a docker container, searching random junk on searxng every couple of minutes.

0815??

When I lived off grid, I wrote an energy production measurement application. With both hydroelectric and solar going through a 1990s inverter, it was something. Nowadays these are off the shelf for suburban yuppies, but for my DYI-everything homestead, only DIY would do. Measurement was via shunts. I put it online over satellite internet and could watch my production and static consumption from work.

In 2018 after deciding that I hated ProxMox, that Ganeti was dead (and it was at the time), that Harvester didn’t exist yet, that OpenStack was way too complex, and that I was interested in going the Kubernetes/container route (sorry I’m still a VM guy), I decided to write my own self-hosted hyperconverged infrastructure manager. I based it on what little I knew of how Nutanix worked, with a lot of ideas from Ganeti too.

And I named it after drain pipe on a whim at Home Depot.

https://github.com/parallelvirtualcluster

5 years later I have 16 production clusters, including my own homeproduction (but not including my testing cluster), mostly through finding a niche for it with my employer, and I spend a solid 25% of my free time working on it. It’s not quite at a “1.0” release I’d be comfortable with random people using yet, but it’s getting close enough for me to start talking about it on social media!

How about a selfhostable trashmail solution

Got a server and wanted to know what the temperature was in my room where it runs Installed VMware on it and a SIEM as a virtual appliance on top, poll the VMware API every minute to get the reading from the temperature sensor so that I can look at it from my phone’s web browser. Overkill: Quite certainly Useful: Definitely

I selfhost text-generation-webui (LLM’s), mimic3 (TTS), and whisper (STT) on a pair of GPU’s and tie them all together to make self-contained AI voice interactive chatbots and other nasty stuff.

I have kubernetes cluster running a vanilla warcraft server full of computer controlled bots that play in the world while I’m offline, just chuggs away all day then sometimes I log in and see how the bots are doing and play a little.

Our car has wifi so you can connect to it and start the heat/ac. It doesn’t have 5g/4g just no data wifi so you have to be within ~20 feet to warm it up. The app sucks also, along with connecting to its wifi.

Alexa “Warm Up The Car” -> Home Assistant -> trigger an android phone to run a touch script on the phone to run the stupid app and warm up the car -> then report back it did it correctly.

It still fucking works after 5 years and I refuse to even touch the damn thing, as it’s way way too handy when it’s cold out.

I live with a couple roommates in an apartment. For convenience we create a simple webpage where we could quickly see who’s home. It works by querying the router (running OpenWrt) every few minutes for known phones connected to the Wi-Fi. We pretty soon realized that we could actually see which room someone was in pretty consistently based on the signal strength alone.

After that it didn’t take long before we exploited it as much as we could, everything from automatically turning on the coffeemaker the first time someone left their room between 7-10am to blasting an alarm if someone left/didn’t leave their room at certain times.

The only thing slightly different that I self host is WebODM. It’s open drone mapping software. You can upload 10s or 100s of photos of an area and it can generate an orthomosaic, kind of like Google maps. It has a lot of other features too.

I don’t really use it, I just play with it from time to time.

For years, I hosted a PHP script on a personal website that would connect to a weather API, retrieve the weather at my home location, and, depending on it, generate a cute display with HTML/CSS and SVGs. The display looked like a 1500x500 image (though it was a website), where the sun (or moon), clouds (or rain or snow, etc.), were positioned differently based on the weather and time of the day. Additionally, the temperature and other details were displayed.

Then, the script would call an HTML to PDF tool to generate an image from it. This image was, at that time, uploaded to Twitter as my profile banner image. A server cron job would run the script every hour, so my banner would be updated every hour to reflect the weather at my home position.

Why did I do this? I have no idea. Not even sure if anyone noticed, but I could, so I did! Eventually, I ended up turning the script off at some point because it felt childish.

Would probably get more zanier responses on the Home Automation or Home Assistant subreddits.

The stupid printer didn’t have decent Linux support, so after we moved I couldn’t change its wifi settings to give it the credentials to the new network. Solution: I created a secondary, isolated SSID on the wifi AP to replicate the old wifi network that the printer knew, and now we could connect to the printer over wifi again. (And security bonus, it was now on an isolated subnet.)

My town used to post our garbage pickup schedule as a photo pdf to our town’s website.

They tend to change when garbage will be picked up randomly espcially near holidays, so it can be annoying and we’d end up running out in the morning when we heard the truck driving by on ‘off’ days

The changes always made it into the calendar at least the night before.

I wrote a horrible python abortion to grab the PDF, OCR the data, and then put it into HA so I can have HA turn a light on in my hallway the night before.

These days they make the calendar available as an iCal file so data ingest is way easier.