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.
My wife has a podcast that’s basically a radio show. I’ve built an online radio for it using icecast and ezstream, and I’ve built her a management dashboard where she can enable/disable episodes, add and set up stingers/ads*/whatever else she wants. New episodes get downloaded and added automatically. Front end shows which episode is playing.
* Ads are in universe, not Better Health or whatever.
Fun! What sort of “ads” does she go for?
I love the concept! That’s very cool.
I’d say it would be a common use case but still never see people host it, a deadman switch sends notifications for you to check in, and if you miss enough of them sends selected contacts notifications and executes scripts
Sist2 (Lightning-fast file system indexer and search tool). I’m not suggesting this is most unique use case, but noone mentioned it. I was mind blown when I became aware of it. I was looking for a way to manage my digital book and document archive for a long time. Tried various book management solution but none had full text search across whole library. Its lighting fast (like instant) you get excerpts with thumbnails and links to the files. Point it to your storage and you will gain extremely efficient way to look at your archives and references. Btw. I was already well organized and structured with my files, but going through it and searching for things I knew were there, was always a bit of a pain.
I know some guys that might be into that. Thanks for mentioning it!
Sist2
I tried it many years ago and it was nice, but I couldn’t really make it fit my workflow properly.
Somewhat related, I run a linux VM with Everything search 1.5 (alpha, beta or rc, I don’t remember, but it’s much better than 1.4) in Wine, and that VM has most of my main storage array mounted read-only. Then I have the Everything web interface enabled, so I have a place to search my tens of millions of hoarded files instantly. Doesn’t archive file content though.
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.
Fascinating stuff, and a linear streaming French TV from the 90s would be awesome. For what it’s worth, the only redeeming element of Amazon and other VOD services is that they do often have a ton of “live tv” channels that are just regular ol’ TV, but one show over and over. Music videos or MST3K is my usual go-to.
Yeah i was also fan of apps like Mobdro which featured 24/7 feeds of TV shows or even movies by genre. That’s the initial inspiration i went with.
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 selfhost podsync. Even for podcasts that have their own feel, I love getting chapters embedded…
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.
Holy shit! I’m going to need this, so +1 if you’re taking requests to put this on GitHub. I’ve been complaining to my partner for a while that our TV’s remote has a million fucking buttons that we never need, but doesn’t have brightness up/down buttons that we need every day.
Is it an LG though? The APIs I’m using are WebOS specific
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
Hah, great question. I did. And then I realized, this only works if the TV is on the moment the switch happens.
Which in the evening is actually pretty commonly the case… But never in the morning.
oh right, because the TV is not available on the network when it’s sleeping.
then you could save the desired brightness into some variable, and when the TV gets turned on apply the settings. I believe HA should be able to make an event when that happens. if there’s a large delay, you could make a timer that forcibly refreshes the TV state every few seconds
Hmm, you mean when HA sees the TV come back? Interesting, that might work.
I’s rather not do the force refresh option, because sometimes you do want different profiles. Very dark show, sometimes I want the bright setting at night. Very overcast day, sometimes the dark setting is better during the day.
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 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.
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.
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.
why would it have access to my fingerprint?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging nginx Popular HTTP server
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #123 for this comm, first seen 9th Oct 2026, 18:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
