What's your weirdest or most unique self-hosted use case and solution?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Llm that reads my whatsapp chats and extract events then make calendar events for me

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 selfhost podsync. Even for podcasts that have their own feed, I love getting chapters embedded…

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.

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.

New form.

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.

My wife often writes groceries lists using her phones note app, and sends it to me if I’m doing the shopping. Each item in the list is in it’s own line.

I use Nextcloud Notes, I’m pedantic and want to use a markdown checkist for shopping lists (also bad at shopping). I wrote a Matrix bot, or rather added a feature to an existing one, that adds - [ ] in the beginning of each line of a received message and sends the result back. I then copy-paste the response into NC notes.

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.

Not sure it really counts.

For community radio

A VPS running wireguard.

Four presenters connect in from home.

Using Stream What You Hear to create the live MP3 stream from their mixer.

Played using Zara Radio to the FM transmitter.

It’s pretty reliable.

Same VPS hosts a Rustdesk server.