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.

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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve (with lots of assistance from Claude) created a selfhosted app for managing a beer cellar and or well stocked fridge, which keeps track of drink-by dates, has push reminders to a PWA web app and much more.

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.

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.

I used to use YouTube for music, specifically to watch and listen to music videos, but YouTube kept making that harder.

I use tube archivist to basically have my own jukebox. Dont have an account with YouTube and can have my own collection.

Wanted to have a streamlined system where I use invidious with custom download controls but YouTube makes invidious very fickle.

Surely a custom vibe-coded mess of a web frontend for ImageMagick (it allows uploading a whole lot of scanned images, then presents a comfy web UI which allows choosing particular transformations - posterize to bilevel, trim, straighten, deskew, scale-to-page-size-and-add-edges). It runs in an ancient discarded-and-salvaged laptop.

I also use the same laptop as:

• Livekit SFU (transporting media for Element (Matrix) calls)
• XMPP server (Prosody)
• STUN/TURN server (transporting media for Snikket (XMPP) calls) (coturn)
• email server (Postfix)
• hosting a QR scanner webpage, so I could scan QRs in PCs with minimal fuss (nginx + 1 static file)
• and of course, since it’s already there, home router (it’s in the basement, so too far to do WiFi. The WiFi access point runs in dumb bridge mode)

I also run a periodic HLS video broadcast (my home internet connection should survive something like 40 simultaneous watchers, I should figure out how to distribute it efficiently to other hosts). It’s too heavy for the ancient laptop, but (as it turns out, I measured yesterday), a NAS with a 4-core Intel N100 CPU just barely manages. I might switch to it, it’s probably more power efficient than the current desktop workstation.