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

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨hansolo@lemmy.today⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

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.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the schedules 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 either “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.

source
solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
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 cheap impact receipt printer on craigslist. Nothing much actually happened with this, but I liked the idea.

source
LeTak@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
- Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  *Home assistant, is the light of on?
  
  I don’t know, let me ask the clock.*
  
  source
- hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I kind of love this.
  
  source
nibbler@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source

Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz [bot] ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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

[Thread #123 for this comm, first seen 9th Oct 2026, 18:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

source

Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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. It takes 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.

source
- hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That’s very cool!
  
  source
- webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Does the signal bot need its own phone number?
  
  source
  - Flamekebab@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yep. I keep an old phone for the bot to be a linked device.
    
    source
Reannlegge@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I have a script that reads over one of the Canada Lemmy groups I am in (Canada@Lemmy.ca) 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.

source
giiicmrp@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
- justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  for this my wife and i use grocy. we don’t really use the stock feature (which is probably the original main feature), bit is nice to do shipping lists by just clicking stuff that you already wrote and the shopping mode of the app is awesome. also the chores feature we use heavily, i just needed to tweak the ics export a bit.
  
  source
- hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Nice. Seems like a more direct version of a Joplin list.
  
  source
michaelharley@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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.

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.

source
- dihutenosa@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You might want to check out pass - the standard Unix password manager
  
  source
  - michaelharley@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I have and use pass for system secrets but for service where I’m logging in via the browser, I prefer KeePass.
    
    source
- hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  This is awesome.
  
  source
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
- djdarren@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Just today I installed Azuracast on my server, pointed it at my Navidrome library, and now I have my own radio station. Once it’s all configured I’ll hook into it from my laptop for my weekly show using Icecast, which I’m really forward to doing. Because I’m cool.
  
  source
- hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Absolutely counts! Never even imagined that as an option.
  
  source
PMental@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
dihutenosa@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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)

STUN/TURN server (transporting media for Snikket (XMPP) calls)

email server (Postfix)

hosting a QR scanner webpage, so I could scan QRs in PCs with minimal fuss

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.
source
- hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Pretty good collection for an old clunker!
  
  source