I don’t want to hear about your Plex, your NPM, your notes application or science forbid, your budgeting application. I want to hear the most exotic thing you setup to selfhost, that probably only you and a hand full of people around the world actually use or even need. A problem that you solved in a way, that makes people go WTF. Go!
I’ll start: I live in the mountains, and there is snow, lots of snow. I often tell people “We had 3m of snow last year”, but is that really true? So, I thought to myself: Can you measure snowfall? It seems you can, so I setup a USH-9 ultra sound measuring device, connected it via IC2 to my Home Assistant and now I can tell people with confidence, that we had a total of 3.45m of snowfall last season, with max snow height of 60cm on January 5th.
Future project: I have chickens. They lay eggs. I have cameras. I want to know which hen lays how many eggs. Solution? AI image recognition of the hens (who is who) and if they have laid an egg. Any inputs welcome.
I’m not hosting anything exotic right now, but in the past, before the -arrs existed, back in the 2000s:
The first one was actually useful. The second one was more of a novelty I’d show to visitors.
MythTV. There is a name I haven’t heard of for a while. Whoa.
Even more exotic is a Nintendo wii hacked to serve as a media player, which then plays from a MythTV server. It worked, sometimes. Really flakey though. Sometimes the samba connection would randomly fail, sometimes the FTP connection would fail. It was great to repurpose the wii but i can’t be bothered to work out the bugs to make it reliable. Just a novelty. I also applied the Roku hacks to make an old Roku useful for the same purpose. But again it was hit and miss… couldn’t handle most MythTV videos.