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.
For years, I hosted a PHP script on a personal website that would connect to a weather API, retrieve the weather at my home location, and, depending on it, generate a cute display with HTML/CSS and SVGs. The display looked like a 1500x500 image (though it was a website), where the sun (or moon), clouds (or rain or snow, etc.), were positioned differently based on the weather and time of the day. Additionally, the temperature and other details were displayed.
Then, the script would call an HTML to PDF tool to generate an image from it. This image was, at that time, uploaded to Twitter as my profile banner image. A server cron job would run the script every hour, so my banner would be updated every hour to reflect the weather at my home position.
Why did I do this? I have no idea. Not even sure if anyone noticed, but I could, so I did! Eventually, I ended up turning the script off at some point because it felt childish.
This is a very fun idea and I guess you yourself had lots of fun setting it up that way.