Self-Hosted Main

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.

I live with a couple roommates in an apartment. For convenience we create a simple webpage where we could quickly see who's home. It works by querying the router (running OpenWrt) every few minutes for known phones connected to the Wi-Fi. We pretty soon realized that we could actually see which room someone was in pretty consistently based on the signal strength alone.

After that it didn't take long before we exploited it as much as we could, everything from automatically turning on the coffeemaker the first time someone left their room between 7-10am to blasting an alarm if someone left/didn't leave their room at certain times.

The stupid printer didn't have decent Linux support, so after we moved I couldn't change its wifi settings to give it the credentials to the new network. Solution: I created a secondary, isolated SSID on the wifi AP to replicate the old wifi network that the printer knew, and now we could connect to the printer over wifi again. (And security bonus, it was now on an isolated subnet.)

I selfhost text-generation-webui (LLM's), mimic3 (TTS), and whisper (STT) on a pair of GPU's and tie them all together to make self-contained AI voice interactive chatbots and other nasty stuff.

Got a server and wanted to know what the temperature was in my room where it runs Installed VMware on it and a SIEM as a virtual appliance on top, poll the VMware API every minute to get the reading from the temperature sensor so that I can look at it from my phone's web browser. Overkill: Quite certainly Useful: Definitely