0815: Tell me you are German without telling me you are German :D

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.

You’d probably like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/schcw0/diy_smart_chicken_coop_and_inapp_egg_counter/

Our car has wifi so you can connect to it and start the heat/ac. It doesn’t have 5g/4g just no data wifi so you have to be within ~20 feet to warm it up. The app sucks also, along with connecting to its wifi.

Alexa “Warm Up The Car” -> Home Assistant -> trigger an android phone to run a touch script on the phone to run the stupid app and warm up the car -> then report back it did it correctly.

It still fucking works after 5 years and I refuse to even touch the damn thing, as it’s way way too handy when it’s cold out.

I have kubernetes cluster running a vanilla warcraft server full of computer controlled bots that play in the world while I’m offline, just chuggs away all day then sometimes I log in and see how the bots are doing and play a little.

I self hosted searxng, but the problem is after I was done I realised that defeats most of the privacy benefits of searxng: If I’m the only one using it, then I might as well just be using the search engines themselves directly.

So now I also have firefox running in a docker container, searching random junk on searxng every couple of minutes.

I wrote my own SMS gateway API with authentication tokens, quotas, rate-limits. This is because I wanted to send SMS without relying on an external API, so I got a 2€/month SIM card and plugged a USB modem (Huawei E169) into my RPi to use with Gammu. I’m using Gotify to log sent and received SMS, and send an SMS whenever my home internet is down or the IP address changes for example. It’s plugged into my systems monitoring for critical alerts, and while I offered API keys to my friends, none of them wanted any so I’m the sole user.

I’m up for the chicken challenge, dad wants to have chickens, we live too far apart. It’s reusable, plus now you can know which chickens will go to nuggets and which give you omelette

Love the stuff from the comments here.

For me, not so WTF but still a little overkill. My Parents have a sauna in the Garden which we occasionally use. But in the winter it’s cold and you don’t want to check outside for the temperature of the sauna until you go in. So my cousin and be build a little WebUI and Python script which allows us to monitor the temperature and control the state of the sauna remotely. 10m from living room garden sauna saved 😅

Newsweek Poland has pdf version and I am a subscriber. Unfortunately there is no mechanism on their page to schedule sending newest magazine to subscriber email. There is only a button in subscriber section to send selected pdf (link) to email. I wrote client which is logging in, bypassing captcha, gets listing of current issues, looks into history of downloaded issues and downloads newest issue for me. They offer in the same subscription other magazines too, so I extended this tool to also download others too.

Second one. I use IPTV service which has time shift functionality. I wrote app which allows me to download any tv program within this 3-4 day window of past tv show. It is using ffmpeg and some logic.

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

I do work for multiple organizations and got tired of having to disconnect/reconnect VPN tunnels each time.

Solution: Raspberry Pi. It’s got a single Ethernet port on it which makes it perfect. I used Openconnect since it was compatible with Cisco and PulseSecure (at the time). When you establish a tunnel, the routes come in as “kernel routes” assuming you have a split tunnel. I configured IPTables to NAT masquerade out each interface and I set up Quagga, a routing daemon to talk to my main gateway and redistributed my kernel routes into OSPF. That way, any of my devices can now access any networks they need. I did also have to configure my own DNS server since I needed to resolve the different private networks.

I have 4 kids. I had a kid-management app running at home for a while.

It assigned chores in a rotation, including periodic chores like cleaning out the fridge which didn’t need to happen every day. The kid interface had a simple green button they could click to say they’d done their chore.

When THAT happened, their fake bank allowance balance would increase.

The server side piece would track how long they were logged in and lock their screen after 30 minutes of screen time a day

The parent side included a form to track spending (decreasing their balance) and to enable and disable their user accounts on the computer. It could also grant additional screen time if needed.

The kids are older now and like hoarding cash instead of a balance, and they aren’t as motivated by screen time as they used to be. So the app is no longer in use.

I was thinking OP is gonna do something like snow cooling solution thingy… 😃😃 haha

The last place I lived was heated with an enormous pellet stove which would run itself out of pellets entirely before letting out an ear-splitting series of beeps and forcibly shutting off for about an hour. To avoid this, I taped an ultrasonic distance sensor to the lid of the hopper and had an ESP32 send me alerts and display the current pellet level on a little OLED.

Not a terribly dumb idea, except for the fact that ultrasonic distance sensors seem to be incredibly bad at measuring a constantly shifting mass of porous pellets. I don’t even know how many hours I spent working on an algorithm to get accurate readings, and by the time I moved out it still wasn’t quite right. I’ll also note that this pellet stove was in the living room, about 5 feet away from where I spent most of my time, and I could’ve just, ya know, got up and checked the hopper occasionally.

How about a selfhostable trashmail solution