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.
As few years ago, when my son was a teenager, he had selective hearing, would never come to dinner on time, never do his choirs etc… all he did was play xbox and scream at his friends down xbox live until 2 or 3am… typically moody teenager!
My wife got close to breaking point… I ended up creating a web app, that would enable and disable his Internet access, or limit his to school websites etc, or set a schedule for his access, which could be selectively ended when he’s good.
I then brought a load of those Amazon wifi order buttons, and tied each button to a different feature… so she literally pressed one button to suddenly get him to his attention.
To be fair, he wasn’t terrible, and always did well at school…
Oh man, kids these days! My youngest stepson (now 22 and attending uni) is still with us and I’ve had to do all of that over the years, he was decent in school but his grades dropped immediately once my wife decided he needed a cell phone.
He’s an addicted gamer, that’s his priority in life, hardly goes out, stays up until 2 or 3AM even if he has to be up at 6 to head to uni. Spends almost all his time alone in his room. Can’t wake himself, even with multiple alarms blaring they’ll be going for 45 minutes before we get tired of it and go shout at him.
When he was in high school I had to enact the internet blocks, once he was done I told him he had to adult now and start getting ready to be an actual functioning adult. It’s semi-worked but not totally. We still have issues with him unable to get up, late for school some days because he slept thru his alarm.
Had a talk to him recently about where his focus should be, how he needs to cut back on gaming, start networking so he actually lands a job in the career path he has chosen, get out in the world, etc. One ask I had, be up at 8AM weekdays, school or not. And, hasn’t worked, still up until 3AM nightly, even on the days where he actually has to get up to be at uni early.
So, back to some interesting DNS blocks, I no longer just kill his internet but certain protocols mysteriously stop resolving around midnight. But looking at the logs, he just switches to watching YouTube or Plex until 2 or 3AM. Not much I can do really, if I cut his internet he just goes to his phone off wifi.
They really hate having IT savvy parents. He has even contemplated ordering his own internet connection he’s said, won’t happen though since that would cut into his meager budget where he works little hours because, rather be gaming. :)