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

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 suppose my most well known one is a recreation of the BBC’s Ceefax service (https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/) - I wrote a program which scrapes the BBC and various other sources for data and turns it into old-style teletext pages. All hosted from my rack in the attic. Not very exotic but still.

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/

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 too have a chicken cam, but no image recognition at this point. However, I have used it to discover that an opossum was breaking in and eating the eggs.

Other than that, the most unique things I have cobbled together are probably these:
- I work from home, so I created an automation using Home Assistant to tie into the Webex API to determine if I’m on a call or busy and, if so, turn on my Do Not Disturb light so that people don’t just barge into my office.
- A script my son can run from my OliveTin dashboard to update our Minecraft server (docker container).
- Another script I can run from my OliveTin dashboard to log into my firewall and disable/enable my son’s internet.
-- Both of these scripts notify me when they’ve been run via ntfy.

The industry I work in has many many companies. For whatever reason they all seem to use a very similar website template. Job openings are almost always listed on their webpage. Almost always its a plugin from workday or whatever their HR software is. Years ago I noticed that job listings were almost always published to their websites before they appeared on major job sites like linkedin.

I used a business to business website that lists every single company in this industry by location and has a link for each to generate a list of companys and URLS. I monitor this for changes with changedetection.io

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Then changedetection.io + company list and their job posting URLS that look like this company.com/careers/join-us/?_sft_job_posting_category=technical

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So I now have about 800 companies that I am able to monitor for job leads and get notified via NTFY with company, job title and job description.

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Its turned off currently cause I am actively employed, but when I was looking about a year ago I had it running hourly and if I look again I will indeed use it

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 two! The first is exotic purpose, the second is just tightly integrated so much that it might be only useful to me.

Smashcam

I live on a busy corner, in an otherwise slow and sleepy town right outside the city line. I live between a lot of town services on one side (fire house, library, athletic fields, town hall) and the elementary school on the other side. Pedestrian traffic is very high, the amount of children crossing is very high, bicycles abounds, and the cross street between them is decently high traffic.

So I see a decent amount of car accidents on my corner. 30mph limits on both streets so usually not catastrophic, you might be driving away instead of towed. But the repairs will be substantial on most of these. To provide an objective reality-as-a-service, I set up a camera high up in the eaves of my roof pointed right at the intersection. I’ve sent the police enough clips that they know where to archive my emails for evidence by routine. I’ve started training a model to detect car crash noises (and honks) to cut and save the clips automatically. It’s not reliable enough yet, but this could become a reasonable pipeline:

Car crash audio detected ->
Notification "Possible crash, do you want to review the footage and send to the po-po?" ->
manual human review to make sure we're not sending false positives ->
hit send ->
email with clip constructed and sent

Photos

This is not exotic in terms of its purpose. Lots or people have self-hosted photo sites (heres a whole chart of them all!)

But none of them integrated with my foss RAW editor darktable.

So I built my own photo site alternative that parses the darktable edit files and DB.

So now on the web, I can see the ☆ ratings I gave the photos in my editor. The tags and labels, etc. I parse the RAW files to show the focus boxes that the cameras write in the metadata when they took the picture, the facial recognition bounding boxes, etc.

And it shows the edit history stack and all the edits from my RAW editor. And of course, it has the left-right swiper to show before/after the photo edits. I can export any size, and it calls out to darktable with command-line control to export with the given edit stack to make the JPG of whatever size I’m requesting.

So yes, alternatives exist. Mine is simply very specialized to a particular editor program. I don’t believe I made the repo public, so as far as I know, I (and my family) are the only ones using it. It’s probably more featureful than things I have released.

When I lived off grid, I wrote an energy production measurement application. With both hydroelectric and solar going through a 1990s inverter, it was something. Nowadays these are off the shelf for suburban yuppies, but for my DYI-everything homestead, only DIY would do. Measurement was via shunts. I put it online over satellite internet and could watch my production and static consumption from work.

Spank me and tell me you host your own email.

RemindMe! 3 Days

I don’t know how exotic hosting a SIEM and EDR (Elastic Security) solution for self hosting ist but I do that. Complete with custom alerts and all. Additionally I use Wazuh for vulnerability management and integrity monitoring on my assets. Also I run a SOAR-like script that enriches my alerts with other SIEM and external Threat Intel data.

RemindMe! 4 days

In 2016 purchased and jailbroke 20 iPhone 4, and later upgraded to 30 iPhone 5s on iOS 9.3
I wrote a custom theos tweak which injected an HTTP server into Snapchat.
A raspberry pi was running an nginx server as a load balancer across the 30 iPhones.
I developed an Android app called “Casper”, which was a 3rd party Snapchat client. It sent http requests to my load balancer server to fetch signed security tokens from a random iPhone, which spoofed that it was the official Snapchat app.
The Snapchat APIs believed my app was the real app, so it could download and view snaps without the sender knowing it was even opened.
Self hosted an iPhone farm :)
Here’s a link to my tweet with photos and videos of the setup for anyone interested!
https://twitter.com/LiamCottle/status/1406616490783117322