I bought a Samsung Galaxy S4 from my GF like 6 years ago for $50. She of course upgraded her phone. I replaced the OS with LineageOS and slammed the ability to boot from ISOs over USB onto it. I now use it as a backup way to boot from ISOs over microUSB->USB-A in many different forms. It’s not as fast as I can get with better USB thumb drives, but in a pinch, it’s there for me! I know this isn’t exactly me writing code here, but I had to unlock the boot loader, replace the OS, root it, make sure Google Play worked on it (that was a touch of hacking, but again not my code), and stuff like that. So it’s a legit device as far as Google Play can tell and all that! Also the S4 has a removable battery so yay!

Yes this is self hosted related because I use these ISOs for server stuff, be it Proxmox VE OS install, OPNSense, or even firmware bootable ISOs (although those I probably should have on a dedicated thumb drive that doesn’t require a battery to live lol).

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.

Just about all my projects are (or rather were) on github. The hidden ones are due to redditors trolling or being outright shitheads, so I had to hide some projects temporarily.

Timezone aware clocks

I have a wall of eight timezone aware clocks, with the arms controlled via stepper motors to a single raspberry pi. The Raspberry Pi also controls eight separate OLED displays that are made to emulate VFDs. And then I set each clock to the timezone it corresponds to, pull the weather and temps from the internet and send them to each display, and also show some headlines for the region. When you need to talk to a client, you know what time it is there, what the weather is like, and recent news headlines.

Chore list

I have a chore list that displays on 12"x4" touch screen, with physical electromechanical toggle switches that are controlled by a raspberry pi. This chore list reminds me to clean the litter box, water the plants, pay the car insurance, etc. When I complete a chore, I flip the physical toggle switch and the chore gets marked as done until the next time. After a while, the chore disappears from the display, and the raspberry pi releases the electromagnet and resets the physical toggle switch back to the “undone” position.

Jukebox

I have a physical jukebox I built, that mounts on the wall, that streams music from my Synology. It has a bunch of super satisfying to press clicky tactile LED illuminated arcade buttons for track select, and the track lists are shown on two 4K 12"x4" touch screens. There’s two more 1920 curved touchscreens for the marquee to show album art and for navigation. That’s a single raspberry pi controlling four separate touch screens and about 50 buttons. When you press a button to play a track, the button locks down, like on the old car radios, but the raspberry pi when switching tracks can physically retract or release the buttons too. There’s a software defined jog wheel that has an OLED display to control the volume, but the raspberry pi can turn the physical dial too. That’s wired into chatgpt, speech to text and text to speech, with cortana as the voice, and I can say things like “whatever happened to the lead singer of this band?” or “Play a random shuffle of more tracks from this year.”

Memories

18x 9" OLED screens that display a photo montage and photo gallery of family pictures all controlled by a raspberry pi.

The Wall

It’s a half-dozen salvaged OLED displays built into a false wall behind some sliding shoji screens. The displays are driven by some old piece-of-shit computer and GPU. They display nature scenes. It’s an enormous digital window.

Home Health

I have a smart dashboard that tracks my cats, phones, wallets, weather, and a bunch of other info that is displayed on an ipad by the coffee machine.

Daily Guk

It’s an old 21" android tablet that displays only good headlines, daily funny comics, weather, upcoming calendar, etc.

Cat Toy

It’s a 55" touch screen that entertains my cats. Android stick plugged into the back running some custom Unity3D games.

Walking Timer

I built a timer that tracks how long we walk, and how many laps we do around the block, and then I grab the images from the doorbell camera and use computer vision and gait analysis to automatically detects when we leave, when we return, and how many times we walked past the front door on our laps, and calculates our speed.

CNC Controller

I have a CNC controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which in turn is controlled by an Android tablet. So if the UI crashes, the CNC will continue running the gcode. This could now be replaced by other open source projects that have become available since I created this setup.

RV Sync

I have an all flash NAS at the RV which is set to automatically sync the video & music directories, and a few other directories, between my NAS at my home and the NAS in the RV so that all the contents are available when on the road, even if internet is a bit wonky.

Retired Projects

Cat Litter Robot

This was a litter box, with a Kinect, a web cam, a Fujitsu robot arm, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The robot arm was controllable via a web UI and it live streamed the litter box. When a cat did their business, the kinect detected that, weighed the litter box, and then sent a request to mechanical turk to have someone clean the litter box for 25 cents. And then when they were done, two more requests were sent to mechanical turk to have other people independently verify that the video showed the litter box being cleaned adequately.

Giant Waterfall Ring Toss

An art gallery in Los Angeles wanted something as an attraction due to the pandemic, so I salvaged a 55" display, built an enclosure, and installed it in the upper glass portion of the door frame of the art gallery, and people could play the classic “Waterfall Ring Toss” game by mashing a great big button.

Remote Control Cat Toy

I built a web browser controlled remote cat toy with one of those feathers on a wand controlled by a number of servos. And also added a laser point option too. Then had a bunch of web cams live stream the adoptable cats in the shelter. And people could donate a $1 to “play the arcade game” with cats that would get unlocked as people contributed more money.

Planetarium

I built a 12 foot wide classic planetarium driven by a raspberry pi and a lot of really strong high torque servos for a science museum exhibit. Kids could use a jog shuttle dial to rotate the planetary orbits.

The Matrix Camera Capture Rig

I built a cheap camera capture rig for a science museum that works like the Bullet Time rigs, but this was done with cheap point & shoot SONY cameras. Patrons sit on a couch, or pose in a movie set, and the capture rig takes a snapshot, puts a video on the monitor for them that orbits the subjects.

Digital Sandbox RTS

A box of physical “wet sand” that you could play in, that projected an image from three overhead projectors, and you controlled a small army you could send into combat against other people playing in the sandbox. Kind of like a simple Populous game. That was on display at one of the Los Angeles kids science museums for a few years.

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…

Well we all need a 100G capable firewall sometimes

Mkay, I don’t know how crazy this is going to sound but here you go:

Back 3 years ago, I was still crypto mining with a bunch of good old RX470s that had been running since 2017. I had like 8 rigs in the basement. I also had solar power on the roof, but not enough to make the mining “free” since I didn’t have batteries either so I had to do something to get the power bill down.

So…since my inverter was connected to the network with a simple web page where I could get information like the actual output, I set forth to code an automation to turn my rigs on or off depending on the output of my solar panels. I used a php script running in a cronjob on a linux machine, nsclient on the windows miners and some zwave plugs to automate the on/off procedure.

Worked great for like 2 years until I decommissioned it all.