Alright so my lab is pretty much functionally complete; it does everything I was hoping it would and much more.
OK so now what :D Do you know of any projects that are self-hostable and serve no functional purpose whatsoever and exist just for fun? Could be silly projects, could be games. I’d like to add a “silly things” section to my publicly facing list of web services.
For instance, I was thinking of hosting a web version of nethack. Also I enjoyed hosting a node of hypermind for a little while just because it was so silly.
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I’m running a Minecraft server for me and my sibling, and it’s been fun. I managed to get GeyserMC and Floodgate working so that Bedrock edition clients (i.e. their tablet) can connect to the world.
Little silky that there’s no Linux version of Bedrock edition to be honest, but it’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep Windows as the only option that can run both editions.
No Linux Minecraft bedrock got me and my wife to switch to Hytale instead. Get F’ed MicroSlop.
Might want to check out Village Story too, believe its a bit more mature in age, as in the game has been out for longer.
I know that one, once we get bored of Hytale we will check it out. So many new experiences now competing with Minecraft audience.
I haven’t done it in a few years but I used to run my own weather model. If fed the correct data and given time to crunch the numbers, several times a day you can create your own weather forecast that is probably (hopefully) similar to the freely available forecasts from the weather service, TV, radio and apps.
Which input data is required? Is it hard to setup?
It’s been a few years but I don’t remember it being too hard to set up. I did it on slackware, compiling everything from source, so anybody should be able to do it on a distro with dependency resolution.
They provided a zip file that is updated every so often (hourly?) and contains data for your specific region. I just used that. It does have an option that people can use their own data, but I think it’s because most NWS offices run this model in addition to the national models they get from upstream. No normal person has enough input data to be useful.
Depending on the specs of your server/VPS you could run a modded Minecraft server. Back in the day I really got into Minecraft and ran a server modded out to the max with shaders, and all manner of accoutrements. It was for fun, but Minecraft is one of those games you can really learn from.
spoiler
I keep thinking making a magic mirror would be such a project…
I have one. Very neat little project. I see now that there is an AI interface for MagicMirror now. Looks intriguing.
Chat bots are real fun to make and are really useful.
Games on Whales
I setup the IT-Tools mostly for fun. I’ve only used it a couple of times, but it’s a swiss army knife of small practical tools.
Oh I like
https://romm.app/ - Self hosted game ROM manager that lets you play retro games directly in the browser (using RetroArch cores compiled to WebAssembly).
https://retroassembly.com/ is a similar project.
There’s also https://gamevau.lt/ which is like a self-hosted version of Steam, for DRM-free games (like from GOG).
I like this but since it’s on my own domain i’m going to refrain from illegal stuff.
Would it be a publicly available page, or accessible only for you?
If it’s a public page, you could possibly host shareware games or with other licenses with a similar effect.
And there’s plenty of games you can legally buy as ROMs (e.g. homebrews on Itchio), games that include ROMs in their files (e.g. River City Girls 0 on Steam, most Neo Geo releases on PC platforms and pretty much any MS-DOS game rerelease), and if you’re from a region with laws not as draconian as the DMCA, there are games with ROMs embedded in their files and that can be extracted. So if it’s a private page, you could go for those too.
Password protect it and just let friends use it? Or have it just for yourself :D
How about hosting an ADS-B receiver, tracking nearby air traffic. It doesn’t serve any practical purpose other than participating in the crowd sourced network that feeds sites like FlightAware and FlightRadar24 (and you get a free subscription by participating)
@mko I have one. Lots of fun. Made with a Raspberry Pi 0. Lots of plans online. It sits on my windowsill. Tiny! It feeds those two commercial flight tracking sites as well as others. Here is a link to the software for web interface to your ADSB receiver.
Yep, I set mine up last weekend.
Used a nice Racknex rackmount kit to put a Raspberry Pi with SDR in the rack, and a little LCD display on the front that cycles through the details of aircraft currently in range - so it also serves the important purpose of Blinkenlights.
I’m fortunate to live close to two international airports (one small, one big) and under a reasonably busy flight corridor as well, so plenty of planes to spot - light aircraft, helicopters and military all the way up to A380s.
I think I read recently about some emulator portal you can selfhost, would that be silly enough? Requires you to acquire ROMs though.
I just posted a comment about this :D
A fediverse instance obviously.
I’ve actually been wondering how feasible it might be to set up a Lemmy or piefed server just for me. Is it frowned upon in the fediverse to essentially have a “vanity” url for an instance no one else can join? How difficult would it be to manage blocklists/federation without a team like the large instances have? Would there be an issue with instances refusing to federate with a single user instance?
It’s not a big deal, but a single user instance has some issues with discoverability as it will only show communities you personally have subscribed to.
Implement GNU Terry Pratchett on your servers:
You could host a Tor relay node (or an i2p node). These networks need crowd and bandwidth.
I had a World of Warcraft-server running for a while, that was quite fun.
A website/blog
