I’ve written a Signal bot that listens for messages from my wife and me. It’s for sharing pictures of our daughter with a small list of people that want baby pics. The images we send it get blurred and sent as a preview, with an unblurred version sent as a “view once” image. Each blurred image contains an ID so that recipients can request the images again.

That’s very cool!

Does the signal bot need its own phone number?

Yep. I keep an old phone for the bot to be a linked device.

God that sucks.

Why not use SimpleX or Wire or Matrix?

What would be the advantage?

No phone number needed. Can run directly on a non-phone server.

Also more secure and trustworthy because it’s open source.

Also more secure and trustworthy because it’s open source.

But Signal is open source..?

Getting a phone number was relatively cheap and easy, so for a one-off implementation, Signal was an easy choice as it’s what many friends and family already use.

The phone number part significantly degrades your privacy and security

I’m not here to fight you. I was replying with a cool thing I wrote to share baby pics to family and friends, not trying to be the most perfect hardcore op sec person on the internet.

People I know use Signal. I have never even heard of two of the three services mentioned higher up the thread.

When I wrote it I was dealing with a newborn, auditing whether Signal passes some No True Scotsman test for open source-ness was really not my priority.

Ugh, this kind of response is so off-putting. You can reply if you like but I’m probably just going to delete the whole damn comment thread because fuck this kind of purity test bullshit.

I wasn’t asking for fucking feedback on my work.

I think this is a great response. I’m not sure what happened to “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I absolutely agree on the purity test thing and I think the functioning solution you have created is absolutely awesome and has inspired me to try something similar. Rather than comment on the result and cool thing that was achieved, they chose to focus on some irrelevant detail because apparently it’s too hard to just say something is cool.

If you have a write up of your setup I’d love to read it. Don’t let the zealots drag you down bud.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

I’ve finally made my repo public thanks to your comment: https://codeberg.org/Flamekebab/FruitBatBot

Isn’t just the client open source

Not as of a few weeks ago

…signal.org/…/11197884108826-Phone-Numberless-Reg…

It needs to be Android with Google Play Services for the registration for a variety of payment related reasons, but they want to eventually remove that tie

I don’t think the backend my code depends on supports this yet, but good to know it might well in the future.

I think I read somewhere, that Signal just recently allowed registration without phone number (“just” a spare device and a one-time payment, it’s in Android Beta, apparently), so that’ll work now.

Surely a custom vibe-coded mess of a web frontend for ImageMagick (it allows uploading a whole lot of scanned images, then presents a comfy web UI which allows choosing particular transformations - posterize to bilevel, trim, straighten, deskew, scale-to-page-size-and-add-edges). It runs in an ancient discarded-and-salvaged laptop.

I also use the same laptop as:

• Livekit SFU (transporting media for Element (Matrix) calls)
• XMPP server (Prosody)
• STUN/TURN server (transporting media for Snikket (XMPP) calls) (coturn)
• email server (Postfix)
• hosting a QR scanner webpage, so I could scan QRs in PCs with minimal fuss (nginx + 1 static file)
• and of course, since it’s already there, home router (it’s in the basement, so too far to do WiFi. The WiFi access point runs in dumb bridge mode)

I also run a periodic HLS video broadcast (my home internet connection should survive something like 40 simultaneous watchers, I should figure out how to distribute it efficiently to other hosts). It’s too heavy for the ancient laptop, but (as it turns out, I measured yesterday), a NAS with a 4-core Intel N100 CPU just barely manages. I might switch to it, it’s probably more power efficient than the current desktop workstation.

Pretty good collection for an old clunker!

I used to use YouTube for music, specifically to watch and listen to music videos, but YouTube kept making that harder.

I use tube archivist to basically have my own jukebox. Dont have an account with YouTube and can have my own collection.

Wanted to have a streamlined system where I use invidious with custom download controls but YouTube makes invidious very fickle.

I have something similar, but I wanted to use my existing Jellyfin. I use TubeSync, which is basically just a web wrapper for yt-dlp with scheduling. I configured it to periodically download my unlisted YouTube Music playlist.

I have an Invidious instance going, and a boatload of MP3s from the last 30 years… Tell me more.

This way I have local MP4 files of all my favourite music videos. One day I would want to make software that organizes them as music (with artist info and all that)?and somehow gets the equivalent MP3 files for them as well, but for now it’s just an app that has over 1000 music videos that I play in the background.

Wonderful! Thanks for the added info.

I built myself a ‘new masked email’ workflow. I copy and paste the site url into the form and click create. It generates my random masked email, generates a strong password, prompts me for my keepass password then saves all the things and copies the generated password to the clipboard. Here are some screenshots. I did a test entry to demonstrate for you.

ALTDark-themed web form titled “New masked email”. The intro line reads “Mint a per-site alias at [redacted domain] and save a login to KeePass.” Below it are a “Domain or URL” field with the placeholder “amazon.com · https://infosec.pub/”, a “KeePass master password” field with the placeholder “used once, never stored” and the note “Used in memory to open the synced database, then discarded. Never written to disk or logs.”, and a teal “Generate & save” button.

New form.

ALTThe same form after a test run for google.com. A green check reads “Saved to KeePass · Logins / google.com (qvkk8729)”. Below it are the generated email “google.qvkk8729@[redacted domain]” and a random 30-character password, each with a copy button, the URL “https://google.com/”, and a “Mint another” link.

I type in my KeePass password and I get this screen while the entry is automatically saved to KeePass.

This all runs on an Intel NUC in my office and is accessible over my local network.

You might want to check out pass - the standard Unix password manager

I have and use pass for system secrets but for service where I’m logging in via the browser, I prefer KeePass.

This is awesome.

I am selfhosting HomeAssistant and one automation is for my ceiling lamp. As I don’t whant to touch the electrical wiring or alter it permanently, I control it via IR and imitated the signal from the original remote via the ESP32 and some IR led. This on his own does not build a full feedback loop, so the ESP does not know if the light changed after the signal got send out. I lacked the correct light sensor in my inventory but remembered that my clock got one for display brightness control. The clock supports MQTT and also exposes the light sensor values in HomeAssistant. So after the ESP sends a signal to turn off or on the light, the automation looks at the light value from the clock to validate that it worked, else it tries sending it again.

Home assistant, is the light of on?

I don’t know, let me ask the clock.

I kind of love this.

Ugh, I absolutely love this. What clock is it?

Ulanzi TC001 with AWTRIX firmware

I need to do something similar. I have a Esp32S3 music player/ voice assistant connected to my old Yamaha, 90s AV receiver. It can change the volume knob via IR commands (cool integrated motor that physically turns the knob when the remote or HA changes the volume with IR).

I want to do something like put a ring magnet and an encoder on the tiny shaft or something to get position feedback to couple to HomeAssistant/musicassistant.

Some old Players got a needle that moved on a scale to show the current volume (and Channel if Radio). Do you have something like that? This could maybe be used to encode the current volume into HA via HAL or Ultrasonic sensors.

Not sure it really counts.

For community radio

A VPS running wireguard.

Four presenters connect in from home.

Using Stream What You Hear to create the live MP3 stream from their mixer.

Played using Zara Radio to the FM transmitter.

It’s pretty reliable.

Absolutely counts! Never even imagined that as an option.

Just today I installed Azuracast on my server, pointed it at my Navidrome library, and now I have my own radio station. Once it’s all configured I’ll hook into it from my laptop for my weekly show using Icecast, which I’m really forward to doing. Because I’m cool.

This is super cool

My wife often writes groceries lists using her phones note app, and sends it to me if I’m doing the shopping. Each item in the list is in it’s own line.

I use Nextcloud Notes, I’m pedantic and want to use a markdown checkist for shopping lists (also bad at shopping). I wrote a Matrix bot, or rather added a feature to an existing one, that adds - [ ] in the beginning of each line of a received message and sends the result back. I then copy-paste the response into NC notes.

Nice. Seems like a more direct version of a Joplin list.

for this my wife and i use grocy. we don’t really use the stock feature (which is probably the original main feature), bit is nice to do shipping lists by just clicking stuff that you already wrote and the shopping mode of the app is awesome. also the chores feature we use heavily, i just needed to tweak the ics export a bit.

Yeah we use Our Grocery

I use vi to write my list and then lp that to my printer. I hate looking at my phone when I’m at the store trying to double check if I got everything.

yeah, i understand you. i don’t want to use my phone for every single thing either. in particular I’m not using it when I’m home. but in this case it’s really nice for me personally, because stuff that i marked disappears from the top and often my wife and i go together, so having a synced up list is neat

I’ve (with lots of assistance from Claude) created a selfhosted app for managing a beer cellar and or well stocked fridge, which keeps track of drink-by dates, has push reminders to a PWA web app and much more.

I play Schafkopf, a card game usually played by 4 players. It was always a burden, especially before group chats existed on mobile, to figure out if we’ll be four players coming Friday.

So for 20 years I host a webpage for the 5-6 of us. It shows a calendar, user clicks the dates they want to play. Days with already registered players show in different colors. If a 4th player registers, all 4 are notified via email.

Afterwards the page asks players for the monetary result, generates stats and graphs about money, game nights over time, individual player participation etc.

In 288 game days I made 1278 EUR. I missed 53 game days.

Wow small world. Have you played Spitzer?

Never heard of it. Schafkopf is quite popular here…

Are you paying tax on those earnings or is this illegal income?

dang, suddenly Magnum shows up :D

Yes, this is an investigation. A … private investigation 😎 *magnum intro music starts playing*

I have a script that reads over one of the Canada Lemmy groups I am in and sees if a petition has been posted from ourcommons.ca than shares it in the Lemmy group if it has not been shared yet.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging nginx Popular HTTP server

[Thread #123 for this comm, first seen 9th Oct 2026, 18:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

so, I’m self hosting for many years, with many many tools that i tried out and a couple that stuck.

not sure if this counts as weird, but I guess the most fitting example is the following:

i have a matrix server, which basically only a few relatives use to communicate with me, but I make heavy use of the bridges, so i don’t need to run those shit apps like Whatsapp on my phone.

anyway, i really dislike voice messages, because most of the time i read messages at the computer or in the tram and i don’t want to get headphones out, or simply don’t want to listen to five minutes of car noise to get the information off the words. so when my next productive episode comes I’m planning to set up a matrix bot that sends those audio files to some stt engine and returns a transcript to the chat. I’ll set up the bridge to ignore this bot, so the whatsnot user doesn’t get spammed.

Doesn’t the bridge require you to run whatsapp on a phone anyway?

yeah, Whatsapp really stinks in this regard. i have it in an isolated environment on my phone (called shelter), where it is frozen most of the time. you need to switch it on once every two weeks, and the bridge will tell you when.

at some point I’ll dump it on a phone which is just in a drawer at home, together with all the other BS apps.

i tried waydroid as alternative, but somehow didn’t really make it work (didn’t put much effort into it though)

If you manage to make an account on WhatsApp and move it to waydroid, they’ll ban you.

Meta’s game is (meta)data collection and selling your data. They’ll delete your account if they can’t get all your phone’s data (eg if it’s an emulator then they can’t uniquely identify you)

the app doesn’t have access to any of my phones data now. it runs in an isolated environment once every two weeks for about a minute, otherwise I’m only using their web API. so they might ban me, but yeah, it’s not that i would care much ;)

It has access to your phones fingerprint, which is then linked to all your other activity.

It doesn’t need access to the phone data. All it needs is the fingerprint.

why would it have access to my fingerprint?

Because your phone gives it that info

Got meshtastic once a day doing a weather report. Its very unique to my area. Its just a python script.

Ive got a script that syncs my crosspoint books and bookwyrm. Its just a python script.

Ai honeypot. It works really well. Guess what python script.

I didn’t implement this because it stopped being needed, but a text to print converter for my hearing impaired and non-techie elderly mom. Basically an email gateway running on VPS so if she got an email or text from a family member, a raspberry pi in her bedroom would immediately print out the message on a receipt printer where she would see it. I was going to use a cheap thermal printer but another family member objected (I guess reasonably) to the toxic crap in thermal paper, so I found someone selling a still affordable impact receipt printer on craigslist. Nothing actually happened with this, but I liked the idea.

Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the movement of local transit (BART trains, and buses) so I can check their ETA’s and locations from a phone browser. There are existing apps and sites for this but they unfortunately suck. They always answer “when will the next bus/train arrive at stop XYZ” which is almost never what I want to know.

What I want is usually either “I’m on the #123 bus RIGHT NOW and want to get off at XYZ, how many more stops do I wait?”, or else “my friend is on BART and just passed station X. When will she get to station Y where I’m supposed to meet her?”. Anyone implementing anything like that, please take it into account. The transit agencies usually have API’s to get the relevant data.

Oh, yeah, that’s a tough one, but seems workable.

It doesn’t seem so technically difficult if you can get the transit data. The phone GPS supplies your current location for the bus version, or alternatively you can just identify the most recent stop you saw. San Francisco has around 1000 city buses (I looked that up a while back) and you can put fairly precise coordinates, bus number, and route number of a bus into 4 or 5 bytes. So the complete locations of all the buses is around 20K which is less data than the javascript bloat that nextbus.com sends on every new visit. You do want the route maps (from transit agency) and street maps (openstreetmap) but overall it’s not huge.

Yeah, and things like arrival times could be flipped around, so time until your stop is also just the ETA of that bus to the stop anyway. Just changes to how you slice and dice the same data.

There might be other buses ahead of the one you are on, en route to that stop. You really want the phone GPS to figure out what bus you’re on, maybe showing a selection of possible bus numbers or route numbers. It would be great if you then see a route map showing your location as you move.

I have wireless wyze cameras in my house that are connected to a private network segmented away from internet access.

because of that, it’s impossible for them to retrieve updates. So I wrote a proxy in crystal-lang that can proxy web requests over my private network to the public internet.

this allowed me to pull the new hacked firmware and installed them from github while maintaining network privacy.

a year or so later I began selfhosting gitlab and now I just have a job that pulls a clone there and all the cameras pull from within my networks.

I have a lot of custom stuff, esp. regarding HomeAssistant integrations. But my favorite “stupid/not stupid if it works” solution is the following:

I have an LG TV and attached Nvidia Shield. The Shield is the only input we ever use on the TV, and since its remote also can turn the TV on/off and control volume, its all we need. Which is pretty neat, only one remote.

Except for image settings (i.e. proper bright picture during the day, different less bright image mode during the night). I don’t want to keep the extra remote on the couch just for that, but unfortunately, these settings are not exposed via HDMI CEC.

They are, however, exposed via a web API on LG TVs. So my utterly stupid solution is this:

• install quick actions app on the shield
• reconfigure Netflix button on the shield remote to open quick actions popup
• add two quick actions, night and day, that curl simple HTTP endpoints on a VM I set up
• on the VM, a simple flask server listens, and then sends the (too complex for the quick actions app) API request to the TV.

(I feel the need to add: the TV is in an isolated subnet and has never once communicated with the internet, and it will damn well die an internet virgin.)

Anyways, this has been working flawlessly for 2+ years! I also have toggles in HA for the same endpoints, but honestly, never use them. It’s so nice to just be able to toggle the image via remote.

Respect the hustle. This sounds useful for me, as I lower the brightness for the kids so I dont burn in their content.

I just aint setting that up! Nice work.

Do you need a Github link? Assuming recent-ish LG, should he the same.

That’s cool, and I’m glad you’ve made the TV take a vow of solitude!

did you think about automating even the switching of the brightness? HA could do this based on the day-night cycle, dawn, etc. or it could also work with a room brightness detector

Hah, great question. I did. And then I realized, this only works if the TV is on the moment the switch happens.

Which in the evening is actually pretty commonly the case… But never in the morning.

oh right, because the TV is not available on the network when it’s sleeping.

then you could save the desired brightness into some variable, and when the TV gets turned on apply the settings. I believe HA should be able to make an event when that happens. if there’s a large delay, you could make a timer that forcibly refreshes the TV state every few seconds

Hmm, you mean when HA sees the TV come back? Interesting, that might work.

I’s rather not do the force refresh option, because sometimes you do want different profiles. Very dark show, sometimes I want the bright setting at night. Very overcast day, sometimes the dark setting is better during the day.

Holy shit! I’m going to need this, so +1 if you’re taking requests to put this on GitHub. I’ve been complaining to my partner for a while that our TV’s remote has a million fucking buttons that we never need, but doesn’t have brightness up/down buttons that we need every day.

Is it an LG though? The APIs I’m using are WebOS specific

Yup, LG c1 or c2 iirc.

I selfhost podsync. Even for podcasts that have their own feed, I love getting chapters embedded…

Llm that reads my whatsapp chats and extract events then make calendar events for me

Oh, that seems like it could come in handy often.

I host a bunch of small web sites, i guess the most unique is one i made recently about the “Interface Series” (also known as “Mother Horse Eyes”). It’s a big old web fiction that was published (10 years ago) as a series of 100 reddit comments in unrelated threads. Just recently someone recorded an audiobook of the whole series so it motivated me to finally get this project done. Basically it’s a place where you can listen to each post, and read it karaoke style, and it also links back to the original reddit comment. I’ve also made it so you can listen to each of the interwoven narratives as a standalone audiobook. It is hosted here : interfaceseries.art .

Other than that i am an avid collector of old content from French television like tv shows, old american series dubbed in French etc… so i have a couple of sites where i show this collection. Can’t really link to it as it’s not really legal but it’s a lot of fun. I love the feeling of “linear streaming” as opposed to VOD : i love turning on the TV and watching whatever’s showing at the moment rather than scrolling endless lists of content so most of my websites work like that. I open-sourced the tech, it’s not much to look at, just a lighttpd server and some client-side logic to determine what’s showing at the moment on each channel.

My ultimate goal would be to create a “French TV from the 90s” simulator where, depending on what day of the week and what time it is, you get what would probably be showing at that moment on French TV in the 90s. It’s paused right now as i negociate with some guys who digitized a bazillion TV magazines from that time, and their data would allow me to get a really high def simulation.

Fascinating stuff, and a linear streaming French TV from the 90s would be awesome. For what it’s worth, the only redeeming element of Amazon and other VOD services is that they do often have a ton of “live tv” channels that are just regular ol’ TV, but one show over and over. Music videos or MST3K is my usual go-to.

Yeah i was also fan of apps like Mobdro which featured 24/7 feeds of TV shows or even movies by genre. That’s the initial inspiration i went with.

Sist2 (Lightning-fast file system indexer and search tool). I’m not suggesting this is most unique use case, but noone mentioned it. I was mind blown when I became aware of it. I was looking for a way to manage my digital book and document archive for a long time. Tried various book management solution but none had full text search across whole library. Its lighting fast (like instant) you get excerpts with thumbnails and links to the files. Point it to your storage and you will gain extremely efficient way to look at your archives and references. Btw. I was already well organized and structured with my files, but going through it and searching for things I knew were there, was always a bit of a pain.

Sist2

I tried it many years ago and it was nice, but I couldn’t really make it fit my workflow properly.

Somewhat related, I run a linux VM with Everything search 1.5 (alpha, beta or rc, I don’t remember, but it’s much better than 1.4) in Wine, and that VM has most of my main storage array mounted read-only. Then I have the Everything web interface enabled, so I have a place to search my tens of millions of hoarded files instantly. Doesn’t archive file content though.

I know some guys that might be into that. Thanks for mentioning it!

I’d say it would be a common use case but still never see people host it, a deadman switch sends notifications for you to check in, and if you miss enough of them sends selected contacts notifications and executes scripts

My wife has a podcast that’s basically a radio show. I’ve built an online radio for it using icecast and ezstream, and I’ve built her a management dashboard where she can enable/disable episodes, add and set up stingers/ads*/whatever else she wants. New episodes get downloaded and added automatically. Front end shows which episode is playing.

* Ads are in universe, not Better Health or whatever.

I love the concept! That’s very cool.

Fun! What sort of “ads” does she go for?

One of my favorites is for WandOS. There are ones for chocolate frogs, cauldrons, giggle water. There are also some for other podcasts.