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 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
You could run a BBS! Synchronet and Enigma both have Docker images available.
It’s really the epitome of a pointless endeavor, but it also gives you an entirely new kind of system to learn, tinker with, and customize.
I miss the days of dialing your local BBS
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.
I had a World of Warcraft-server running for a while, that was quite fun.
A fediverse instance obviously.
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
Game servers? https://linuxgsm.com/. Have an Unreal Tournament 99… tournament with friends.
What a fuckton of ads and shit on that website…
Feels awesome and a cool project to self host but visiting that URL makes me puke
Much more fun to use linuxgsm and docker, also a bit easier in my personal opinion… https://github.com/GameServerManagers/docker-linuxgsm
Pi-hole and Firefox with UBO, I saw no ads
Oh that’s cool, thanks.
thats an awesome suggestion @dan@upvote.au +1
they have cs, as well.
@OP post your server IP, I’ll come play
Games on Whales
There are lots of game servers you can run. I highly recommend Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart. (Yes, that’s a terrible name, but it’s a very fun game.)
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
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.
A website/blog
