It’s been a while since my last post here on Alt Ctrl Dunc, and while I’ve been dealing with some life events such as a house move, I’ve not been completely away from a computer.

I have a HomeLab and a couple years ago, I delved into Self-Hosted apps, some of which I still use to this day. These have solved some real world problems for me, and in some cases, saved some cash.

But there’s also some gaps that I’ve found are either just not out there, or are some situations that are just so niche, it doesn’t surprise me that a product hasn’t been produced to resolve it.

This is where some readers may turn off, but while I am of the opinion that AI slop is a stain on things like the web, guiding AI to get you somewhere you may not be able to otherwise, either through a knowledge gap, or a lack of time, can be a good thing, in a similar way that using Google or watching a YouTube Video to find a solution to a problem is a good thing.

So… back to my projects, I have no intention to release any of these, but I thought I’d share the ideas around them as inspiration for those who may want to delve into their own customised projects. In some cases, you may think “This app already exists”, which may be true, but having the power to at any time make a change exactly how you want it, to something as small as changing the size of a button, is worth it.

In all of these cases, they are web-hosted apps via the HomeLab, that I access via Tailscale (a free and highly recommended service to dive into) installed on all of my devices. These aren’t designed to look pretty and can be janky, but janky is allowed when it’s a hobby.

TweetDeck-Style RSS News Reader

Back when Twitter was around and I was actively using it, and before it became any kind of premium product with X, TweetDeck had a superb interface that used columns to organise tweets. As accounts used it to publish their articles, at the time I used it as a news aggregator. Now that things have moved on, I’ve kept the theory and the usage as I haven’t been able to find a suitable RSS reader replacement. As frequent readers know, I highly value this vintage technology.

3D Printer Catalogue

3D printing quickly became one of my favourite hobbies, and being able to integrate it into my HomeLab via OctoPrint and access it from anywhere makes it even better. However, file management within OctoPrint is basic, and the Slicer software to edit the prints doesn’t really solve the problem of as example, wanting to print the same thing again, or rating/reviewing a print. I’ve called it “Nexus STL”, because STL is one of the major file formats, like a JPEG, used in the 3D Printing world, and Nexus is a throwback to my old Minecraft days. This web app connects to OctoPrint to update its counts.

Find The State Game

As someone who has been to the states frequently recently, this one is more of a way to help me remember all of them, and I’m still not there. The idea is to compete against someone to click the state shown on the screen, the app will say if you are “cold”, “warm” or “hot”, until you get the state right. The person who gets it right first gets a point, until all states are clicked. For a bonus point, the app asks what the capital of the state is with 3 suggestions, get that right and it’s a +1.

This does extend out into finding countries, but that game is a lot longer and used a lot less.

Shared Bills Portal

I share a house with my partner, and we both share 50% of the bills, but with prices of everything going through the roof recently, it’s hard to track of all the rises, when they’re happening, and how much they’d be. Also, where someone gets paid 4-weekly and someone gets paid monthly, figures can get muddy (why pay for bills twice in January when you get paid twice in January as example). We don’t have a join account, but do have a “household” account where we pay in individually once we get paid. The workflow is that we at any point can jump on the portal, pay the amount, then mark it as paid in the portal. Supports part-payments and custom amounts, and you can jump into the future cycles to mark them as paid.

This is just a handful of things of many projects I’ve been working on, and I’m curious to know if anyone else has been making these “just-for-me and just-for-fun” projects. These may not be coded in the best way, but they answer real world problems and “do the job” they’re intended to do.

If anyone’s interested, I’d be happy to share more!

What have you been working on lately?