Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

> By that time, their meat is too tough for us to enjoy eating.

Those used to be called "stewing hens," and were enjoyed quite regularly. You just can't cook them in the same manner as you would a young chicken. They were usually braised low-and-slow not unlike tough cuts of beef.

Using a personal LLC for projects I was able to gain access via Google SAS. Because I'm using Class A CBSDs indoors, I don't need a CPI to sign off on the registration.

Back in 1997, in my college dorm, we had a big red emergency mushroom switch mounted to the wall, hooked up to the lights and one of those greeting cards you can record a personal voice message on. If you raise the plastic cover and hit the mushroom switch, the lights turned off, some red lights turned on, and the greeting card played Ride of the Valkyries out of its pathetic little tinny speaker.

"Selfhosted" solutions:

Retro chores: A chores list mounted to the wall. It has a 4K OLED touchscreen that is 20" tall but only 4" wide. Physical toggle switches controlled by electro magnets so that the Raspberry Pi inside can physically toggle the switches. Complete a chore? You toggle the switch. Then the Raspberry Pi, at the end of the day, resets the toggle switch and clears the chore from the list. It's made with 21st century technology looks like it came straight from Atari in the 1970's. All walnut, and teak and brush metal.

Retro Jukebox: Two vertical 4K OLED touch screens, two curved 2K AMOLED touch screens, lots of physical jukebox style radio buttons that can be programmatically reset, all controlled by a Raspberry Pi, brushed metal and wood case, and now wired into ChatGPT so I can say things like "whatever happened to these guys?"

Time-synchronized wall clocks: Eight separate analogue timezone aware clocks controlled with dual axis stepper motors, and a sizable amount of VFD displays, all run from a single Raspberry Pi. The controller changes the VFD under each clock to show the name, the offset from local time, weather in the time zone, and a few headlines. It's motion and IR sensitive so the VFDs shut down when nobody is around to watch them.

Daily Guk: It's a newspaper running on an old 21" android tablet that shows good news for the day, our calendar, comics, local weather.

Memories: It's 18 x 9" OLED displays artfully arranged on the wall and driven by a Raspberry Pi that pulls images from our stash of digital photos. Motion sensing so they turn-off when nobody is around.

Arcade Cabinet Rack: I have two 4U workstations and a 3U UPS, plus a 1U network switch I installed in a custom built cabinet that is about 30" tall, and then I built another cabinet on top of that which is an arcade machine that plays a bunch of retro games on a Skull Canyon NUC.

The Wall: I salvaged a bunch of 55" 4K TVs, stripped them down to their components and then built them in to a fake wall, with sliding rice paper shoji screens in front of them, and the screens show peaceful calming nature scenes. Display can run in 2D or 3D mode. Driven by an old i7 and a quadro card.

CNC Controller: An android tablet that talks to a Raspberry Pi that controls my two CNCs littleboy and fatman because I got tired of the CNC cuts failing due to network connectivity issues.

CNC Dove tailer: It's an aluminium jig that I cut on the CNC that lets me vertically mount a board at the end of the CNC to cut dove tails nice and clean.

Walking timer: It's a simple stop watch Windows app with some big buttons to start and stop the timer and add laps that my wife and I use to track our neighbourhood walks. I added some computer vision smarts to it so it can pull the video from the front door camera and automatically start the timer and track our laps around the block using gait analysis and image recognition.

Home health: It's a custom made home dashboard that tracks calendars, emails, locates the cell phones, locates our wallets, tracks the cats, shows our meal plan for the week, local weather and so on.

Cat toy robot arm (no longer available to play): I built a robot arm with different attachment options; a laser pointer and a feather on a bendy stick. You could control this robot arm over the internet, through a web browser, and there were live camera feeds to the web browser window. And you could donate money to play with the cats in the shelter for a period of time. Like an arcade game. And all the cats got adopted.

Cat toy touch screen: I salvaged a 50" LCD and installed an infrared touch screen and turned it into a large cat that sits on the floor that lets the cat chase a virtual mouse around the screen.

RTS sand box: A couple of high res overhead projectors and a few kinects and some sand in a box and we have an RTS game you can fight little war games on. I don't think the installation is at the science museum anymore.

Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job.

Waterfall Ring toss: I salvaged a 55" 4K TV and made a physics based retro game where you try and get rings onto pylons, that was then installed in the door of an art gallery, which was closed due to the pandemic. Big mashable button on the front of the machine so you could play the game.

Cool use of technology. Sounded like it scared the shit out of him.