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)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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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 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.
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.
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.
Password protect it and just let friends use it? Or have it just for yourself :D
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.
Forgive my negligence, but what is a BBS?
Back in the olden times, before the WWW came along and the internet exploded, you'd fire up your modem and dial into other computers. Bulletin Board Systems.
They would typically host some local forums, files to download, private messaging, and some online games. Larger ones might have a chat room. As time went on, networked forums got popular. Mostly text interfaces, but ANSI graphics and menus were common.
It was really the best.
Setting one up to be accessible via telnet is a fun little project. Install a couple of doors (games) like Legend of the Red Dragon, Pimp Wars, Usurper and just have fun.
Ohhhhh that sounds very interesting! I might just have to set one up for my server!
A similar but not quite as retro endeavour would be hosting a Hotline server.
I miss the days of dialing your local BBS
It was the best of times, it was the w... nope. Just the best.
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.
A fediverse instance obviously.