Toy Projects
It’s incredible how much can you do with AI. I’m having so much fun lately, that it’s unreal; the speed, the progress… it is crazy.
I’ve been working on small projects. Some of them took an afternoon. Other took a little bit longer.
10 years ago it was not the case. Those projects would take weeks to completion. I would often not finish them.
With the use of AI, I feel 10x. I finish them without problems or friction. I release them with ease. Modifications and adjustments take no time. It’s fun.
The hardware
I have a small home-server. It’s a Beelink Mini S12 Pro. N100, 16GiB of RAM. 500GB NVMe SSD. I bought it in 2024 for 195€.
Toy Projects
Those are the projects I’ve been toying with:
1️⃣ Personal documents
Simple project that helps me classify all the tickets, invoices, medical reports, vehicle inspection and legal documents that I owe.
✨ How has my life improved? No more papers. Everything classified, searchable and accesible everywhere. More than 300 documents.
Next improvements: Telegram bot where I can send PDFs/images of new invoices and will appear in the inbox, to be classified.
2️⃣ Barking dog
My neighbour’s dog used to bark non-stop. It was a big problem for me.
I complained, to no avail. The owner was saying that the dog was not barking that much. So I decided to record the dog.
Using a C920 webcam, I recorded the audio, in 5 minute intervals. Then classify the audio using a local model (Google YAMnet Neural Net) looking for “dog barking”. Finally produce a report. This is one example of a particularly quiet day:
✨ How has my life improved? When I formally complained again the owner fix the problem and it has been quiet(er) ever since.
3️⃣ Thermal Printer
I bought a thermal printer. A NetumScan 80 mm POS. Claude did all the coding and heavy lifting. I’ve used it, so far, for:
Instant photo at parties
At a friend’s birthday, I set up a Telegram bot to receive photos and print them on the thermal printer. Anyone could print anything they wanted, and take a small silly present with them. People (read “kids”) loved it and could not get enough.
Print daily habits
I get daily tickets and carry them all day with me. When completed, I put them in a “progress glass jar”. Seeing the progress on how the jar fills, and feeling better for those good habits is great.
Print merged MRs
Every merged MR on Forgejo (self-hosted Github) gets its own printed ticket. Satisfying her a ticket being printed after asking something to Claude, and automatically get it merged to master without my intervention.
4️⃣ GnuCash
Automate all my accounting. Classify all my expenses from the various sources. All my income and debt.
✨ How has my life improved? I’ve identified some useless subscriptions, saving some money. I’ve registered, to the cent, all the in/out flows.
5️⃣ Frame Gallery
I have a Samsung TV “The Frame”. You can see artwork, and it looks nice in the living room. I like it.
What I don’t like is the 50€/year subscription. Enter the frametv-art-gallery project. Minimalistic. With many photo sources. You can build your own galleries. And more importantly, remove the yearly Samsung subscription.
✨ How has my life improved? Cutting a small yearly cost, and having more personalisation over my telly.
6️⃣ Photos
I have an iPhone, with 17.000 pictures on it. It doesn’t have free space. Apple wants me to pay for yet another subscription.
I’m paying already a Google Basic plan (20€/year) to store 63GB of mostly pictures, altho it’s lowering the quality of my photos.
I’ve decided to install Immich and I’m very happy with it. I won’t save money because I’ll need to back up all this data elsewhere (external HDD + S3?).
✨ How has my life improved? Free space on my phone again!
7️⃣ This blog
I’ve been writing for most of my life, on and off. Old blogs are not published anymore.
It was never about creating an audience. It was never about other people reading my thoughts about this or that.
It was about creating something. Going from consumer to producer. To put my thoughts on black over white. Dedicate an effort to finish a piece.
I’m practicing the writing style proposed in Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. I like it.
Summary
None of the projects are life-changing. But I’ve had fun doing them, and now using them.
I explain how I set up and manage my server in Home Server 😊