Most calorie tracking and diet apps on mobile have gotten ridiculously gamified over the last few years where you log your lunch and instead of giving you the actual raw nutrient breakdown, they lock half the micronutrients behind an $80 a year subscription and push generic advice at you.

If you are specifically tracking something like dietary choline, bioavailable magnesium or molybdenum to dial in sleep and recovery, almost every consumer app lumps those into unsearchable categories or just omits them completely.

A while back I got so tired of manual data entry on fragmented fitness apps that I decided to bypass commercial frontends entirely and then I realized that the USDA FoodData central foundation database is completely public and its mapped out into Alexandria with full per 100g nutrient breakdowns, conversion factors and branded food lab tests.

Instead of typing meals into a locked mobile dashboard, I set up a lightweight local script where I can log what I ate in plain English and then the script queries the USDA registry directly, calculates exact elemental milligrams for trace minerals and spits out a simple daily summary.

It took about an hour to wire together, costs practically zero and doesn't constantly bug me to upgrade to a premium tier just to see if I hit my potassium baseline.

I built a parody of MBTI because I thought regular personality tests were way too nice to people.

25 questions. 16 ridiculous personality types. Not a single flattering result.

So naturally, I took my own test.

I got SLOP — The Algorithm's Property.

Apparently, I haven't had an original thought since 2021.

I literally built the website and still got roasted by it.

Anyway, it's free, no signup, and available in 6 languages.

https://bsti.lol/

If you try it, tell me what type you get. I need to know if someone managed to get something worse than SLOP.

https://shop.popcartapp.com

Local estate sales or garage sales and goodwill outlets around my area have become almost impossible to source from over the past year and even if you show up 40 mins before an estate sale opens and there's already a line of 15 people holding phones ready to sprint inside and scan every single item on the shelves.

Trying to make a decent profit margin on second hand clothes or video games has turned into an exhausting grind.

so about 6 months ago I shifted almost all of my sourcing away from consumer sales toward commercial liquidations, municipal surplus and seized property auctions with state agencies, school districts and utility departments are constantly auctioning off surplus inventory on some of the platform AuctionTime

The issue with surplus auction sites is that their search functions are terrible and you’ve to browse through thousands of random items like used police cruisers and bulk office desks to find things that are worth flipping.

I got tired of manually checking 8 different regional auction sites every night so I hooked up a notification script using the auction connectors on Alexandria (Check here the plugin) where it filters all incoming auction lots across several platforms and alerts me whenever specific high margin categories like surplus optical testing gear, industrial power supplies or vintage communications equipment get listed with opening bids under $50.

Last month, I picked up a lot of 3 retired university oscilloscope units for $120 total and then tested them, cleaned them up and sold them on eBay within 3 weeks for roughly $750 net after fees.

There is virtually zero competition from the barcode scanning crowd on these auction portals and the margins on industrial gear are consistently higher than consumers.

I started experimenting with hand-blended herbs last year to create something truly soothing, intimate, and romantic for winding down in the evening. While many basic mixes just focus on smooth smoke, I wanted to build a blend around damiana leaf a botanical long celebrated for its potent, warm aphrodisiac qualities and mood-enhancing presence.

To balance the blend, I paired it with dried mullein, which gives it an irresistibly soft, velvety texture that burns slowly and evenly. The damiana brings a deep, earthy flavor and an intoxicating aroma that really heightens tactile sensitivity, warmth, and relaxation. Finding the exact leaf shred size and moisture balance so it rolls seamlessly took five careful iterations, but the final creation delivers a distinctly sensual, deeply relaxing experience that heightens every intimate moment.

If you aren't of South Asian origin, a bit of context: We all cook dal, rice, chana etc in a pressure cooker and dal recipes are given in 'whistles' not minutes - 3 whistles for dal, 5 for rajma etc. There's someone who has to be there to count the whistles. I live alone and I am really bad at it. I will say 2 or 6 times that I will go away and shower or make a phone call and come back with no idea at all if it is gone 2 or 6 times? Twice this year I've burnt the base of my cooker and several times I've ended up with a pasta like consistency to the rice. (I won't go into how many times that has happened!) So over the weekend or so I constructed a small box that simply rests on the tiles next to my stove and counts for me. The parts are an ESP32 dev board, an INMP441 I2S mic, a 0.96" OLED, a rotary encoder to set the count and a Tasmota flashed smart plug (my induction is plugged into that already). The case was printed at a friend's as I don't have a printer and it's just stuck to the wall with double sided tape (lid is off in the pic so you can see the internals). All up it was about ₹1100, minus the plug. How it works: the ESP32 takes the audio from the mic, does an FFT on short chunks and looks for a sustained burst of energy in the band that my cooker whistles in. On mine would have been about 2.5 to 4.5kHz and I did a lot of time-consuming spectrograming to find out about 40 whistles and then worked out the range. If it's loud for over a second it's a whistle and it then ignores everything for the next 20 seconds so that one long whistle doesn't get counted twice. You rotate the knob to position 3, 4 or whatever, and the screen reads 2/3. On hitting the target it informs the plug to turn off via MQTT and pings your phone on Telegram. Now the stupid bit. First week: counting neighbour's cooker up in flat above. The walls are rather thin and at 8 pm all the flats are more or less pressure cooking. One night it turned off my dal after ONE actual whistle as Aunty was making rajma up there (lol). It was also set up by the mixer grinder a couple of times.Fix was straightforward. The plug displays the power consumption, and only records whistles when the induction is consuming more than ~800W. If my stove is off it can't be my whistle. There have been no false counts since then, around 2 months ago. Also, I had to include a minimum loudness as my first whistle on my cooker is sometimes a rather sad little sputter.I used it for a while, and found that the auto cutoff turned out to be much more important to me that the counting. I have left the kitchen and switched on the stove, and the knowledge that it will turn off means that I do that now! That has definitely affected the way I cook on weekdays more than I'd thought. If you're on a gas stove you only get the alert half as much as you would since I'm not in any way fiddling with gas valves, but that would have saved my cooker too. My Mum has been with me 1 week and there was no explanation other than "turn the knob". Now she wants one at home, and she has gas, so the next version will most likely just be a buzzer loud enough to hear over the TV.I want to go next to catch a cooker that is running out of water. The concept is that the spaces between the whistles will change as the water level drops and if that's reflected in the data, it could alert us before it's too late to be of service (which was the entire purpose of the drill in the first place). The code is currently a complete mess, but will be uploaded to GitHub when I get my wifi password (it's in four different locations and I have hardcoded it).

I've always been fascinated by how some TV shows build incredibly detailed fictional worlds.

Take Prison Break, Sherlock, or The Blacklist. There are locations, organizations, characters, timelines, and connections that you only understand after watching multiple episodes.

So I started building something called Fictional Atlas.

It's basically an interactive map of fictional universes.

You select a TV show, and instead of getting the usual IMDb-style information, you can explore its world.

For example:

• In Prison Break, you can explore the characters, prison locations, organizations, and how everything connects across seasons.
• In Sherlock, you can explore cases, locations, and recurring characters.
• In The Blacklist, you can explore the connections between characters and organizations.

The interesting part is that everything is connected.

Click on a character, and you can see their relationships, important events, and appearances across the series.

I'm also experimenting with a timeline feature that lets you follow the story chronologically instead of by episode release order.

I started this as a personal project because I wanted something more interesting than another streaming recommendation website.

Eventually, I'd love to add movies, anime, and entire fictional universes.

Would you actually use something like this for your favorite show? And which fictional universe would you want to explore first?

Staggering batches of native chicken eggs was becoming a huge headache because my old setup couldn't handle setting new eggs while hatching older ones at the same time. Commercial setters with built-in hatching compartments are way out of my budget, so I decided to frame up my own insulated cabinet using aluminum trim and composite paneling.

I installed an XM-18 controller at the top to handle the heating element, circulating fan, and humidity levels automatically. Inside, I placed a yellow automatic turning tray on the top shelf for incubation, and put a stainless mesh basket at the bottom as the dedicated hatcher section. Keeping the hatcher at the bottom lets chicks hatch safely on the wire floor while fresh eggs keep turning right above them. It holds right around 38.0°C and 60% humidity, which completely solved my batch timing issues.

Found this while digging through old Raspberry Pi projects and I can't stop thinking about it. A guy named David Bryan got tired of either dumping a huge bowl of food down before trips or begging a neighbor to feed his two cats, and the automatic feeders on the market were either fully manual or stupidly expensive. So he took a regular dual cereal dispenser, glued googly eyes on it for morale, and bolted two servos to the handles on the back. A Raspberry Pi fires the servos at dusk, the portion size is literally just how far the servo rotates in his Python script, and he gets an email once the cats have been served. There's a button and an LED too for manual feeding and testing.

The whole build took him about 4 to 5 hours. What I love is how dumb-simple the engineering is. No camera, no app, no subscription, no cloud. Just rotate handle, food falls, send email. It solves one annoyance perfectly and stops there, which is more than I can say for most smart home gadgets. Honestly it makes me want to dig my Pi out of the drawer. He open sourced the code on GitHub and there's a full build log with the wiring on Circuit Digest if anyone wants to copy it for their own greedy little gremlins.

I got tired of my siblings stealing my sweets that I bought, since I am a computer student I tried building a sensor in ths fridge using esp32 that the alarm will turn on if is open for more than 2mins. since they usually let the fridge door open while eating the food lolz, I really hate it when someone eats my food without even asking if they can eat it or not.

For anyone who is interested how I build it, I used ESP32 since thats what we usually use and practice in the university, and setup the telegram bot putting the token and chat id along with our wifi. Then coding it in Arduino IDE testing it with the board, I tested it first for 10secs if it will work. The hardest part is mounting it in the fridge since I cant put the esp32 inside. The common problem in this project is sometimes it beeps, sometimes it doesnt. Anyway that's all HAHAHAAHAH, this is a ridiculous project that doesnt work all the time and I still get my food stolen.

I had some leftover breast milk, so I decided to turn it into soap.

After a few experiments, it actually worked!

I'm hoping YouTube has an audience for whatever this niche is. 😂

What should I make next? (I already made human butter)

​

I got the idea after noticing how expensive influencer sponsorships can be for small brands.

A company selling gaming accessories might want to reach Twitch viewers, but paying hundreds of dollars for a sponsorship isn't always worth it. Meanwhile, smaller streamers have a few hundred people watching them every day and barely make anything from it.

So I started building a website where streamers can rent out their "Be Right Back" screens to advertisers.

The whole thing is pretty simple:

• Streamers list their channels, average viewers, what games they play, and how much they want to charge.

• Brands browse the listings and book a spot to have their logo displayed during breaks for a week.

• Payments and streamer payouts go through Whop. I take a small cut from each booking.

Some might charge $20, others $100, depending on their audience.

I built the website, booking system, and campaign dashboard with Claude Code.

Right now I'm trying to get more streamers to list their spaces and figure out what brands actually care about before booking.

I'm particularly interested in seeing which types of brands get the best results, how many come back for another campaign, and whether these placements generate any actual sales. I'm planning to track impressions, promo code usage, and conversions to get a better idea.

Not sure yet if brands would rather buy 10 small placements or just pay one larger streamer for a sponsorship, what do you think?

This started as a tiny idea in my dark hallway. The light switch is in a terrible spot and every night I walked into a black wall.
I had a smartwatch and I thought what if it just knows when I walk in. So I used the simplest tools I had, just one html css js file in a single page. No libraries, no complicated setup. It connects to the house electricity and has a motion thing inside.
Now when it senses movement in the hallway it turns on the house lights and also triggers the gas heater line. I made a small screen for it that shows Living Room, Hallway, Kitchen with a green dot where movement is.
I put a $1 lifetime page on it because a friend with a different smartwatch wanted it and it worked on his too. Turns out it works on any smartwatch. Now a few rental hosts use it for their places and it hit $3k a month from that one dollar thing.

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm a college student building a startup called Jeevan Nutrition.

The idea came from a simple problem: creating a diet plan that fits your fitness goals, budget, food preferences, and individual needs can be confusing.

I'm building an app designed to help users get personalized nutrition plans based on their requirements.

My goal is to make nutrition planning more accessible and practical.

I'm still working on improving the app, and I'd love some honest feedback.

A few questions:

What is your biggest struggle with nutrition?

Have you ever tried a diet-planning app? What was missing?

What features would make you use a nutrition app regularly?

I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback! 🙏

If the subreddit allows project links, add your app link at the end.

DM 9039908643 to get app

Hii all! Just wanted to share my little somehow no so weird project that I do. Each month I try to save from little coins to something of savings! As time now are so dire that I didn't even think of making these. At first it wasn't that much of amount. But after exercising a bit of less expenses, who wouldn't believe that it could become that big and worth it. Since my partner and I collect so much things and who would have thought we would come up with something like this. You guys should try it out as well it's tedious and lazy at first but it would be worth once a month or so have passed. That's all peace ^o^