Last year for Christmas I got a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) as a kit with case etc. From the beginning I had no special application, if I had one I could have used my third generation Pi or one of several very old Pis from my father. Admittedly, I just wanted to see what such a small and inexpensive tinkering computer could do.

And admittedly it is quite impressive what it can do. I can use it without any problems to surf the internet or, like right now, write a blog article. It even supports my 4K monitor, I turned the resolution down though because I couldn’t figure out how to set the scaling to 200% in Raspian (or Raspberry Pi OS).

I once tried to use the Pi as a media player on the TV, but somehow Kodi wasn’t that much fun and YouTube didn’t work either. And so it lay in the drawer, unused. I tried to play a little bit with Sonic Pi again, but my musical talent and sense of rhythm are non-existent and so I gave that up.

So now the question is really what I can use my Pi 4 for and maybe my Pi 3, which I still have?

A Pi (I guess version 2) is used as a thermometer in the apartment. My father had set up a simple website so that you can see the temperatures over the last 24 hours from outside and inside.

But somehow I really miss the ideas what I could implement. A web server? I once tried to run a website from home with my Pi 3, which works fine, but I still prefer to use a rented server in a data center for my public pages. Maybe I could use a Pi as a Pi-Hole to block advertising? Or do I just use it whenever I want to write a blog article or other text without distraction?

Does anyone have a good idea or suggestion? Or own cool experiences and projects? The devices are too good to lie unused in the drawer!