My goal this morning was to dig up my old Mastodon bot code and try to remember how I was doing my fun little auto-tooters.
My attempt to register an acct on a bot-focussed instance has stalled. I think the instance is only lightly maintained and acct approvals take weeks or more.
My two most recent bots on the old "bots in space" instance were one that found the biggest word in a NYTimes article and then tooted a definition of the word.
The other one would build a weird (often funny) sentence with a random generator working through parts of speech. (no LLMs involved).
I had a third bot that operated in locked mode just to give me updates from our home automation system.
I've spun up a new account for one of my funbots with the sunny.garden instance which is intriguingly run by a fellow Canadian near Tokyo. Yay! 🍁
So that's there at @wordybot. You may remember my old bot which would toot a few observations weird, wacky or wonderful around lunch time each day.
Follow if you like, or not. It's gentle on your feed, and good for a laugh here and there.
Delving into old toot-bot code over breakfast, and realizing I had forgotten a lot of what I was last up to.
Turns out I'd already moved one project to a non bots.in.space instance and it was running fine until we moved. It stopped on moving day when I tore down our network and reconfig'd in the new place. ha! 😆
Brain was very full for several months thereafter.
I'll get that one working again, if I can understand my old notes. Should be a CRONTAB that was firing it off each day.
Found that my NAS had updated its Python version a couple of notches since my #mastoBots had last run, and in doing so it had lost some libraries. The underlying Linux OS had been a nice spot to run low-effort scripts in an always-on context.
My random observation bot @randotoot is again working. So there's that.
Further absorbing my old code and hoping to resurrect another my word defining bot which relies on a NYTimes API which may have booted my access by now.
Ross of Ottawa