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.

#botsForFun

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.

Doing an update of my stale #VSCodium app via #homeBrew. Haven't done much coding lately, sadly with so many things going on.

That hashtag likely brings up as many beer-brewing references as software package-manager mentions – as both are pretty squarely in the Mastodon-patron demographic. 🀣

Fingers crossed that #VSCodium remains untainted by the AI vibecoding plague.

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.

…it might take me a day or three to find my old code, get it running on some sort of platform (my NAS?) and have it spark up a few artisanal sentences.

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! πŸ˜†

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.

#MastoBots

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.