yesindex@gts.decafbad.com

mastodon tinkering

Tinkering with a thing that watches the federated stream of public toots visible from my lmorchard account on mastodon.social and finds popular links from over the past few days.

Good news is that it works. Bad news is that all the news sucks.

Tinkering around with finding links shared on the mastodon dot social public feed and dang there are a lot of Hacker News bots out there

Trying to dig for my ancient fediverse posts, I found this 2008 blog post of me working through setting up one of Mastodon's distant ancestors, Laconica.

Kinda wish I could go back in time and cure my ADHD so I could have focused more on tinkering with that. I'd have to cure my ADHD in the present to build the time machine, first, though.

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2008/07/03/getting-laconica-up-and-running/

Because my brain is a certain way, I've spent most of my Sunday flailing through figuring out how to get a Logo interpreter dockerized to run a program and ideally dump out an animated GIF (or at least a static PNG)

I might have all the pieces to do it with UCBLogo but still sort of tinkering. Seems like that interpreter doesn't respect the DISPLAY env var? That makes it hard to throw it at xfvb-run and ffmpeg

So the weekend's tinkering got the basement RGB strip, black lights, and a couple of power outlets automated with Home Assistant. Music & video works maybe 1/2 the time via the Logitech Harmony Hub.

After dinner, I played a bit of Watch Dogs: Legion and realized that the home automation stuff kind of feels like hacking ctOS in the game.

Tinkering with a few of these IoT devices in Home Assistant and I really want to just hook them all up to a Clapper

I guess the tl;dr of it is like when I first started tinkering with Arduino blinkenlights, except now it's sneezed all over my house and actually seems pretty cheap to get into. But I will likely constrain the mad science to the basement and garage until further notice

Clearly this is in my future if I keep up with this BBS tinkering nonsense.

(or, I guess if I want to put on a really weird BDSM scene)

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-PCI-Express-Serial-Card/dp/B06XSKGB64/ref=sr_1_9

Thinking about tinkering side projects... seems like node.js is good for stuff I want to share hosted on glitch to be easily hacked at. But to share something meant to be portable & used, golang seems better? (rust too, but I could use the golang practice)

Also, to be clear, this thing is currently only indexing toots from a few of my own accounts - because I'm the only one who's followed and been followed by it.

Also seems like the user stream topic doesn't include toots with at-mentions of other folks. 🤔

https://yesindex.glitch.me/?q=tinkering

Tinkering with another search indexing bot, over on one of my personal instances. Intent is to only index mutual follows. When followed, it auto-follows back.

But, for lots of good reasons, there's no such thing as an "unfollowed" notification - so the bot can't auto-unfollow.

If you block the bot, it stops receiving toots. So, that's an option. Thinking I might have it watch for an "unfollow" DM to unfollow.