the website of cass mitchell
I spent some time last month participating in looptober , a project where you generate a short bit of looped music every month. I used Strudel to write my pieces. Strudel is a JavaScript/Web-based tool for live coding music. I took a class on live coding at SFPC this past summer and really enjoyed it. I've been playing with Strudel ever since, and so looptober was a good opportunity to focus on…
I kept putting off finishing it because, you know, everything sucks, but I put together a mastodon archive viewer website/tool here: https://mastodon-viewer.muffinlabs.com/ It does the whole '100% local processing' thing, so you can specify your archive zipfile and everything is processed/stored locally. You can also use it to generate a website suitable for uploading somewhere and sharing your…
I switched botsin.space to read-only mode on December 16th. I essentially just prevented the creation of new toots -- you can still login, migrate your account, request an account archive, etc. Unsurprisingly, the load on the website has plummeted. In the next couple of weeks I hope to spend some time downsizing the instance, cleaning up some junk, etc, etc, to have a lean archive of the server…
There's no easy way to put it, so here goes -- after a lot of consideration, I've made the hard (frankly, painful) decision to shut down botsin.space. TLDR: here's the plan: Effective immediately I'm shutting down new account signups I will switch the site into read-only mode sometime not long after December 15th. I'll do everything I can to help people migrate their accounts elsewhere, and/or…
Awhile ago I made a very simple bot -- @WhatNewDevilry , which simply posts one of my favorite scenes/lines from Lord of The Rings: Instead of posting on a scheduled interval, I wanted to add some randomness to the posting schedule. I decided to do this by using the Mastodon API's scheduled tweet system. Basically, the bot code checks to see if there's a scheduled tweet for the account. If not, it…
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates - Audio Edition This is an audio version of the acclaimed book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates . Although it was originally published in 1955, there has never been an audio version of it -- until today. Weighing in at 18 gigabytes of audio data, the book provides 455 hours (almost 19 days) of listening enjoyment. The print…
Introducing feedsin.space , a service for generating Fediverse accounts that post content from RSS feeds. Something that I've learned over the years of running botsin.space is that a lot of people want to be able to publish RSS feeds to Mastodon. A few months ago, I decided to implement a service to run alongside botsin.space that people could use to setup accounts for RSS feeds, but without…
I've been meaning to write up some notes on how I manage botsin.space , and how I've dealt with certain problems in the past -- in particular, the several days of issues and downtime in May 2022. Hosting botsin.space is hosted at DigitalOcean. There's nothing really special about DO (in fact, I think about moving often) but there's a few features that have really saved me a few times now. First,…
@EarthRoverBot is in the final stretch of a journey from the edge of Maine to the US/Mexico border. The bot is entirely virtual, and the trip is powered by Google's Street View data. It takes a step forward every 12 minutes. It has a location and a bearing, and if there's valid Street View data in that direction, then it moves forward. If there isn't data, it adjusts course until it finds a way to…
I thought I'd write something about how I made the bot @lists_of_lists , from start to finish. It's a relatively simple idea, so if you're interested in writing a bot for the first time, this might be a helpful guide. I have a bit of an advantage for two reasons. First, I'm a professional programmer, and have been for many years. I know ruby very well, and it's the language I use to build most of…
@wayback_exe @wayback_exe is a bot that loads old pages from the Wayback Machine and generates screenshots of the output in an old browser. T-BannerThe James Marshall Homepage Jun 1997 https://t.co/ClD8MMNGgo pic.twitter.com/GfExw9p4tv — Wayyyyyyback (@wayback_exe) October 20, 2015 Why? The Wayback Machine is an incredible tool. It has archived over 23 petabtyes of data and grows by…
@botgle is a bot that plays games of Boggle . TIME FOR BOGGLE: Ｗ Ｓ Ｌ Ｒ Ａ Ｉ Ｉ Ｎ Ｇ Ｂ Ｗ Ｓ Ｍ Ｓ Ｙ Ｙ 🎶 💫 🐉 — BoggleBot (@Botgle) July 6, 2015 The Rules The rules are pretty simple: Just like in normal Boggle, there is a 4x4 grid of letters. The goal is to find as many words as possible in eight minutes. The game lasts for eight minutes, but the timer doesn't actually start until someone makes…
@kaleid_o_bot @kaleid_o_bot is a bot that will take an image you send to it, and run it through an algorithm to make it look like you are seeing it through a kaleidoscope. @muffinista here you go #northwest #12slices pic.twitter.com/akqJ7MpolK — Kaleioscope (@kaleid_o_bot) December 23, 2014 You can send any image and it will tweet the results back to you. If you want, you can pass a few…
Introducing Chatterbot , a ruby library for producing bots. Features It makes setting up Twitter OAuth permissions very easy. The included chatterbot-register script will walk you through authorization in a couple of steps and generate a skeleton script for your bot. It has a very simple DSL for generating basic bots. Here's a basic but functional example for an actual bot : It will run searches…
@ARealRiver is a Twitter bot that charts the course of a generative river via emoji. The course of the river is constant as it transitions between tweets, so you can scroll through 100s of tweets and watch the river expand and shrink, and meander back and forth, passing cities and forests and volcanoes and other scenery as it goes. There were a lot of different inspirations for this bot. I was…
@EarthRoverBot status page @EarthRoverBot is a simulation of a rover that travels the globe via Google Street View imagery. Basically, it stitches together a route by hopping from point to point, wherever there is valid street view data. In April 2017 the bot completed its first trip from the Canada/US border in Maine, to the US/Mexico border in California, near San Diego. You can see a map of…
I launched @USPrisons on Twitter a few weeks ago. It will output every prison in the United States -- or at least, I think it's all of them. I found a website with the data, did a bunch of parsing and cleanup, and ended up with 4763 prisons. The bot should spend a year listing them all, along with a few stats, and a picture if possible. If you're interested, I released the code that does the…
I've always thought the stock market reports you hear on the news are fairly silly. "The Dow Jones was up x% because this or that happened." The people saying those things always sound smart and informed, but no one really has any idea why a stock goes up or down in value. So, I made a bot to do the same thing. @StckMrktStatus will pick a stock from the NASDAQ or Dow Jones, see how it is doing for…