Tag: exocortex

  1. Interfacing Fess with Searx.

    30 November 2020

    I promise I'll explain what Fess is in a later post. I want to get this information out there in preparation.

    If you haven't used Searx before, it's a self-hosted meta-search engine which queries a wide array of search engines (some of which are also self-hosted), collates the search results, and returns them as a regular search result page, an RSS feed, or a JSON API.

    One of the lesser known features is that you can add your own search engines. You can either write your own (using an existing one as a template) or you can leverage one of …

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  2. Embedded environment monitoring.

    02 November 2020

    Disclaimer: This post has lots of links to the Adafruit website.  There are no referral links, I received no consideration, I just buy parts from there and do cool things with them.

    A couple of weeks months ago I did a writeup of a prototype environment monitoring device for my office built out of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and some off the shelf components.  In the time since I've found time here and there to work on the embedded version, which doesn't use a full computer system but a microcontroller with just enough functionality to drive a couple of …

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  3. Simple environment monitoring with spare parts.

    15 July 2020

    It's going on summer in the Bay Area, which means that it's warming up a bit both outside and inside (because air conditioning is Not A Thing out here).  That, coupled with the not inconsiderable research infrastructure I have at home has left me wondering and worrying about just how hot my office gets during the day while I'm working.  Now, I could just put a simple little thermometer on my shelf (and I did) but my concerns are a bit bigger than that.  What happens if my office temperature reaches a critical point and servers start melting down on …

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  4. Tunneling across networks with Nebula.

    30 April 2020

    Longtime readers have no doubt observed that I plug a lot weird shit into my exocortex - from bookmark managers to card catalogues to just about anything that has an API.  Sometimes this is fairly straightforward; if it's on the public Net I can get to it (processing that data is a separate issue, of course).  But what about the stuff I have around the lab?  I'm always messing with new toys that are network connected and occasionally useful.  The question is, how do I get it out of the lab and out to my exocortex?  Sometimes I write bots to …

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  5. Nifty things to do with Searx.

    10 March 2020

    Not too long ago I was noodling over a problem: I wanted to break up the scheduling queues in Huginn to make my fleets of agents a little more efficient when the execute.  The best way I could think of was to make some of the schedules stochastic - periodically have an agent roll some dice and depending on what comes up decide whether or not to trigger the agents downstream.  So, of course I started looking for a random number generator that would basically roll 1d10.  However, the Liquid templating language that Huginn uses internally doesn't have any function to …

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  6. Integrating Huginn with a Matrix server.

    12 February 2020

    Throughout this series I've shown you how to set up a Matrix server and client using Synapse and Riot, and make it much more robust as a service by integrating a database server and a mechanism for making VoIP more reliable.  Now we'll wrap it up by doing something neat, building a simple agent network in Huginn to post what I'm listening to into a Matrix Room.  I have an account on libre.fm that my media players log to which we'll be using as our data source.  Of course, this is only a demonstration of the basic technique, you …

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  7. Using Ansible to restart a bunch of services running under systemd in --user mode.

    05 December 2019

    Let's say that you have a bunch of servers that you admin en masse using Ansible.  You have all of them listed and organized in your /etc/ansible/hosts file.  Let's say that each server is running a system service (like my Systembot) running under systemd in --user mode.  (Yes, I'm going to use my exocortex-halo/ repository for this, because I just worked out a good way to keep everything up to date and want to share the technique for everyone new to Ansible.  Pay it forward, you know?)  You want to use Ansible to update your copy of Systembot …

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  9. Challenge accepted: Archiving a Mastodon account with Huginn

    19 November 2019

    Last weekend I was running short of stuff to hack around on and lamented this fact on the Fediverse.  I was summarily challenged to find a way to archive posts to the Fediverse in an open, easy to understand data format that was easy to index, and did not use any third party services (like IFTTT or Zapier).  I thought about it a bit and came up with a reasonably simple solution that uses three Huginn agents to collect, process, and write out posts as individual JSON documents to the same box I run that part of my exocortex on …

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  10. Experimenting with btrfs in production.

    04 November 2019

    EDIT - 20230129 - Changed the btrfs replacement command a bit. Added a command block to force the SATA controller to rescan the devices available to it.

    EDIT - 20211120 - Edited the page so that it makes more sense. The last couple of edits were out of sequence. Cleaned up a few things, too.

    EDIT - 20211107 @ 1324 UTC-7 - Added how to monitor the drive replacement process.

    EDIT - 20201206 @ 2216 UTC-7 - Added how to remove a hard drive and replace it with a bigger one to upgrade.

    EDIT - 20200311 @ 1859 UTC-7 - Added how to replace a dead hard drive in a btrfs pool.

    EDIT …

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