For quite a few years I've written about strange and sundry things you can do with Huginn, but not a lot about what to do when you run into systemic limitations. The nice thing about Huginn is that you can spin up as many workers (subprocesses that execute agents from the database) as you want, subject to the limitations of what you happen to be running it on. The downside, however, is that it's easy to accidentally upgrade your VPS to the point where it's just really expensive. I just ran into this purely by accident and spent a day …
From time to time the job workers in Huginn will lock up. This usually happens if they are subjected to an external resource which can be contacted but never seems to respond. A stuck webapp on the other end is usually the problem. If the connection never dies, or takes a long time to time out it can wreak havoc. However, there's a relatively easy way to fix this. First, you have to shut down your job workers. Depending on how many you have this can take a while... once they're down, though, it's a relatively simple matter to use …
I have no idea how long I've been in quarantine. I've stopped counting because the numbers were just making me twitchy. Life is going about as well as one could reasonably expect. We're all save and sound in northern California, as much as we can be during a pandemic. Working from home is working from home. To minimize risk we're getting as much stuff delivered as we can, modulo periodic trips to the local pharmacy to pick up filled prescriptions and suchlike. I wish I could say the same of things back home in Pennsylvania, but I'd be lying and …
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 …
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 …
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 …
A common task that people using Huginn set up as their "Hello, world!" project is getting the daily weather report because it's practical, easy, and fairly well documented. However, the existing example is somewhat obsolete because it references the Weather Underground API that no longer exists, having been sunset at the end of 2018. Recently, the Weather Underground code in the Huginn Weather Agent was taken out because it's no longer usable. But, other options exist. The US National Weather Service has a free to use API that we can use with Huginn with a little extra work. Here's what …
It seems that there is another influx of refugees from a certain social network that's turned into a never ending flood of bile, vitriol, and cortisol into what we call the Fediverse, a network of a couple of thousand websites running a number of different applications that communicate with each other over a protocol called ActivityPub. Ultimately, the Fediverse is different from Twitter and Facebook in that it's not run as a for-profit entity. There are no analytics, no suggestions of "thought leaders" you might want to follow, no automated curation of the posts you can see versus the ones …
A Google feature that doesn't ordinarily get a lot of attention is Google Alerts, which is a service that sends you links to things that match certain search terms on a periodic basis. Some people use it for vanity searching because they have a personal brand to maintain, some people use it to keep on top of a rare thing they're interested in (anyone remember the show Probe?), some people use it for bargain hunting, some people use it for intel collection... however, this is all predicated on Google finding out what you're interested in, certainly interested enough to have …
EDIT: 20170123 - My reviewers have suggested some edits to the article, many of which I've applied.
It's been a while since I wrote a Huginn tutorial, so let's start with a basic one to get you comfortable with the idea of building an agent network. This agent network will run every half hour, poll a REST API endpoint, and e-mail you what it gets. You'll have to have access to an already running Huginn instance that can send outbound e-mail. This post is going to be kind of lengthy, but that's because I'm laying out some fundamentals. Once you understand …
