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 …

Given the proliferation of spam on just about every vaguely workable platform these days it seems sheer insanity to attempt to run your own mail server.  If it's out there, it's ripe for abuse in one way in another.  And yet, e-mail is still probably one of the best ways to get status reports from your machines every day (my SMTP bridge notwithstanding).  It is thus that the default configuration for mail servers these days defaults to "no way in hell will I relay a message for you," which is a net good for the the Internet as a whole …

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 …