12.41, Sunday 6 Jan 2008

The presence machine I put together the other day stubbornly refused to randomly pick its magic number for 2 and a half days (it runs every 5 minutes, and flips a 144 sided coin. If the 100th heads comes up, it uses Twitter to remind you to have a look around). The odds of that are small--less than a penny in the pound. Overnight, however, it did fire, twice. But Twitter appears to reject identical status updates, and so the messages didn't get through.

I've made an update: to keep the messages different, the presence machine will now send out a first line from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, translated by Ursula Le Guin. Sometimes it's not the first line; I'm fickle.

Here's the presence machine. Maybe something will happen soon. Maybe not.

Follow-up posts: