Inspired by the twitter account “Shit Noisebridge says” I set about recently to script together that trains a Markov chaina on the complete archive of the noisebridge-discuss@ mailing list to create a rival account “Shit noisebridge probably says”.

It’s not yet complete but one useful thing to have fallen out of this project already is a script that makes it easy to download mailman list arcihves in their entirety by passing the name of a list. It’s a very simple script with a magic constant pointing to the Noisebridge mailman instance at the moment but it might prove useful for those wishing to read through mailing list archives. You can find the script on Github.

While the noisechain component is yet incomplete this script has also proven useful in reading mailing list archives. Combined with a neat little Perl script for converting the Mailman archives into .mbox files for reading with Mutt it becomes a very easy way to read through mailing list archives.

P