Searching for a Postalicious replacement

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Hey WordPress plugin people: Does anyone know of a working and supported plugin that does what Postalicious used to?

Ideally, I’d like to return to something I used to be able to do: post a daily “here’s what I found interesting today” roundup post. Way back when, I used del.icio.us to save links; those would get picked up by Postalicious, and once a day, they’d be aggregated into a single post (example from 2009 here).

Is there a similar plugin, or other known way (some sort of IFTTT integration, maybe?) to do such a thing? Conceptually, it seems rather simple, but I don’t know what bookmarking services have open APIs or other ways to hook in, and I don’t have the coding chops to create my own.

📚 Sins of Commission by Susan Wright

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67/2023 – ⭐️⭐️

Much of the plot revolves around an alien race that broadcasts emotions that affect everyone around them, which means nobody is acting the way they should, so it’s hard for me to tell whether people acting out of character and making decisions that don’t make sense was intentional or not. But by the end, I wasn’t really sure what the reasoning or motivations were for many of the actions taken. Plus, some of the key points (like a small breakthrough in understanding the new aliens) were far too obvious to not be thought about by the characters until halfway through the book. This one is quite forgettable.

Me holding Sins of Commission

Not a Spotify Wrap-up

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Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.

Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.

That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….

Top Artists

Top Artists 549 total artists 1 The Orb 137 minutes 2 Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes 3 4 Dolly Parton 128 minutes Orbital 124 minutes 5 Underworld 89 minutes 6 Bonobo 71 minutes 7 Hooverphonic 69 minutes 8 Imperative Reaction 64 minutes 9 Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes 10 Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes 11 VNV Nation 50 minutes 12 Seabound 50 minutes 13 Front Line Assembly 46 minutes 14 Rotersand 44 minutes 15 Icon of Coil 44 minutes

549 total artists

  1. The Orb 137 minutes
  2. Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
  3. Dolly Parton 128 minutes
  4. Orbital 124 minutes
  5. Underworld 89 minutes
  6. Bonobo 71 minutes
  7. Hooverphonic 69 minutes
  8. Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
  9. Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
  10. Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
  11. VNV Nation 50 minutes
  12. Seabound 50 minutes
  13. Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
  14. Rotersand 44 minutes
  15. Icon of Coil 44 minutes

I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!

Top Songs

Top Songs 872 total songs 1 BAD GUYS FEELIN' ALRIGHT ELLE KING Feelin' Alright (from... Elle King 8 plays 2 Wide Open The Crystal Method 6 plays 3 Cuts You Up Peter Murphy 5 plays 4 Came Back Haunted Nine Inch Nails 5 plays 5 Dial8 Velvet Acid Christ 5 plays 6 Modern Love David Bowie 7 5 plays HOOVERPHONIC 2Wicky Hooverphonic 5 plays 8 IMMA ATE Express Yourself (Edi... Madonna Madonna 5 plays 9 The Night (feat. Aliso... Röyksopp 4 plays 10 Underworld I Exhale Underworld 4 plays 11 12 13 14 15 SOME NIGHTS INVNATION AUTOMATIC Spock VCMG 4 plays Eraser E Nine Inch Nails 4 plays Some Nights E Fun. 4 plays Gratitude VNV Nation 4 plays Funk 4 Peace... Fort Knox Five 4 plays

Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.

So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.

Year 50 Day 213

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Me holding three advent calendars.

Day 213: It’s advent calendar season! One from IKEA, one from Trader Joe’s, and one from…well, Kinder. I don’t remember where we bought that one. Oh, and not pictured is this year’s Lego City calendar. Three chocolates and a Lego goodie every day until Christmas. Not bad at all.

Year 50 Day 212

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Me laying on the couch, smirking. My wife's foot, wrapped in a blanket, is slightly blurred as she taps me on the head with her toes.

Day 212: I was fiddling around with my phone trying to come up with a photo for the day, when my wife started tapping me in the head with her foot. Kicked in the head because I didn’t have a photo yet! How cruel!

ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment

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I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.

Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.

I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.

It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.

On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)

On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.

And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.

Pity, that.

📚 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

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66/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1993 Hugo Best Novel

Technically a time travel book, but the time travel itself is kind of the least important part, little more than a hand-waved MacGuffin necessary to get the characters in the right places. From there, you have the dual stories of near-future and historical pandemics. And, of course, any pandemic-centric tale can’t help but be read somewhat differently now than it would have been five years ago. In some ways, the near-future part seemed rather prescient, referring to a prior flu pandemic that would have hit in the mid-2010s, only about a decade off from our COVID reality, or the presence of protesters blaming the government; in others, it now seems sadly naïve (now that we know that most people’s reaction to a pandemic too quickly turns to “meh” or outright denial rather than taking it seriously). Both stories are excellently handled, often with a subtle dry humor in the “present day” portion balancing the tragedies of the historical portion.

Me holding Doomsday Book