In around 2015 or so I was having a shower, and thinking to myself “Why the hell aren’t I listening to music, or a podcast?”. It’s the perfect window of opportunity – but with waterproof headphones making it tricky to wash your earholes, the next best option is a speaker. Bathroom electrical rules being what they are mean that you can’t have a power socket to plug a speaker into – but battery-powered Bluetooth speakers are a thing now^[i] Now that we live in The Future ^[ii] Let’s leave my specific thoughts about Bluetooth as a technology to one side, for a moment. .

But, having moved into the category of adult who own a house with a bathroom that has an external-facing window^[iii] Impressed? , it crossed my mind that if I got my paws on a SOLAR PANEL with a USB connector on it, then I could buy the cheapest USB-chargeable bluetooth speaker I could find, and have myself a sustainable means of listening to tunes in the shower and NOT have to worry about how much battery was left!

So, thrillseekers, that’s EXACTLY what I did!

Now, if we’re being *totally* honest, this is actually the 2nd speaker/solar panel pair I bought – the first ones were substantially cheaper (and smaller), and crapped out in about 2 years^[iv] Of COURSE I took them to the e-waste recycling part of the tip – I’m not an Earth-terrorising monster. . So these ones are the replacements I bought in 2019^[v] Important plot point – if you’re going to emulate this piece of GENIUS, make sure that the first speaker you buy is a waterproof one. . But on the plus side, it’s now 2026 and these are going strong! Bit of rust around the eyelets, but that’s always gonna happen when you get old and spend your day lurking around a bathroom.

Any questions?

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We’ve also saved loads of recipes from our various dalliances with meal delivery companies, such as Hello Fresh, Gousto, and the amazing Mindful Chef. Inevitably you have your favourites – but it’s nice to have some awareness of which ones are really getting a workout.

In order to keep track of which recipes we cooked before and when, I started noting on the pages/cards what date I cooked them. We also developed a ranking system – a star means something to definitely make again. Two stars marks the dish out as a bulletproof classic for the ages.

And seeing as I’d already written on them, it made sense to start writing notes about the recipe if there were suggested improvements for next time.

Or any sort of feedback really. 

Looking back on some of the notes they seem a bit obvious – but there are times when you read the recipe and then try to optimise/work out what can be done to get the whole thing out quicker.

Some lend themselves to more editorial content.

And then of course there’s the inevitable need to protect our forgetful future selves from making poor choices.

Nobody’s gonna be buying these books off us secondhand anyway.

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Well, for starters I guess that would include anyone greeted with information like this:

Right away this tells us that Spotify pegs its information on what 20-year-olds are listening to: because the early 70s was ~50 years ago, not ~70 years ago.

It’s not devastating information, if I’m honest – in the last few years I’ve had a fascination with The Meters, and more latterly have been diving into a vertical-listening odyssey around the work of Robert Palmer – who I realised I knew nothing about but whose work punctuated the classic-rock background hum of my suburban Adelaidean life. Weird serendipity then showed that Palmer’s first album (Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley – 1976) was made in conjunction with The Meters. And it’s mid-1970s so Spotify can piss off…

Still: Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin still get a healthy rotation on my Spotify (along with the excellent latter solo/band work of Robert Plant), so it should be NO surprise that my favourite artist is…

Being told I’m in the top 2% of global Peppa fans is kinda meaningless information, because it tells me nothing about the population size, nor how many people (smarter than I) were able to figure out Spotify’s “exclude these tracks from my playback history” function.

Still – the next thing this retrospective is asking me is Which of these tracks was your most-played of 2025?

Crikey. It’s a bit obvious now I think of it – I tend to listen, when unencumbered by an audience, to podcasts using my AntennaPod app on the phone: which knits into the car’s generic Bluetooth Player.

So the only music I’m really listening to is either what I remember to put on whilst working in my garden office, or what we’re listening to on the way to/from nursery. Which means the winner’s probably Bing Bong Zoo.

Well, that’s something I suppose.

Still – it’d be interesting to see what my top songs were over the course of the entire year…

Oh.

There’s a couple of questions/talking points out of this.

Firstly – how in the hell is it possible that my listening age is 70, when my top 5 tracks are all Peppa Pig tunes? There again, I suppose that Peppa commenced improving the world with her porcine output in 2004 so depending on how the Spotify algorithm classifies it that potentially giver her a “listening age” of 40 in the current world.

I was quite excited about the potential for rebuttal in this topic (can’t call it a conversation, cos Spotify don’t give a shit…) in the form of the Last.FM stats which I’ve lovingly been gathering since around 2007… only, it transpires that a data breach in 2022 led to a password reset edict which I missed, so, not much being collected there of late.

IS the aggregated “listening age” driven by the age of the artist, or by some kind of graph of the humans listening to those artists? In which case, given children can’t hold Spotify accounts, the gerontocratic skew makes an amount of sense.

What this teaches me, in the end, is that regardless how much situational enthusiasm I may hold for Rizzle Kicks following an errant podcast mention: unless I’m on the top of my clicking-“Exclude from my profile”-button-game, then it’s the mighty catalogue of Peppa (and though we didn’t see a “full chart” from 2025) and I would expect Paw Patrol and Hey Duggee which will dominate my measured taste.

And then, of course, there’s the small matter of The Wheels On The Bus. Will she ever get sick of it? Not so far…

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I won’t claim it was the most popular post I’ve ever written, but a while ago I kinda vented a few frustrations around my attempts to realise an idea I had, whereby I could post content to an Instagram feed, and scrape that to push the content into WordPress to display on a timeline. The idea I suppose being that Instagram provides a ready interface for publishing decent-quality images and simple text.

It provided a chance to do a little bit of hobby-development (seldom do I have the excuse, and therefore make the time/get the chance), as well as a reason to play with some of the AI tooling which is now available and which the world is constantly telling me can improve one’s productivity by orders of magnitude by doing the gruntwork for you.

It wasn’t going smoothly:

We’re in mid-August now and I’m fairly pleased to say that things have moved on a bit since then. Not necessarily forward.

• I sourced a Timeline plugin which would display Custom Post Types, meaning that I could also use the custom post to store taxonomy data, AND put together a REST API for that post type so that pushing in all the data I wanted wasn’t going to be a ballache.
• The only way I could think of to read the Insta feed but not require any kind of authentication was to write a Python script to run a couple of times a day & call the Insta API to get posts, and then parsing the text & calling my WordPress REST API would be fairly trivial.

I got all that working on my laptop, talking to my dev version of my blog (running on my Unraid server on my home network). Should be a simple case then of getting the WordPress code I wrote into what we’ll laughably call my Production environment, set the Python script up somewhere else on my VPS, set up a cron job, and let the whole thing get moving.

So, getting everything onto the server… I figured there must be a way to automate this, because not only do I vehemently hate copy/paste deployment (we live in the future, dammit!), but also it seemed a reasonable opportunity to mess about with github actions.

I managed to convince github to use pipelines to copy my wordpress file updates and my Python stuff up to my VPS. In the case of the former, however, there was the not-insignificant matter of what to do with it once it was there – Plesk sites run under an internally-maintained username and it became readily apparent that it wasn’t possible to upload using that user’s creds (owing the fact they weren’t real users), and so any files I DID get anywhere near the webserver couldn’t be read by it.

This hurdle was vaulted by my discovery that Plesk has a git integration whereby you can fit it up with a repo and then click a button in the Plesk console to drag the files across, all with the right perms, etc.

Python was another story, however.

Pushing/running was no trouble – but I found that the logs were full of 401s when the Python script tried to talk to Instagram. ChatGPT and Claude must’ve gotten really tired of my stupid questions on this, cos I genuinely couldn’t fathom why it was working perfectly from my laptop but the same scripts/creds were not working from the VPS.

I stumbled across someone’s lament on Reddit that Meta’s APIs are really picky about where they accept requests from – they don’t want people running bots, so anything it recognises as a non-residential IP address gets bounced. No problem – there’s loads of Residential Proxy services set up to get around this sort of thing (I mean, people will swoop in and make a crust wherever, no?). This, however, gave me no joy – nor did authenticating to the Instagram API before attempting to do the profile read.

So I’m scratching my head – how in the hell can I run this Python script on my home internet connection, but not from a cronjob on my laptop/desktop? Well, I guess I *do* have that Unraid server running 24/7 with my media box on it. Only in order to do that I’d need to learn how to put the Python stuff in Docker and then write the template to allow Unraid to run it.

No small amount of swearing later, trendsetters, and that’s exactly what I’d done. Only instead of 401s from the Insta APIs, I was now getting 403s (Forbidden, rather than Unauthorized). So now it was happy to look at who I was, but once that’d been established it was STILL telling me to piss off.

So I go back to running it on my laptop to see where I might be going wrong. And now THAT’s giving me 403s. What the hell? Had I gotten myself blocked, somehow?

Turned out this was all a case of poor timing on my behalf – around the same time I started mucking about with all this, Meta published this:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2024/09/04/update-on-instagram-basic-display-api

In essence, if you don’t pay for an Instagram account, you can sling your hook. So they must’ve been rolling these changes out and it’s only now that I’ve gotten within sight of the finish line that my user’s been hoovered up into the update.

Ultimately this isn’t a huge problem – there’s other similar phone apps out there for social media channels, so there must be something less world-dominatey I can slot right in? Step forward, Tumblr.

Now that I had most of the code and a good idea of the approach I was taking it oughtta be simple right? RIGHT?

Pulling stuff out of Tumblr wasn’t too bad – Pytumblr library instead of Instapy, and away you go. All running locally on laptop and pushing to dev wordpress site (on home network). Now to swap in the credentials for “Live”. Oh – no permission to create posts.

Much investigation ensued and eventually I concluded that for whatever reason, my setup of WordPress running on Plesk meant that trying to make WP REST API calls using Application Passwords would be a bit of a nonstarter. I *think* it was something to do with headers being stripped, but it was a pretty crap way of doing Auth in the first place. Only trouble was finding a better one that didn’t involve heroic amounts of further fuckery.

A plugin install later and I was off on the way using JWT instead. Well. Theoretically.

Some back & forth on that one (including the revelations that I wasn’t setting the Authorization header correctly, and that you need to set a User Agent header for your calls from requests-py in order for WordPress/Plesk to block you), and in MID-FEBRUARY it I actually got the goddamn thing working.

…

I stumbled across this unfinished draft and it’s no longer clear why I didn’t post it at the time. The thing works ok.

Quasi-amusing coda: I described this whole setup to Chelsea at work, and she said “You do know that Tumblr got bought by WordPress, and they’ve moved the whole backend across so that it’s powered by it now?”.

So I’ve written a bunch of Python code running on a server in Docker to pull data out of Tumblr (wordpress), parse it, then stuff it back into a different WordPress.

Sounds about right.

Update: Oh no, they’ve changed their minds.

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