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.

The post She swallowed the cat to catch the bird. The fly had left some time ago. The cat was totally redundant. first appeared on jasonbstanding.com.

My formative years were influence heavily by the Master of long-term cold storage, my mother. In addition to her mostly-beige-powders spice rack which was stocked some time in 1965, and a comically museum-like pantry cupboard (in 2014 we located a jar of Bonox which predated the Australian Bicentennial celebrations). Alongside this was a 7-foot tall frozen cabinet of wonders which we’d go spelunking in periodically to try to find a frozen pasty to heat up for lunch, or perhaps a Tupperware or carton of stewed apple or apricot – always a welcome addition to liven up a boring bowl of rice flakes ^[i] Don’t get me started on this.

The point being that things could seemingly exist in there indefinitely.

Sure, I’d *read* various bits of text advising that “salmon can be frozen for up to a month after purchase”, and soforth… but come on, we ALL KNOW that use-by dates are a con, and you can always rely on your personal judgement, etc.

So anyway, for lunch the other Tuesday I realised I’d failed to plan adequately and resorted to browsing the middle drawer for a tasty mid-day meal.

There was a ziplock bag with “Ghana Curry” written in marker – which I had vague memories of flinging in there, although the first warning sign is that I couldn’t tell you who was Prime Minister when it went in. Not that that’s an immediate warning sign round these parts at the minute.

Quite a tasty handful, and I came away with a little smugness knowing that I’d contributed to the ongoing endeavour to “use up some of that stuff that’s filling up our freezer”.

It wasn’t until about 3 or 4pm that I noticed anything you’d describe as “symptoms”.

Rest-assured, I’ll spare you the gory details – this was intended more to be a musing on the affects it can have on one’s mental state to be so closely and shortly tethered to the proximity of one room of the house. Having the conversation with my boss about, “No, it’s not that I’m not well-enough to work – I just can’t risk a 1-hour train trip right now”. I recall thinking that at LEAST the frequency of travel must’ve positively influenced my step count ^[ii] Not the case .

But the other reason for posting this was because after recovering I said to someone that I was feeling “overjoyed at being free of Bumhole Purgatory“, and Liz said “Well that’s a phrase I doubt you’ll be sharing with the general public”.

Oh, my sweet summer child.

At any rate – 4 days of downtime/recovery is not a gamble I’m winning to take in future, so there’s been a fairly ruthless editing of the freezer’s contents. Bye bye laksa paste. Bye bye 170g of diced pork shoulder leftover from lord only knows what.

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In fact, it’s just something jammed in the drainage pump (we think), however to get to it you’ve got to basically take the whole thing apart – and based on recent repairs to the dishwasher we reckon that’s gonna be at least £100 for parts & labour. The washer’s now 10 years old, and this would be the 5th repair we’ve done on it, so we concluded that rather than spending more on repairing the thing than it initially cost us (£470ish), we’d upgrade to a newer, more energy efficient one.

Naturally with time/inflation and whatnot the whole exercise is pricier – but we sourced one with a 5 year warranty, and it’s a step up in the range. And they’d deliver it today ^[i] they could’ve delivered yesterday, but we were out ! And it included disconnection & recycling of the old one and connecting the new one.

I awoke at 7am to check the automated text telling me where in the 7:00-19:00 delivery window we might be. 8:38-12:38, apparently. Over the next 1.5 hours the window narrowed until at 10am I got a “You’re next!” message.

SO EXCITING! ^[ii] Yes, we’re still talking about a washing machine here. My life has changed in oh so many ways.

And then after a brief inspection, the guy explained why, inevitably, they couldn’t install it.

For reasons best known to themselves – the blokes who installed our new kitchen/utility cabinets appear to have located the isolation tap for the washer inlet pipe behind a wooden board. I think you can see it just below that grey hose end, poking its head up at the bottom of the square hole. It’s not that they didn’t accommodate for it – you can reach the tap through that hole (just). But the long bit of plastic rotates TOWARDS the wood – so it’s not physically possible to turn the tap, cos there’s a lump of wood in the way.

It’s a shame. I genuinely thought they weren’t fuckwits.

Anyway, the mission is now to get a saw and modify the hole (very, very carefully) so that we CAN turn the tap. And the delivery guys will come back for another go.

As they were walking out, I said to the delivery guys, “Ah well, at least you got a nice drive to Bristol”. Then mused, “I bet this happens a lot. Have you successfully delivered & installed any washers today?”. He said, “Two”. I jokingly offered, “Out of what… five?”.

He said, “Yep.”

I had no idea that among the traffic & industry on Britain’s road network, some of it was men employed to take whitegoods out for scenic trips before returning them to their point of origin.

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We’ve lived here about 7 years now. In that time we’ve pretty well totally redecorated (and in some cases remodelled) the house. The only reminders of the previous occupants are a couple of trees in the garden, the paint job inside the garage, and the Christmas card that now appears every year, addressed to them.

Judging by the handwriting it’s an old(er) lady – I would guess a friend of the wife (even though the address is always written to Mr and Mrs).

Inside there’s always a quite nice card, and a little handwritten note giving a summary of recent events and some extra well wishes.

The reason I open the card and therefore know this is because they never put a return address on the back of the envelope, and year after year I hope that they provide some clue as to how to contact them. The couple who lived here didn’t leave a forwarding address, so year after year I’ve no choice but to consign the card to the bin.

I suppose I just find it odd that the lovely old lady cares enough about her friend to send the card & note every year but not to try to contact them at any other time or by any other means, to be able to learn that their pal has moved.

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There you are, thinking “Well, I’ve been posting data on an Instagram feed – might be nice to organise and visualise it a bit differently?”.

No problem – surely there are various ways to query Insta based on hashtags?

Oh. ^[i]You CAN search Insta for a hashtag, but it only shows you ALL posts with the hashtag – not limited to a particular user. So my choices of “in”, “out” and … Continue reading

No problem – I can probably write a python script to pull the Insta posts, split the post text, and write it somewhere.

Ooh – I could put it in wordpress – that has taxonomy!

I could use the wordpress REST API? That’d work. Just need to give it a username and password…

Oh. To call the API you need to set up an Application User. ^[ii]ChatGPT told me that to do this I needed to install the Application Users plugin. I suppose when I asked it I didn’t tell it what version of WordPress I was using, but that was deprecated when … Continue reading

Oh. To set one of those up you need your site configured to run under SSL. My dev site is not.

Oh. Because my dev site is running on my Unraid server via Docker ^[iii] but, a special docker setup that Unraid gives you where you can’t edit/access the Dockerfiles or docker-compose.yml files I’ve got to figure out a bunch of extra bullshit I’m not going to need when I actually come to deploy it. ^[iv]I described this to one of the guys at work, who said he’d recommend setting it all up in K3s – because, you know, these days in order to get a Python script together to read data from … Continue reading

Somehow managed to force it to let me create an Application Password. But my REST call to create the wordpress post is throwing a 401.

Ah. ^[v] The instructions suggested to set the Auth header to “Basic username:password” – but neglected to point out that the username:password string then needs to be Base64 encoded. ChatGPT lied to me. ^[vi] This seemed to be the least surprising bit of information in the whole story.

I got it working, but then thought “Why don’t I use some sort of Timeline plugin to visualise the data on my blog?”, and so set about finding one. Then learned that it stores its data as custom post types… no worries, I’ll just make the API call write those!

Oh. When you define a custom post type you need to configure it to be exposed via the REST API, and that’s done inside the plugin code – so to do it I’ve got to forego automated plugin updates and run a custom version that I manually patch with the 2 extra lines to do what I want.

OK, that’s working now – but it doesn’t use the Post date as the date it bases the timeline on – there’s a custom field for that. I’ll just set that in the REST call then…

Oh. It’s stored as a meta property, so not only do I need to expose it in the REST API as well, I also need to write functions to read & write it.

Got to love software.

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