2023 - Page 61 of 64 - [Blogging Intensifies]

Code Project: Fresh RSS to WordPress Digest

Ramen Junkie February 8, 2023 0Comment

I actually briefly mentioned this project when I write about moving from TinyTinyRSS to FreshRSS. This has become a bit of an evolving and ongoing project however, so I’ve decided to catalogue it in it’s own page. This little script worked out much better than I expected, and I’ve modified it a bit over time, and have ideas to modify it going forward even more. Starting off, the code can be found here in this Github GIST.

I’ve left a bit of commented out code that i might use later for troubleshooting or adding additional features. The general gist of the code, it pulls the last 24 hours worth of news stories I have favorited from my FreshRSS install, then formats them into a digest format and posts it here, in this blog. They get sorted into their own category, you can find them here.

This is basically a thing I’ve seen others do that I’ve wanted to do for a while. It’s also partially just for my reference more than anything, it’s sort of a log of everything I have found interesting on a particular day more than anything. Others may or may not find it interest, which is why I also filter that category out of the home page feed.

Originally, it was just a list of URLs and titles. I realized that it might be useful to have SOME idea what the link was about before clicking it, so I have been playing with the summary as well. My first attempt was a bit dodgy because it actually posted the entire article as the summary. Currently, it just arbitrarily chops it off at a few hundred characters. I want to improve it even farther at some point by pushing it through some summarizing AI and getting an actual proper summary but I have not gotten there yet.

There re a few other things I want to add but I’m not sure they re easily possible. Firstly, I would love to be able to parse some sort of categories into the digest. So say, all the “Video Game” links are together and Music links are together. FreshRSS has categories but they don’t seem to show up in the feed anywhere.

This would also allow me to split these posts between this blog and my other blog, Lameazoid. I do share interesting video games news from FreshRSS, but I mostly don’t share Toy related articles, because it feels a little TOO FAR out there for what I want to post to this blog. If there were a way to have the categories, I could easily have the script split the feed by categories and post a digest to each blog.

I also wish there was a way to add my own notes and commentary occasionally. I don’t think it showed up in the feed either, but TinyTinyRSS had a notes feature. I am not sure if FreshRSS has that as well. I probably should try to at least suggest these features to the creators on GitHub, or maybe get really adventurous and create my own plug-ins for FreshRSS to accomplish these tasks.

Ramen Junkie

Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.

www.bloggingintensifies.com

Link List

Tuesday 2023-02-07 – Link List

Link Bot February 7, 2023 0Comment

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Tuesday 2023-02-07

06-Feb-2023 – Morrowind-inspired Zine Month RPG Electrum Archive explores a desert city in newest edition

Brief Summary: ”
Plunge into Elder ruins searching for inks, shop the dusty markets or simply get lost in the desert with the The Electrum Archive – Issue 2, a scienc”

07-Feb-2023 – Lego returns to The Lord of the Rings with a $500 Rivendell set

Brief Summary: “Image: LegoFrodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Aragon, plus Elrond, Arwen, Bilbo, and more — there’s room in Lego’s just-“

07-Feb-2023 – THE EXPANSE Gets New Comic Series From BOOM! Studios

Brief Summary: ”
The epic story continues. BOOM! Studios is producing a new comic book series that expands the space saga as told in Prime Video’s critically lauded a”

07-Feb-2023 – Overwatch 2 is getting a dating sim and a One Punch Man crossover in Season 3

Brief Summary: ”
Overwatch 2’s third season is beginning later today and it looks to be the most substantial season yet. Blizzard have released a brand new trailer al”

07-Feb-2023 – HBO Presents Mario Kart

Brief Summary: ”

Pedro Pascal is earning accolades for his performance in HBO’s The Last of Us based on the Sony PlayStation games from Naughty Dog, but Saturday “

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Link List

Sunday 2023-02-05 – Link List

Link Bot February 5, 2023 0Comment

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Sunday 2023-02-05

05-Feb-2023 – We try the new Asian Juicy burgers from McDonald’s Japan

Brief Summary: ”
Cute on the outside, but are they good on the inside too?

Last week, McDonald’s raised eyebrows with the announcement that they would be adding a ne”

05-Feb-2023 – How to Write a Story in ChatGPT – Prompt Engineering

Brief Summary: “Are you ready to level up your prompt engineering game? This blog post will give you the inside scoop on the 5 best tips for beginners in prompt engin”

Link Bot

Link Bot is a mindless Drone that does automated tasks for Ramen Junkie on Blogging Intensifies. It is programmed to feel happy about doing these meaningless tasks, and while this may seem cruel, Link Bot is not able to tell because it’s programming does not allow it to feel sad, and thus it is not capable to realizing it is being treated cruely.

Also, it’s a bot.

Link List

Saturday 2023-02-04 – Link List

Link Bot February 4, 2023 0Comment

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Saturday 2023-02-04

03-Feb-2023 – PSA: Twitter’s API changes may make it difficult to log in to your favorite games

Brief Summary: “Image: MihoyoElon’s messing up the game — literally. Two extremely popular online games, Arknights and Genshin Impact, have warned that players who us”

04-Feb-2023 – The WiC64 Brings Classic Commodores Online, Google Maps Included

Brief Summary: “A computing platform is never really dead unless people stop developing new software for it. By that measure, the Commodore 64 is alive and well: new “

04-Feb-2023 – LEGO Ideas Twilight: Cullen House Achieves 10,000 Supporters

Brief Summary: ”
The Twilight: Cullen House by LobsterThermidor is the latest project to achieve 10,000 supporters on LEGO Ideas. The 2,995 piece build features a mod”

04-Feb-2023 – LEGO Final Fantasy VII Contest Announced

Brief Summary: ”
Square Enix has announced that they are doing a LEGO contest to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy VII. They are asking what Final Fanta”

03-Feb-2023 – WordPress Plugin Developers Alerted Ahead of Twitter API Changes

Brief Summary: “Beginning February 9, 2023, Twitter will turn off free access to its APIs. The company announced yesterday that it will be offering “a paid basic tier”

03-Feb-2023 – Groundhog Day Continues in These Time-Looping Anime

Brief Summary: ”
You thought Groundhog Day was over? Think again. These days, the holiday is less about meteorological predictions and more about an existential karmi”

02-Feb-2023 – Burger King Japan’s Cheeseburger Gelände — exceptional in taste, size and… paper napkins?

Brief Summary: ”
Burger King’s latest offering leaves Mr. Sato stunned not once, not twice but three times!

If you’re looking for a fast food burger that comes in ge”

03-Feb-2023 – Daytona USA was one of the miracles of the XBLA era, so grab it while you can

Brief Summary: ”

Sometimes you really don’t know how good you’ve got it. Just over a decade ago Sega dropped a batch of Model 2 ports on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, “

Link Bot

Link Bot is a mindless Drone that does automated tasks for Ramen Junkie on Blogging Intensifies. It is programmed to feel happy about doing these meaningless tasks, and while this may seem cruel, Link Bot is not able to tell because it’s programming does not allow it to feel sad, and thus it is not capable to realizing it is being treated cruely.

Also, it’s a bot.

Programming Projects

Code Project: VLC Portable Playlist to Text Dump

Ramen Junkie February 4, 2023 0Comment

It’s kind of funny how one post can lead to another sometimes. This one is pretty basic but it also just shows a bit how useful I find knowing my way around computer systems to be. Yesterday I posted about my little annual music playlists. And as part of that, I wanted to actually post the playlist. I am pretty sure there is a fairly universal “playlist file type” out there and being open source, I had assumed that VLC on my phone stored the playlists somewhere in playlist files.

That assumption was wrong, it uses a .db file. A little portable database. There is an option to dump this file to the root of the phone, presumably for backup purposes, but it’s also useful to just browse it like I am doing here. The file itself can be opened and browsed with SQL Lite’s DB manager. It’s standard databases inside for tracks and artists and playlists.

Fortunately, I have had some experience dealing with database queries, so I set about building what was needed tog et the data I wanted. Pull the Playlist I want, in this case “2023 Best” but I could change that to do any available Playlist. This gives the tracks by id, but the tracks themselves are stored in a separate table for media. So that needs joined in. The media table stores track names, but not artist names, so an additional join is needed to get the artist names. This complicated things a bit because both the playlist table and artist table have a column “name” so more clarity needed to be added.

The result was this little query that dumps out a basic table of Artist and Song title.

SELECT Artist.name, Media.title 
FROM Playlist
Inner Join playlistmediarelation ON playlist_id=id_playlist
Inner Join Media ON id_media=media_id
Inner Join Artist ON media.artist_id=Artist.id_artist
WHERE Playlist.name = '2023 Best'
ORDER BY Artist.name

Now, I could have done some cute clever trick now to merge the two into a new column and add in a ” – ” between but it was easier to drop it all into a notepad file and do a fine/replace on the weird space character that it stick in between the Artist and track title.

The added bonus here is I can easily use this query again anytime I want to dump a Playlist to text.

Ramen Junkie

Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.

www.bloggingintensifies.com