Teletekst Bot

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Status

Active since July 2024

What

Monitor the news ("Nieuws" in Dutch) such as it is shared by the NOS Teletekst, by checking the references from the index pages at 101, 102, and 103, and then scan for any other pages from 104 to 199.

When a new page is found, or an existing page is updated (using a relatively basic heuristic), post the new or updated page to the Mastodon account. It also attempts to detect when a page is moved around.

Because occasionally pages are included for sport (in general) or soccer (voetbal), it will use an appropriate #TeletekstXYZ hashtag for that, so people can mute that. The same goes for the content updates, which can be a bit much especially for emerging stories, and get tagged with #TeletekstUpdate.

For content updates the posts also includes comparison of the previous and current version with color-coding for words or lines that have been removed, were added, or stayed the same. It's similar to git diff but has been adapted to make more sense in this text context.

If the content was unchanged and only the page number or title changed, the existing Mastodon post is updated in place.

Where

https://mstdn.social/@teletekst (originally at https://botsin.space/@teletekst, but that server shut down at the end of 2024).

How

There are two Cron jobs:

Every 5 minutes a program walks all the pages from 101 to 199, using the next page references. If all pages are exactly identical, discard the results. It needs to gracefully handle broken next page links and other quirks.
Also every 5 minutes, but a minute later, a second program checks if changes were found. If so, look for new pages, deletes pages, moved pages, and modified pages. Two pages are treated differently, namely the "Kort nieuws binnenland" and "Kort nieuws buitenland", where one or two short national or international news items are dumped.

Disclaimer

This is not an (official or endorsed) NOS.nl service!

Code

https://codeberg.org/jochie/Teletekst

Read Later

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Status

Active since July 2025.

What

A self-hosted bookmark/read-later service

Where

https://readeck.is-here.com/

How

This service is setup as one of several virtual hosts on a virtual machine that is dedicated to a couple of these self-hosted things (the project page for is still WIP/AWOL for now).

To try and keep the maintenance requirements relatively low I used the docker approach, only sharing the data with the host system so that it is preserved over restarts and can be backed up regularly:

  docker run \
         --detach \
         --rm -ti \
         -p 6080:8000 \
         -v /var/www/readeck:/readeck \
         codeberg.org/readeck/readeck:latest

A fragment of the Apache configuration file:

  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:6080/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:6080/
  RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto https

Disclaimer: I don't have a lot of experience with the proxy or proxy_http modules, so it's possible that could be done better. There are more complete instructions on the Readeck Deployment documentation page.

Integrating it:

For Firefox I use this Readeck add-on.
There is no iOS (or Android, for that matter) app but the (self-hosted) website can be added as a pseudo-app on iOS by using Safari's "Add to Home Screen".
That pseudo-app doesn't get you a "Share to …" entry, but thankfully there are acceptable workarounds (listed in the FAQ) in the form of shortcuts. It took a little bit of fidgeting to figure out how to configure the shortcut, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing.
Although it's somewhat redundant, I also created a script to check my Mastodon bookmarks and import new ones into Readeck. So if I'm in a hurry, I'll quickly bookmark a ~~post~~ toot, otherwise I'll use the "Send Page + Tags To Readeck" shortcut.

Code and related things

Originally I had planned to migrate from Instapaper (the read-later service I used for ~15 years) to a self-hosted Wallabag instance, but before the dust had even settled on that (meaning figuring out what browser add-on to use or how to integrate it on my phone) this post by Shom pointed me towards Readeck. That's why the scripts below have a migration path from Instapaper -> Wallabag -> Readeck, and not Instapaper -> Readeck.

My collection of scripts in this read-later repository.

wallabag_import.py: Iterate over the Instapaper entries and add them one by one to my (also self-hosted) Wallabag service. For the ~17k bookmarks that I had that took multiple hours and possibly got my IP in trouble with a few websites.
readeck_wallabag.py: Initiate a migration from Wallabag to Readeck (handled entirely by Readeck after that).
reprocess_readeck.py: Loop over all bookmarks in a Readeck collection, re-adding them and deleting the original ones as it goes.
bookmark_readeck.py: Check my Mastodon bookmarks and add any new ones to Readeck

Python on East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Teletekst Bot

Status

What

Where

How

Disclaimer

Code

Read Later

Status

What

Where

How

Integrating it:

Code and related things