Webprogramming

The news site politicalwire.com is a well-regarded site that covers U.S. political news. Like other similar sites, it features a comment section; and like many comment sections on political sites, it attracts personality-disordered internet trolls. One such troll on politicalwire.com goes by the handle Reasonable. This commenter is a troll in every sense of the word, engaging users with deliberately provocative nonsense.

This user has been banned on multiple occasions and escapes both bans and blocks by repeatedly creating new Disqus accounts using the same name and avatar. Since it cannot be blocked at the account/server level, I’ve written a Violentmonkey script to expunge his comments at the level of the browser. To use the script, you will need to use the Violentmonkey (or related) extension and create a new script with the following code. It works perfectly in Firefox.

So this is a little esoteric, but it meets a need I encountered; and it may meet yours if you use Espial, Keyboard Maestro and are on macOS.

For several years I’ve been using Espial a bookmark manager that looks and feels like Pinboard, but is both self-hosted and drama-free¹. Espial is easy to setup, stores its data in a comprehensible sqlite database and has an API, which comes in handy when it came to solving the problem I encountered.

Most language learners are familiar with Forvo, a site that allows users to download and contribute pronunciations for words and phrases. For my Russian studies, I make daily use of the site. In fact, to facilitate my Anki card-making workflow, I am a paid user of the Forvo API. But that’s where the trouble started.

When the Forvo API works, it works OK, often extremely slow. But lately, it has been down more than up. In an effort to patch my workflow and continue to download Russian word pronunciations, I wrote this little scraper. I’d prefer to use the API, but experience has shown now that the API is slow and unreliable. I’ll keep paying for the API access, because I support what the company does. And as often as not when a company offers a free service, it’s likely to be involved in surveillance capitalism. So I’d rather companies offer a reliable product at a reasonable price.