Do you have Talkwalker Alerts?
Do you have Inoreader?
I preach this combo for situation awareness, but having been in the business for a very long time, my setup is an absolute hydra. I am not sure what to do with myself this week, so I decided to clean house. There are some lessons to be had in this.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Situational Awareness minutia herein. If you must watch all the things, and you don’t already have this, get your pad and pencil ready before you scroll ahead. If you’re not doing this, there are still some words of wisdom about Substack and RSS in here.
Your Setup:
Any time I take on a new project it probably gets an email, a Talkwalker Alerts account, and very often an Inoreader mobile/web RSS reader. While Google also offers an Alerts function, I only rarely make use of this. The. interface is clumsy and one is constrained to email OR RSS, you can’t get both. When Talkwalker is set to maximum sensitivity it will pick up SO much more than Google. The only use case I have for pairing them is monitoring situations where there’s a lot of social media chatter about a topic and I want to see if it’ll actually break through to Google noticing.
These things accumulate for me. I get a new task. I get a burner phone. It gets a Gmail. Then the Gmail gets Talkwalker for sure and maybe an Inoreader if there is some Reddit or Substack stuff that needs to be tracked.
So for this exercise, you should get yourself the free Talkwalker Alerts and set a few on topics of interest to you. Then get the free Inoreader account and use it to follow the global RSS feed from your Talkwalker Alerts.
Inventory:
As I said in the title, my setup is a hydra.
There is “my” Inoreader, the one that’s here when I open my browser, when I’m using my iPad, or those rare moments where I turn on my cell phone when I am out & about.
There is Cicada 3301’s Inoreader, they also pay for a Pro subscription. This gets you advanced processing and it allows automating the Inoreader to PDFs in Dropbox pipeline, which I periodically use to the max of 500 articles a day.
There were five six seven active Talkwalker setups and one within easy reach for an NGO that drifted away years ago. Earlier this year the five active all got routed into one “Consolidated Alerts” folder in my Inoreader. This was terrible, because after I removed them there were nearly 400 legit RSS feeds in there. Add to that a cryptocurrency thing I had to start following and my general purpose feed was completely unusable.
Something had to be done …
Semantics:
Prior to talking about the solution, some deep strategy on alerts and feeds should be clarified.
Not all alerts are created equal. There are forty alerts in the Talkwalker associated with the email I use daily. This has things like my name, Parabeagle, the MCP server I recently published, and some obscure branding stuff I’m doing. If any of that obscure stuff gets noticed I want to know immediately.
The project specific alerts will get attention for the duration of the project, then they’re left running. It’s pretty rare for me to tear down a construct like that, sometimes people come back weeks or months after the end with some question and it’s nice to have the full structure reading available.
Talkwalker limits you to fifty alerts and this method just naturally compartmentalizes. I’ve never received a subpoena for one of these things, but if I did there would be no laborious privilege process. The one time in this decade that something like that came up I just sent the client a full takeout of the Gmail account in question.
Inoreader is sold as a tool for those who use it to organize and read on many topics. I do that. They offer free accounts in hopes of making sales but mine seldom convert, they’re just on stop shopping for Alerts, Reddit, Substacks, etc. There are days where those sort of accounts are absolute treasure, but mostly they are … long term memory.
Cleansing:
The first thing I had to do was recover my actual article reading environment from the alert/crypto storm.
The alerts don’t need any fancy processing, most of them are memory, not immediate tasks for me. So I shifted all of them to a free Inoreader that’s easily accessible. I can be there in a matter of moments if something comes up, but otherwise it’s now out from under foot. Those forty alerts I do need to see also arrive as email, so I lose nothing by keeping them out of “my” Inoreader.
I debated putting the spectacularly noisy crypto feed into that same Inoreader, but it’s just not the right thing. There’s one thing in it I’ll read at times, maybe I keep that in my main, but the rest of this noise is getting its own Inoreader. This will be a memory/search thing, and if it starts making money it might get converted to a paid Inoreader.
The Cicada 3301 Inoreader Pro gets Cicada 3301 alerts. I asked when I started, they got me the Pro account, and I’ve not developed it. Now that I’m spending time in this area again, that will change.
During the cleanup I found an email I use for one specific purpose that had a clutch of alerts from a long departed client associated with it. I warned them, they didn’t listen, and now they’re big mad forever since precisely what I predicted came to pass. I cleaned that Talkwalker and I’ll use it to do something new.
I also found that I had done a setup for Shall We Play A Game? This is being published by Cicada 3301, assuming I can make the time to finish it, but it is its own separate branding thing to be monitored.
I used to get annoyed that Talkwalker limited to fifty alerts, but as the years go by I appreciate the compartments more and more.
And then I was looking for a place to put that crypto feed and I found ANOTHER formerly Pro NGO setup. Like I said, this is a hydra.
And then I found yet ANOTHER one, just a free setup, and it’s perfect to inherit the crypto feed.
Purposes & Process:
The Inoreader I see as mine, the one for reading, is where I might use the customization features. Mostly it’s a way to capture lots of articles to PDF without having to use Python. It lets me filter the capture, too, which is a big pain OR just plain impossible with a programmatic capture.
The Cicada Inoreader is going to be getting some exercise. The feed there is simple but it’s got the full Pro features. Part of cleaning up will no doubt lead to some sort of Alerts/RSS => Inoreader => some sort of LLM. I have both Letta and MindsDB running here, but there isn’t an RSS bridge yet.
When I wrote Situational Awareness Using Claude, I was using mcp_rss. This works fine, but the underlying MySQL database was problematic due to my Docker setup. I don’t think I will come back to that, I think it’ll be better to employ some sort of RSS to SQL system and then let MindsDB handle the content.
Then I wandered off to look at what was available, and I forked feed-to-sqlite.
The Far Horizon:
This is just my stream of conscious and I’m not sure I’ll edit it after the fact.
The whole world is accelerating, it’s AI, it’s climate change, it’s the condition of our government. There’s just too much happening all at once.
Google search now provides AI summaries that answer a significant portion of my questions. Research that would once have taken me an afternoon now gets done with a one line query to ChatGPT.
Parabeagle is good for handling large tranches of documents. I have used the Inoreader PDF capture capability to make document collections to use with it, but that’s an impossible task for the feeds I have, I’d need half a dozen paid accounts.
My software development capabilities are an order of magnitude greater than they were. Claude Code and Gemini get things done, they remember where we left off, it’s not the struggle it was during the years I was sick.
My initial excitement with TypeScript based Memento has faded, but the urge to do something that will integrate with Maltego remains strong. Neither Letta nor MindsDB offer graph functions.
Alerts first. Then Substack. The #Weird Bugs people do stuff on Reddit. Getting people to run MCP servers on their own has been a developers only thing, but with MindsDB I could host something …
No Shitter, no Fakebook, no nothing from any algo infested site. Alerts, Substack, and Reddit are all chronological in nature. Things happen when they happen, they generally don’t disappear unless there’s some sort of incident. If they do, having them preserved as RSS makes any mysteries resolvable, with some elbow grease.
Conclusion:
I do not know what I am going to do here, but it’s obvious that something must be done. There are hazards. There are potential revenue sources. There are problems that will come apart in my hands if I am more AI enabled, if I can help those around me to be more enabled.
Did I mention I might be able to swap my 6GB Nvidia GTX 1060 for use of a hosted 16GB RTX 4080? I haven’t touched Tailscale in a while, but I think we are very close to my offering an OpenAI API compatible LLM service to the people around me. I do have a workable local LLM server on Pinky, but that’s a slow, cramped machine, just 8GB of 68GB/sec memory, compared to the 16GB of 200GB/sec of Brain, here on my desktop.
It’s all gonna happen … assuming I can survive November. All is not well here in Happy Valley, but that tale deserves a post all its own, some time next week.
