Pocket

★★★☆☆

I’ve been using Pocket for ages to offload “Hey, this looks interesting” articles from times when I really should be doing something else to times when I have, well, time. And when I say “ages,” I mean it: I was using it back when it was still called Read It Later, long before Mozilla bought it.

  • It syncs a copy of the article to each mobile device, which means I can see something in the morning, save it to Pocket, then read it on my tablet at lunch.
  • Feedly talks to it easily. Back when I used Feedly, I even linked it up with IFTTT so that tapping “Save for Later” on the tablet will add an article to Pocket. This also helped make up a bit for Feedly’s lack of offline access.
  • Speaking of IFTTT and online services I don’t use anymore, for a while I had it set it up so that saving an article as a favorite in Pocket also added it to Delicious.
  • The Android app will accept shares even if there’s no network connection, then sync up when it’s online. That means I can look over a newsletter in Gmail at lunch, save the links that look interesting, and archive the email. Then I can read the article at work or at home…or the next time I’m out somewhere, after it’s synced.
  • Kobo eReaders can connect to Pocket and you can read your saved articles on something that’s actually designed for reading.

You can save pages to Pocket using a browser extension for all the major desktop browser types, including Chromium, Firefox and Safari. For others, you can get a bookmarklet from getPocket.com/add while logged in. And just share a URL or page to the mobile app.

Mission Creep

Over the years, Mozilla turned it into a recommendation engine. A lot of people only know Pocket as “that annoying thing that shows me sponsored articles when I launch Firefox.” These days I’m never sure how much they’re using my bookmarking to train that engine.

And while self-reinforcing algorithms geared toward engagement may be good for the dopamine hits (and a convienient channel to add sponsored articles), it’s not too helpful in the long run.

I’ve finally given Wallabag a try. It’s not as polished, but I feel more confident about what it’s doing with my data, and if I really want to, I can host my own server. Plus Wallabag still works on my Poke3 e-reader. I haven’t been able to get Pocket to log in on it since it stopped syncing and I reinstalled the app.

Speech Oddities

For a while I used the text-to-speech feature to listen to articles in the car while driving to and from work. Even in the mid-2010s the voice was fairly decent, despite the usual flat tones and lack of natural rhythms.

There were a few oddities, though:

  • # is always read as “hash.” This makes it really odd for comics articles, which frequently talk about issue numbers. “Batman Hash 123” just sounds wrong.
  • Italics are…always…emphasis, and presented by…pausing…rather than changing tone. This makes it…awkward…for anything involving lots of titles.
  • It parses words, rather than using a dictionary, and can’t always figure out whether initials should be read individually or pronounced as a word. This usually works fine, but occasionally leads to phrases like “tah-kay-down notice,” (takedown) “link-uh-din” (who knew LinkedIn rhymed with Vicodin?) or “pohs terminal” (POS as in Point-Of-Sale) On the other hand, it figured out “I-triple-E,” so I imagine it’s got a dictionary for special cases.

They’ve probably been fixed by now. Probably.

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