A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was fetching health data from Zepp's API in order write data collected by my Amazfit Bip3 Pro Smartwatch into InfluxDB.

It hadn't originally been my intention to interact with Zepp's API, my first choice had been to pair the watch with Gadgetbridge. This would have allowed me to almost entirely avoid using the manufacturer's app. Unfortunately, I found that the Bip3 wasn't supported by Gadgetbridge and so I had to abandon that approach in favour of identifying and polling the various API endpoints called by Zepp's app.

By sheer coincidence, though, a day after I published my post, someone else ran into the same lack of support and found time to raise issue #3249 in Gadgetbridge's tracker. Within a couple of weeks, support for the Bip3 had been added.

About a week ago, people started contacting me to tell me that Gadgetbridge were in the process of adding support for the Bip, so I installed the latest nightly build and started testing.

Thanks to the work and patience of the Gadgetbridge contributors, the data that my Bip3 collects is now available to me without first needing to be sent to Zepp's servers.

In this post, I'll talk about how my new workflow automatically takes data from the Gadgetbridge database and writes it into InfluxDB for visualisation in Grafana.

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Less than a week ago, I set up a system to automatically announce new blog posts on Threads, however, it is no longer active.

Despite my account having only posted about 4 times (with only one of those being an automatic post by the script above), it got suspended because they felt it wasn't in line with their "Account integrity and authentic identity" rule.

In particular:

We don't allow people on Instagram to create fake accounts.

Initially, I assumed that this was caused by my publishing bot periodically logging in, but a search on the net suggested that others have had similar experiences. Update: they've since issued a cease-and-desist to the library I was using.

When an account is suspended, the user is given the option to appeal. However, my appeal was rejected and the account is now set to be permanently deleted:

I'm not overly concerned about the loss of my Threads account: in the brief time that I had access, the platform didn't really engage me (and it seems that the same is true for others too), not least because I struggled to find accounts that I actually wanted to follow amongst the noise (in the fediverse, I tend to follow certain hashtags - something that Threads doesn't support at all).

Having now been through the Threads appeal process, I wanted to write down some of my observations about the detection and appeal process that Instagram/Threads follow, because (IMO) it's overly invasive and potentially quite deeply flawed.

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