Website mldata.org is down, fetching the USPS data fails

[baldassarreFe]

The website mldata.org is down and there is no hint of it coming back. So these lines that fetched the USPS dataset no longer work:

from sklearn.datasets import fetch_mldata
usps = fetch_mldata('USPS')

A possible solution is to use the dataset hosted here (bottom of the page), but we need to look into the necessary conversions.