gerjomarty

This reminded me of Ersatz TV [1], which on checking appears to have gone into maintenance mode a few weeks ago.

I had wanted to use something that lets me set up an EPG with all of the YouTube channels I watch, to see their live streams in a TV guide and see their upcoming streams in a nice grid format. It's probably harder to do this with live stuff than it is to have a set of videos like this site uses.

[1]: https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV

This is a great innovation and I'm sure in time it'll become a useful source of information. There are some edge cases of course.

If you live on the Irish border, you'll have a choice between getting your petrol on the UK side, or the Irish side. For about 20 years, petrol was cheaper on the Irish side, causing a bunch of petrol stations to spring up just over the border, attracting drivers from the other side with cheap prices and good exchange rates.

In the last 10 years or so, the position has reversed. Petrol is now roughly cheaper on the UK side of the border, or at least not worth making a special trip for.

There's even a petrol station in Belleek mentioned here[1] that straddles the border and apparently has or had pumps on both sides.

[1]: https://www.impartialreporter.com/news/25653110.border-filli...

This video feed feels like I'm watching some Adam Curtis b-roll live. Currently the camera, based in Israel, is panning across the land to catch explosions as the plumes of smoke rise, with people talking, music from the radio, or occassional car doors closing in the background.

This was discussed previously, but this is because of a court case that Warner Music and Sony brought against radio streaming app TuneIn Radio. They argued that streaming stations outside of the UK for listeners inside the UK through the app, while using in-app advertising, was a copyright infringement.

This has had a chilling effect on other radio streaming platforms, which have all restricted foreign radio stations on their platforms while geolocated inside the UK.

https://www.mishcon.com/news/court-of-appeal-upholds-copyrig...

For anyone in the area to visit this, also consider a visit to the nearby Cramlington Giant Spoon. https://maps.app.goo.gl/BgeEKxaoKrbJtQFz7

Yeah, one of my favourite examples from Commie is the treatment they gave to the opening for Lovestory (Koimonogatari) from the Monogatari series.

The visuals of the opening itself flit and transition between old 80s style shoujo animation and a more modern style, so they take the opportunity to also dynamically change the style of the subtitles between the old black-bordered piss-yellow ones of old DVDs and the sharper style of today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLlytsgLcr4

One of the big uses of Aegisub that I remember from many years ago is anime fansubbing, which also drove the specification for the subtitle format it uses, ASS (Advanced Substation Alpha), which continues to see huge use today and is much more flexible than other formats used by DVD and Blu-Ray for example.

In the hayday of anime fansubs, there was often an arms race between different groups to see who could program the flashiest effects and karaoke subtitle styles into their releases. Even then I found them gaudy as all hell, but the craft was certainly respected!

I can't see anything here that's notably different from Radio Garden.

Radio Garden got so popular that they were forced to stop streaming stations from outside the UK to listeners inside the UK. [1] This is thanks to a lawsuit involving TuneIn Radio that suggested this might break copyright / licensing restrictions.

I've had to listen to Radio Garden through a simple SOCKS proxy on a Fly.io server outside the UK ever since.

I imagine this will catch up with this site in due course as well.

[1]: https://radio.garden/settings/uk-statement

EDIT: Here's a link to a story discussing the copyright infringement verdict and the subsequent appeal: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tunein-loses-appeal-a...

As an aside, if you need to play with datetime objects in Ruby, you almost certainly want to be using the Time library instead of the DateTime library, even though one of them sounds like it fits better.

At the top of the DateTime docs [1]:

> DateTime class is considered deprecated. Use Time class.

The same doc explains when you should use DateTime by using an anecdote about William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes dying on the same day - except they didn't because England and Italy used different calendars at the time. [2]

DateTime is great at dealing with historical pre-1970 dates, otherwise just use Time.

[1]: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.3/DateTime.html [2]: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.3/DateTime.html#class-DateTi...

Here's the government's press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/millions-to-take-home-mor...

Seeing a comment on there from the CEO of TiPJAR, which is a private company that provides a "tronc" service to allow allocation of tips at arms-length from the employer, services which are specifically called out in the statutory guidance, left a slightly bitter taste.

Thank you so much! Will be very happy to move to something that isn't YouTube Music.

I wonder if anyone knows if the mobile apps can cache music for offline listening? It's the only feature that's keeping me using YouTube Music's Uploads (formerly Google Play Music).

By most accounts the Elizabeth line in its operational phase has been a great success.

According to the ORR's (Office of Road and Rail) first annual report after opening the central section of the Elizabeth line, passenger numbers have exceeded their "post-pandemic optimistic scenario" and the line is on course to be revenue-positive within a few years.

More details in this London Reconnections post here: https://www.londonreconnections.com/2023/the-state-of-rail-b...

Not passing judgement on this at all, but just giving you another data point.

Every so often, Hololive, a famous Virtual YouTuber agency, debuts a new set of talents by introducing their biographies and Twitter accounts. Because they're so popular, they get an influx of hundreds of thousands of new followers over the course of a day or two after only tweeting once. A large number of these new accounts get restricted because of automated systems assuming it's a bot, when actually it's legitimate excitement and/or network effects.

This reminded me of the Hidden London tours, which allow guided access to staff-only disused and abandoned parts of the London Underground. There's a real excitement in taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors you walk past every day.

As an adjunct to this, the UK, which might have joined this scheme if it was still part of the EU, is now developing its own system called the ETA (Electronic Travel Authorisation) [1]. It'll cost £10 for two years. Currently only in use for a couple of middle eastern countries, but will be rolled out more widely in the future.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/electronic-travel-authorisation-...

The one that jumped out was Magical Girl Raising Project, which a younger me might have described as dark and edgy, but me today would call misery porn (it's not actually porn, just to be clear).

Now that I browse again, most are really good, but some are just a bit dull while being great examples of being from a certain place. Not to call it out in particular, but I ended up dropping Robotics;Notes for being kinda dull, despite it being part of the 5bp semicolon extended universe (Steins;Gate et al).

I was trying to find a link to it earlier on, but the programme it was on (The Context) doesn't seem to be available on iPlayer, unfortunately.

Note that this article shouldn't necessarily be used as a way to find new things to watch; there are some clangers in there to avoid.

I also need to call out Takayama in Gifu prefecture, which is the basis for the fictional Kamiyama from Hyouka, an absolutely wonderful school-life-cum-mystery series from Kyoto Animation.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention Zombieland Saga, where a mad idol producer resurrects dead entertainment stars as zombies to form an idol group to revitalise Saga prefecture.

I should note that John Simpson was being interviewed about this article on BBC News last night and said they had the same policy for the IRA during the Troubles, and had the same accusations thrown at them by politicians then as they are now.

I will not be taking questions, but I do find it interesting to see which characters show up in which languages.

Also, it made me smile that we have a Ruby reading about Ruby. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/cat-milk/Anime-Girls-Holding-Programming-...

This might be the best unintentional weight loss tool I've seen. Trying to get to the Pokemon a size down feels like a nice challenge.

Not to mention the infamous Northern bank, which Danske Bank replaced. I don't think I've ever seen a note replacement scheme happen as quickly as the one that replaced all of the green Northern bank notes for purple ones after the Northern bank robbery, which I believe is still the largest amount of money stolen from a bank at once in UK history, right?

As with Northern Irish bank notes, which have a similar place in English society to the Scottish ones. The pub I went to got very confused when I presented a £10 note issued by the Bank of Ireland, which I guess would be confusing if you had no knowledge of it.

I think the phrase "legal tender" has a lot to answer for here. It's a really well known phrase, and you'll hear shop owners say they can't accept these notes because they're not "legal tender", but the actual definition of it is only applicable when settling debt in specific circumstances.

Just to try to provide a little more context on this.

This was in the wake of an unprecedented heatwave. The all-time record high temperature was set that day, and even though this was set in a different part of the country from where Caledonian Sleeper usually runs through, the unusually high temperatures covered a very wide area of the UK.

While trains can run without issue in these kinds of temperatures in other countries, the temperatures we saw over those two days exceeded the operational window much of the British network was designed and built for.

It looks like there were massive Overhead Line problems on the route the Sleeper normally takes (the West Coast Main Line), and it was too late to try to divert onto the alternative line the Sleeper uses (the East Coast Main Line). Although, the ECML was arguably faring worse at the time! These are the only two lines the Sleeper can use to get south.

On board the Caledonian Sleeper, you can fill in a breakfast card with items you want the next morning, but notably this card also includes options about being informed or not about disruption. So if you really want to be woken up en-route to be told about late running or cancellation, there should have been the option to do so for those whose priority is on-time running to London (versus those who are more flexible or less worried about their arrival time). It's not clear in this case whether the person from TFA used this option, or if they did and the process broke down in some way.

In retrospect it was probably foolhardy for CS to advise their customers that things would be running when so much around them was figuratively crashing to the ground. Ideally they would have pre-cancelled and allowed customers to make their own plans, which could have included using the train as a hotel overnight, as happened anyway.

Most train operators in the UK, including Caledonian Sleeper, operate a scheme called Delay Repay, which refunds users who start their journey and end up at their destination late. Terms differ per operator, e.g. some only pay out in circumstances that are their fault, some only pay out after 30 minutes of lateness. In this instance, Caledonian Sleeper start refunds after 30 minutes of delay, for any reason. So at least the overnight stay at Glasgow would have been free of charge!

I use open banking regularly, the real killer feature I've found is the ability to view all of my accounts together in one place, and very easily move money between them. (Yolt did this for free, but it's shutting down. Other apps also have this feature.)

Yes, you could absolutely do this with each individual bank's app, but there's a little more friction there when you have to manually add the account number and sort code of your other account as a payee, etc. These payment apps made the process very simple without any extra cost.

One thing that I think will really turn people off open banking came up in a questionnaire one of my account's providers sent out. They wanted my opinion on using open banking as another set of data points for them to decide whether or not to approve applications for new accounts.

If it'll stop me needing to print out a years worth of bank statements to apply for a mortgage, great, but I don't think it's very far from a consumer thinking "open banking is the reason I was rejected for this account, why should I ever give anyone access to this."

I wish there were more videos of the history of MTV's lower third graphics, their house style, and the evolution of those over time. Watching MTV as a kid I loved the look of the station, and how it never stood still for very long.