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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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