-
PGBC Scoring Rules
I get a bit of a thrill when there’s a need to design a mini-language. I have one facing me now for a little project I’m responsible for, which is maintaining a scoring site for a bocce comp I’m involve in with friends. How scoring works now is that the winner of a particular bocce match gets one point for the season. The winner for the season is the person with the most points. Continue reading →
-
Alto Catalogue Update
I’ve really tied myself up in knots here. I’m spending some time working on Alto Catalogue, trying to streamline the process of uploading individual tracks into a new album. This is a workflow that is absolutely not user friendly at the moment, and the only way I’ve gotten tracks into the catalogue is to run a hacked-together tool to upload the tracks from the command line. The reason why I’m addressing this now is that it’s slightly embarrassing to have this open-source project without having a nice way of doing something that, by all accounts, is quite fundamental (a good hint for when you’re facing this is when it comes time to write the end-user documentation: if you can’t explain how to do something in a way that doesn’t include the word “hack”, “complicated”, or “unsupported”, then something is missing). Continue reading →
-
Feeds In Broadtail
My quest to watch YouTube without using YouTube got a little closer recently with the addition of feeds in Broadtail. This uses the YouTube RSS feed endpoint to list videos recently added to a channel or playlist. There are a bunch of channels that I watch regularly but I’m very hesitant to subscribe to them within YouTube itself (sorry YouTubers, but I choose not to smash that bell icon). I’m generally quite hesitant to give any signal to YouTube about my watching habits, feeding their machine learning models even more information about myself. Continue reading →
-
Some Screenshots Of Broadtail
I spent some time this morning doing some styling work on Broadtail, my silly little YouTube video download manager I’m working on. Now, I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a designer. And these designs look a little dated, but, surprisingly, this is sort of the design I’m going for: centered pages, borders, etc. A bit of a retro, tasteless style that may be ugly, but still usable(-ish). Continue reading →
-
More work on the project I mentioned yesterday, codenamed Broadtail. Most of the work was around the management of download jobs. I’m using a job management library I’ve built for another project and integrated it here so that the video downloads could be observable from the web frontend. The library works quite well, but at the moment, the jobs are not kept on any sort of disk storage. They are kept in memory until they’re manually cleared, but I’m hoping to only keep the active jobs in memory, and store historical jobs onto disk. So most of today’s session was spent on making that possible, along with some screens to list and view job details.
-
Start of Yet Another Project Because I Can't Help Myself
One of the reasons why I stopped work on Lorikeet was that I was inspired by those on Micro.blog to setup a Plex server for my YouTube watching needs. A few years ago, I actually bought an old Intel Nuc for that reason, but I never got around to setting it up. I managed to do so last Wednesday and so far it’s working pretty well. The next thing I’d like to do is setup RSS subscriptions for certain YouTube channels and automatically download the videos when they are publish. Continue reading →
-
Abandoning Project Lorikeet
I’ll admit it: the mini-project that I have been working on may not have been a good idea. The project, which I gave the codename Lorikeet, was to provide a way to stream YouTube videos to a Chromecast without using the YouTube app. Using the YouTube app is becoming a real pain. Ads aside, they’ve completely replaced the Chromecast experience from a very basic viewing destination to something akin to a Google TV, complete with recommendations of “Breaking News” from news services that I have no interest in seeing. Continue reading →
