Don't mind me, just catching up with some remedial study
Thanks to the risks and burdens imposed by the preposterously draconian blunt instrument that is the #OnlineSafetyAct (UK) of 2023, I've just unceremoniously closed down a collaborative website I've operated for almost exactly 27 years.
A week or so ago I received a rather bizarre email from the London Transport Museum Shop, telling me that if I didn't want to see Mothers' Day spam, I could opt out now. In other words, encouraging me to engage in a whole interactive experience with specific reference to Mothers' Day, in order to spare myself any potentially traumatic references to Mothers' Day.
The thought processes involved in creating this campaign beggar rational comprehension.
@thisisrjg Yes, I've just shut down a participatory server I've been running since 1998. It was never hosted in the UK but it unambiguously served a UK-centric user base, and as you say -- between steep, costly, onerous requirements and unclear but potentially huge penalties, there was simply no case for leaving it up.
I'll be damned. All of my #Chromecast Audios are back, not even one day after a fix was announced. Unusual for a surprise to be pleasant lately.
Brussels Government: Seven-party coalition option to be decided by Monday
Google support has announced in the Google Nest forum that they're pushing out a fix for the #Chromecast #ChromecastAudio expired cert problem
And the third one is working for this purpose as well, after unplugging it and plugging it back in. (No factory reset for me!) #Chromecast #ChromecastAudio.
Was wrong about the #SomaFM app though, it's no longer finding the devices.
Hang on, they're still working, for that purpose. Enjoying some Brubeck streamed off my own file server while making dinner.
Well, until this morning two of my #Chromecast Audios were still working with noncommercial apps like #VLC and #SomaFM, since they don't ask the devices to authenticate. But today those have dropped off the network as well.
I've installed Moode Audio on a Raspberry Pi and hooked it up to my living room sound bar alongside the #Chromecast Audio. It can't do casting but it can do AirPlay.
But that's a somewhat inferior solution, since for the most part AirPlay doesn't hand off streams for the target device to handle on its own, you're actually streaming from the sender device, using its resources (e.g. battery, CPU, bandwidth), and you can't close the app. So I really hope Google fixes this thing.
Interestingly two of my #Chromecast #ChromecastAudio devices are still working for local media -- I can cast to them from VLC on the iPhone, using music that's actually stored on the phone, for example. But none of them work for internet streams.
Just took a cat to the vet today, and I think I finally begin to appreciate what an emotional toll it would take to be one. A veterinarian that is, not a cat.
I mean you can't be a good veterinarian (I hereby posit) without being a compassionate and empathetic animal lover, but there's no way to tell the animal that this bewildering, invasive and sometimes painful experience is necessary and done out of love and concern.
I don't know how you get over feeling that every day of your professional life. I don't know if I could.
(Personally I never mail my ballot, I take it to one of the drop boxes. Which are easily as common as polling places are in other states, so it works out to be the same except no lines or malicious poll workers.)
Software Engineer, mostly in the Pacific Northwest of late
Medical Informatics - Carrier-Grade Network Video Distribution - Real Time Clinical Telemetry
Formerly: Motorola, Tektronix, Intel, HP, Qualcomm, Nintendo; others you're less likely to have heard of.
Will code for pie. 🥧