Oh no! My HR department has been in touch, and apparently someone's getting fired!
Now, if only I had employees.
Or, for that matter, an HR department.
Remote
James Cridland
@james@bne.social
Passionate about audio · Editor of Podnews https://podnews.net · Host of the Podnews Weekly Review https://weekly.podnews.net · Personal/radio blog: https://james.cridland.net · These messages self-destruct
I also have a thing for craft beer, and did so before it was quite as trendy as today.
I live in Meanjin/Brisbane QLD Australia - in Bardon 4065 - on the land of the Turrbul and Jagera people. I'm British and moved here ten years ago.
1624 Followers
1786 Following
50 Posts
Joined February 08, 2023
My website:
Podnews:
Very cool - @manton@indieweb.social 's micro.blog now supports video podcasts, using the alternateEnclosure. He shouts out @mijustin@mastodon.social 's blog post. https://www.manton.org/2026/07/27/expanded-video-and-podcasting-in.html
Yikes!
RE: @abc_bot@social.chinwag.org
They took this photograph on purpose, right? Right?
Hooray! Pub choir! #brisbane
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@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social Agreed. My browser of choice is Helium, which is a very basic, de-googled, Chromium. No password manager, no additional random “features”, essentially taking Chromium and stripping large parts of it out. That works very well for me.
Something like that, using Firefox’s engine, might work quite well.
AWS gets more fiendish in its dark-UX patterns every day. Here we are, looking at its Simple Email Service pricing plan. I'm on "à la carte" pricing - oooh, sounds expensive. Here are the nice cheap options. Thanks, AWS!
Except, the "à la carte" pricing is just $0.10 - not visible here, naturally - it's behind a clickdown on an entirely different webpage.
And don't even start me on whatever Cloudfront is trying on these days.
Not sure this correspondent liked a recent article of mine.
Today I learnt that you don’t have to use CelloPark to pay for parking in Brisbane. There is another one that is less scammy.
https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/transport-and-parking/parking/parking-meters-and-fees
#brisbane
Worthwhile reading for #podcast app developers - @davewiner@beta.mstdn.cf 's documentation for his social network powered by RSS. And, I'd suggest, a great base for cross-app comments within the podcast ecosystem too, given that we all use an RSS feed for the base post of an episode.
"If an item has comments, it has a feed of comments".
I do like this. I wonder how we take it forward.
I've lived in Australia for ten years. The bloke doing our solar installation today poked his head into the house. "Have you got a manhole?"
A manhole? Like a hole in a road?
Apparently this loft hatch is a "manhole" in this country. Crazy talk.
#australia
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@newsgoth@infosec.exchange I think music-intensive radio is dead. No future for that. The future (as I say to anyone who listens to my keynotes) is communities of common interest: where you feel you’re missing out if you don’t tune in.
Radio appears to have not considered WHY someone would listen to the radio in 2026. It’s not news, travel or weather. It’s not the best mix of the 80s, 90s and now. It’s people.
https://radioland.email where I kind of try to say this every week
Yikes. Data from Europe, and the US, about radio listening is in my radio trends newsletter this week: along with the ambitious pricing for Kyle Sandilands's next show
https://james.cridland.net/blog/2026/ebu-radio-trends-report/
I absolutely don’t want to question this judge’s competence or anything, but aside from getting the supermarket’s name wrong - which you’d think after two weeks would be a basic thing - I do wonder whether saying in the middle of final arguments that Woollies did nothing wrong is demonstrating whether you understand how the court process actually works. Anyway, he’s a terrific judge and is absolutely at the top of his game. #AusPol #australia
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-30/tense-exchanges-federal-court-case-accc-woolworths/106561702
Woah. Looks like my iPhone now has access to the “extend” image thing. (I’m on the developer beta 3). Go to edit a picture in Photos, choose the crop control and zoom out, and it makes up the background.
Here is the original of the magnificent hound; and then I zoomed out. It’s added her back legs quite well; continued making the rug on both sides having understood the lighting; and hallucinated a door that doesn’t exist there but is a style that wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
All I did was pinch the image and select “extend”.
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@futzle@old.mermaid.town It is bizarre, though. What with SA/NT's half-hour, and then the whole daylight savings nonsense, where Brisbane moves one hour behind Sydney for six months of the year despite being due north. And then the Eucla thing, which being fair isn't really official but even so.
Here's a fun fact. If you've had 5 email newsletters from someone, and you then use Gmail to unsubscribe (by hitting "unsubscribe" in Gmail's interface), it'll send five separate unsubscribe requests.
Which is nice, but triggers a "OK, I've unsubscribed you" email every time from my system. No wonder people get annoyed. (I *think* I've now fixed that to only be sent if the user was previously subscribed, if you see what I mean.)
As far as I can tell, nobody else works this way.
Just “enjoyed” whoever is on 4BC describing a hilarious YouTube clip of someone dressed as Spiderman crossing a road. That’s how you get audiences! Um
Boosted by @tchambers@indieweb.social
I genuinely don't know whether this was worth the time writing, but https://podnews.net/AGENTS.md is now live, if any AI agents wish to take a look.
@dave@podcastindex.social I don't know if it's worthwhile you doing something similar. Particularly, I have told agents visiting my website to use Podcast Index, so happy to change this language to work with you. (Maybe an AGENTS.md on your website to help?)
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@futzle@old.mermaid.town "Sure, but we're not as mad as the mad people down the road so therefore we're absolutely sane"
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@rae@bne.social I was curious about the TSL numbers you mention there, and of speech being lower than music.
"Average weekly hours per listener" is a useful figure, which the UK releases.
It seems that talk is higher - some rough comparisons:
BBC Radio 4 = 11.8 hours; LBC = 8.7 hours; BBC Radio Ulster = 10.2 hours
BBC Radio 2 = 10.6 hours; Heart = 6.5 hours; Downtown Radio = 10 hours
And this (the least-readable graph in the world) - on-demand music (OMS) is more than 50% of the total audience from about 11am, and you'd have to assume that individual music radio stations are doing quite poorly.
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@raaahbin@eigenmagic.net @jedsetter@aus.social @futzle@old.mermaid.town The invisible timezone change between Sydney and Brisbane quite often confuses people. It’s the same time, but it’s about fifteen years ago in Brisbane. (Grumble, grumble, LNP)
I think this week has seen the most amount of “normie” promotion for the Podcast Index in its 5+ years of existence, and I think it’s excellent.
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@evan@cosocial.ca Is there a similar thing we should be doing here with podcasts? A “listen” activity? Is @samsethi@podcastindex.social already doing it?
While Apple Podcasts doesn’t produce an official API for this, I wonder if there’s a programmatic way to see if a podcast has video? (And therefore I can change the buttons to “Watch on Apple Podcasts”).
I am scraping the podcast page anyway for channels, so I guess in that same scrape, I could just search for a video icon as well. I should get on to that.
There’s also no way to know if a show has video on Spotify either, from the official API. Hmm.
@cheeaun@mastodon.social I love Phanpy, I think it’s the best thing for Mastodon on this iPhone.
A recurring bug is that all the page furniture images disappear for some reason. This appears to happen for me every four or five days. To get them back, kill the web app entirely by flicking it up from the task manager.
I’m running latest production iOS build on an iPhone 17 Pro (I think). Shout if I can do anything to help you.
OH THANK GOODNESS
To stop the emoji picker window from appearing every bloody time your finger hits the [FN] key on your magic keyboard, probably because the delete key is too narrow...
System Settings -> Keyboard -> "Press 🌐 [GLOBE] key to:" - change this to "do nothing".
Tim Apple or John Apple, please note that I do not have a key with a globe marked on it.
Replying to
If it helps, target release time of Podnews Daily is 11:00 UTC. I normally make it.
If it’s held back for an embargo, I’m aware that some elements of the publish process don’t seem to run properly (most notably, the special Apple-specific RSS feed), and it’s in the list to fix.
@samsethi@podcastindex.social @Lyceum@podcastindex.social @227573 @truefans@truefans.social
Huh. Just had a ten minute call from an AI tool, collecting information from me about software I’ve used for a potential consultant call. Very cleverly done, with “typing on a keyboard” sounds to cover up for processing time. Can’t say I liked it, but it was certainly a relatively quick way to get information over.
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@csb@podcastindex.social It would also be nice if he respected creator transcripts where they exist, rather than make his own.
I do like Overcast, but its UX takes a lot of getting used to, and Apple’s experience seems to be a rather nicer experience. But perhaps I should give it another shot. (It, of course, doesn’t do video).
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@Lyceum@podcastindex.social @samsethi@podcastindex.social @truefans@truefans.social I don’t know what Truefans is doing - @227573 will update as soon as the podping is sent out
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@samlitzinger Shared in https://radioland.email today. 3,700 subscribers. Hope someone has a listen!
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@Edent@mastodon.social And, for the benefit of anyone searching and finding this thread: here is the surprisingly 2004-era website for US publications wanting to request an ISSN: https://www.loc.gov/issn/ (and it’s free).
And here for completeness is the National Library of Australia: https://www.library.gov.au/services/publishers-and-self-publishers/international-standard-serial-number-issn where they are keen to point out that a blog is *not* eligible, but a newsletter *is*.
Just sharing my Apple Podcasts figures, which make absolute sense.
29 listeners - but 82 plays. To this 4 minute show.
Average consumption: 182%. So, the **average** listener listened to the whole show, and then listened to almost all the show again. The **average** listener, not just one of them.
Oh, Apple.
Clearly I wouldn’t have gone onto the scaffolding surrounding the house currently but if I had, I’d have been able to take a picture of the destructive power of hailstones on solar panels.
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@Edent@mastodon.social Your ISSN page with the broken link - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/how-to-add-issn-metadata-to-a-web-page/
Live coverage/speculation at https://livenow.news
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@samsethi@podcastindex.social @Lyceum@podcastindex.social @227573 @truefans@truefans.social
Not so sure about that - @227573 fires out a post when it has been ingested into the Podcast Index (and it gets there by Podping). That shows a publish time of 10:47 UTC. (For reference, it’s now 04:30 UTC).
https://ap.podcastindex.org/episodes?id=227573&statusid=https://podnews.net/update/pittman-charlamagne&resource=public
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@timrichards@aus.social @danielbowen@mastodon.social I don’t believe even London has figured that one out. Does Canberra stole your credit card details? I wonder how that is compliant.
I was interested in how #radio on a Google speaker works. Or doesn't.
So here's where I've got so far. How it works, technically; how it doesn't work, in reality, why it's important, and what we can do about it.
https://james.cridland.net/blog/2026/how-google-speakers-radio-works/
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@camwilson@mastodon.social Congratulations on the move. And here’s to the beginning of a job where you are called “Wilson” by way too many people.
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@Edent@mastodon.social Looks like they have removed the form entirely, but “UK publishers” may request an application form here: https://www.bl.uk/services/collection-metadata-services