To be fair, I’m mostly about Craig Charles as well. His funk and soul show is a genuine highlight of my week while I’m cooking.
As for other shows; Jarvis Cocker has just come back on Sunday afternoons, which is very welcome. Also, Cerys Matthews on a Sunday is great.
A few months back we idly pondered using my partner’s PIP towards getting a new EV. As we don’t have a driveway and we rent, we’d have to take the offer that includes membership to one of the charging schemes. Thing is, it includes the subscription, but not the cost of the charging, which ends up being only just shy of what petrol costs. And the nearest charger is a mile away.
So we just bought an old, cheap petrol car.
Just a note to add that if OP does dig in to HDM, bear in mind that there are only three books. There are three more books masquerading as a continuation of Lyra’s story, but they can be safely disregarded as they are a nonsense.
The thing with streaming services for me is the complete lack of humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I sub to Apple Music and use it quite a lot, but when I’m cooking dinner and want a person playing music to me, making recommendations, and just chatting away, there’s no substitute for human-presented radio.
Algorithmic recommendations are fine, but there’s something about clicking with a piece of music that someone has encouraged me to check out.
Yeah, every day. BBC 6 music is where it’s at.
Pretty sure it’s this command;
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4
On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there’s no fan, but it counters along nicely.
As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.
As a Brit, 🤷🏽♀
I’ve never really understood the mentality of businesses. They’re losing customers, so they bump the price to compensate, therefore losing more customers.
I guess those that hang on end up making up for those they lose, and because all the other services are doing the same, they end up getting people who’ve jumped ship from another one and signed up at a good introductory cost.
But, like, just charge a bit less and have more customers.
I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.
I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.
Like I said, magic.
And they rode off into the sunset, herd of cattle ahead of them, chowing down beans and brisket.
Now let’s go get us a scalp.
Ask where to get a cheeky Nandos, wa-HEY!
Yeah, I make good use of the Hidden Posts section in the profile page on Voyager, every time the feed refreshes for no good reason.
That’s a solid cast in that movie. I’ll add it to my list.
Oh god, I’ve just remembered a time on holiday when he went to bite into a perfectly innocuous hamburger, and discovered a single slice of tomato. He was so outraged he threw up on his plate.
That was fun.
Well, those guys wouldn’t be able to tell you…
I see they’ve turned off the GPS coordinates in the EXIF data, to stop us from knowing that these images were created in a VFX studio in Hollywood.
Can’t pull the wool over my eyes, man!
If watching a recorded theatre performance from the comfort of my own sofa counts, then The National Theatre’s presentation of The Importance of Being Earnest, which is wonderful.
In terms of seeing a live performance while in the actual theatre then it would be Rocky Horror back in 2019.
Edit: Just remembered that we saw Wicked in London in December 2025, before we saw the movie. That was fun.
When my kid was four and refusing to go to bed, he once stood at the top of the stairs, holding tight to the stair gate, looked me dead in the eye, and shit himself.
On the one hand I was impressed with the show of superiority, but on the other, I did briefly consider having him adopted.
So yeah, I get it.
In the process of shifting my entire iCloud photo library over to Immich, I’ve discovered that a huge amount of the videos I’ve shot over the years with various iPhones are ridiculously huge x264 .MOVs. So I’ve been fiddling about with ffmpeg this morning, and have landed upon this script that re-encodes them to around 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, and retains EXIF metadata. One video I have is 90 seconds long, and is of bats filmed at twilight over a large pond in the New Forest. The original is 132mb, but because most of the clip is basically black, it’s been able to compress it to 2mb. Which is mad.
Anyway.
Navigate your terminal to a folder that contains a bunch of videos and paste this in, then sit back and let ffmpeg work its magic:
for i in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags "${i%.*}.mp4"; doneFor just the odd one or two videos, here’s the basic ffmpeg command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags ouput.mp4God, I love ffmpeg.