Robb KnightModify

2025-06-24 05:44:04

If you need to claim a podcast on Apple Podcasts, a show that's linked to another account and you want to move it to yours, you can follow this guide which ends with this final step:

Go to your hosting provider’s website, log in, and enter the token in the appropriate claim field.

Sounds easy enough if you use one of the twenty or so hosting providers that Apple say support this but what if you have a moment of clarity and realise you are the hosting provider. What are the hosting providers putting in the RSS feed to validate the claim? Because I couldn't find an Apple support document that explains it, although I'm sure it exists.

I did thankfully come across this GitHub issue on the PodLove publisher repository which had this snippet of code:

echo "\n\t".sprintf('<itunes:applepodcastsverify>%s</itunes:applepodcastsverify>', $verification_token);

itunes:applepodcastsverify is the key bit of information I needed so I updated my feed with my token Apple gave me when trying to make a claim. Within ten minutes Apple had verified the claim and the show was back in my account.

<itunes:category text=""/>
+ <itunes:applepodcastsverify>26f05c10-5044-11f0-b7ac-37b1c324c77d</itunes:applepodcastsverify>

As with most things related to Apple podcasts, nothing is particularly well-documented and it's also hard to tell whats part of the general standard and what's proprietary to Apple.

2025-06-22 05:48:28

A few days ago, I put ~60 envelopes in the postbox to be whisked away to various places across the world.

I got 63 orders in total for the stickers (plus two duplicates I refunded), 13 in the UK and 50 international. There were orders from 12 countries and my profit from this was around £175. To be clear, profit wasn’t the motivator here, I just wanted these stickers to exist but I also think there’s a lack of openness from people when it comes to money and business and all that fun stuff.

Here was my first pass at the numbers:

£468.48 in orders
Stickers £95
Envelopes £15
UK postage (1.70 × 13): £22.10
International postage (3.20 × 50): £160
Profit: £176.38

This was much better I originally thought but then I remembered that when I set the price at $10 I was accounting for just sending two of the "Don't @ Me" stickers - the "Websites" one was a bonus because I'd rather send some sparkly website stickers to people than make an extra bit of money. Nevertheless, if I account for me being a moron the profit is even better:

Stickers: £55
Profit: £216.38

Keep in mind of that £216, I still have to pay tax on it so it’s probably more like £100-£150 profit so not nothing but I’m not quitting my job any time soon.

I spent quite a few hours writing out envelopes (while my wife packed the stickers) and notes for the cards, I could definitely have sped this up if I had labels I could chuck in the printer. Maybe next time.

I also bought too many envelopes and over-ordered a little bit on stickers but thankfully I sold the extra packs.

I don’t know what conclusion to draw from this experience but it’s pretty cool that something I designed and made is out in the world and hopefully on MacBooks, notebooks, and whatever else in the next few weeks. If you bought some, thank you. And send me photos.

2025-06-20 03:51:26

I was listening to the results of the Rickies a couple of days ago and realised it was a perfect candidate for a plugin for my TRMNL.

Both Rickipedia and The Rickies have API endpoints to check these things — I ended up using Rickipedia as it had more info available to do what I needed.

The plugin handles the scenario like now where we have a benchman as well as if there are separate keynote and annual chairmen. I spent some time working out the percentages so I can place the winner "magnets" on the globe and if I resize it it still works which will come in handy if I add any new views or modes.

You can install it here, search "The Rickies" on the plugins page, or the code is on GitHub.

2025-06-18 20:19:38

Yesterday I asked if anyone knew of an iOS podcast app that also had a self-hostable backend or one with a sanctioned API. I have two requirements I'm interested in:

1. A decent podcast experience. This is the "easy" bit. I want to subscribe, download new episodes, and listen to them.
2. An API to access my listening history. I'm doing this in a horrible way right now with Overcast, I would much prefer a proper API.

I got multiple suggestions which came down to two options: Plex with Prologue and audiobookshelf with either one of three third party apps^[1].

Forgive me this sidebar about iOS web apps but this is usually a thing I would solve myself with a backend and a nice frontend built exactly as I want. I could do that, except I need to download podcast episodes offline which you can't reliably do with webapps on iOS. From the Podrain readme:

iOS doesn't have enough storage for for downloading the audio files for offline listening

I dug a bit deeper on this and came across this post on Tigren:

Safari imposes a 50MB limit on cache storage for PWAs. This means your app can only store up to 50MB of data before hitting a hard stop, at which point you’ll be prompted to free up space.

While local storage and IndexedDB might seem like alternatives, they come with their own quirks. Some sources suggest that IndexedDB might allow for more storage—up to 500MB or more, depending on the device’s available free disk space.

However, this isn’t consistent, so developers need to test and verify the limits for their specific use cases.

That last sentence does not spark joy fill me with confidence. Apple have no incentive to make web apps better so I'm not holding out hope. Also, I absolutely will not jump through the hoops to make an iOS app, submit it, hope Apple keeps it there, and pay $100 a year for the privilege.

So I need to rely on an existing iOS app and backend. I installed audiobookshelf on my Coolify instance after working out there's a bug with the latest version. I subscribed to a couple of podcasts and downloaded the latest episodes.

My first note was that to have an episode available it has to be downloaded. It makes sense in the context of what audiobookshelf is but it's not usually how dedicated podcast apps work — Overcast doesn't download every episode to it's server only for it to be served up to a mobile app. Along with this downloading requirement comes another issue — to have a history of what I've listened to, I need to keep them downloaded.

If you want to keep track of what episodes you have listened to but still delete the files, you will need to track this progress using an external utility.

If I was going to build a very basic podcast backend, I would store the following:

• Every episode that has been fetched - by "fetched" I mean new episodes since I subscribed, or ones I manually downloaded to whatever app I'm using. I would not download the episodes themselves
• Store the state on each episode - played, inprogress, unplayed, maybe some others

What occurred to me while using audiobookshelf is it (and the other suggestion of Plex) is designed to be a library of audio books and podcasts but in most cases^[2] I don't need a full archive of every episode of a show. I just want to listen and then disregard the file — but I still care that I listened to it.

I tried out Plappa and SoundLeaf and they're both solid apps but I didn't go any further because of the downloading situation. I don't want, or need, an ever-expanding podcast library just for the sake of keeping my listening history. I might have another look at Pocketcasts because I have a grandfathered lifetime membership and they have an API, albeit not "official".

2025-06-14 06:19:28

Last week I ordered a TRMNL. It's an 800x480 e-ink screen with a plugin system and a little kickstand.

I bought the developer edition which gives you access to make your own plugins rather than exclusively rely on the work of others. It also means I was able to get going before it even arrived with a virtual device. The way plugins works, I was able to put together an EchoFeed plugin pretty easily to show sign ups, posts, and other things. I added an endpoint to EchoFeed and piped that into the plugin.

Assuming there's an endpoint that takes an API key for authorisation (or nothing, in the case of Mastodon), it's really simple to make plugins. The rendering is done with Liquid which I was already familiar with. TRMNL have a CSS framework for making plugins. You don't have to use it, but you probably should. The first plugin I made was one for Relay for St Jude which I mentioned in weeknote #1951 - I'll make sure this is live and ready to go for when the campaign starts^[1].

The first version required entering your campaign URL manually (e.g. https://titlity.com/@rknightuk/stjude2024. I spotted an xhrSelect in the docs as "coming soon" but Ryan at TRMNL got it added within a few hours of me asking nicely so now I can fetch all campaigns from the API instead of expecting people to paste in their campaign URL. Very handy. For reference, I did need to add the following headers on my server to get it to work:

header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers: *');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');

I could have done a better job here but there's nothing in this particular endpoint that requires it can only be accessed by certain domains. It's fine. CORS gunna CORS.

I've also submitted three plugins since having it:

1. Fathom Analytics
2. Mastodon
3. Stripe

There's a screenshot plugin option which will take a screenshot of a webpage and show that on screen which meant I could do a proof of concept for Project Mosaic^[2].

TRMNL have a web component which you can see in use on this demo page. I grabbed the SVG out of it so I could make a template in Pixelmator and I can drop in a screenshot to make nice looking images to share. Their GitHub has a bunch of other resources too like servers, libraries, and a list of 3D printable mounts.

You can, if you choose to, host your own server instead of relying on theirs. I've installed the Laravel version to check it out but I haven't done much with it. It is reassuring that I could run the whole stack if I wanted to. I won't, but I could.

I've wanted some kind of "screen with data" for a while and had similar thoughts to Jachin: there are lots of other options (iPads, Raspberry Pi mirrors, Skylight) but they all have major downsides. TRMNL meets most of my requirements and I'm already considering getting another one for the kitchen^[3].

2025-06-10 05:43:59

Can you share a bit about yourself with us?

I'm a cat dad to a cat called Morpheus and a human dad to two girls. I'm a developer in my day job but I also work on my own projects and freelance outside of that and I also podcast.

I like to make fun web stuff like soundboards, mini games, and utilities. I also collect Lego, play video games, read comics, and most recently I got into pens, pencils and other stationery-related things.

What motivates you day to day?

My motivation to go to work is so my family can have a nice life and also so I can buy stupid stuff but mostly the former. I'm also motivated by Monster and crisps.

We are all different. Keeping in mind your context and mine (I’m a white cis-het American dude in his 40s) what is one thing you want me to know?

I too am a white dude, albeit British and a little bit younger than you, but one thing that has stuck with me since I first heard years ago it is this: you can't account for why people enjoy things. There are essentially an infinite amount of hobbies and interests so don't be annoyed or "confused" why someone likes something. Assuming it's not hurting anyone else, just let people enjoy things.

What are three favorites? (It can be anything like food, books, media, etc; share a few sentences about each though and each one can be a different category, ie, a favorite food, a favorite book and a favorte album)

My favourite food is pizza and I have a theory that all pizza, within reason, is good pizza. There are of course varying degrees of what good means and I'd much rather have a handmade pizza from a stone oven than a frozen one from the supermarket but they're all still good. They're good pizzas Brent.

My favourite game of all time is Jak and Daxter on the PS2. It falls into the "perfect" category for me — "perfect" in the sense of it does exactly what it intends to do and delivers it well. It may not be the best game by some measures but as a 3D platformer it absolutely nails it.

I do find "perfect" to be a better way to frame favourites so with that in mind I'll recommend one of my perfect albums: Palm Trees and Power Lines by Sugarcult.

What is one quote that you can’t get out of your head?

I don't take much value from quotes in the traditional sense, which I believe is the intention of this question. Boiling down an idea or concept to a single sentence can be a useful technique for understanding but I think we lose a lot when we repeat the same handful of quotes about a topic instead of looking for a unique perspective themselves. I do enjoy a good shit post though, so here is one of my (sadly now deleted) favourite tweets I've saved:

love reading about men in history like "unfortunately, he never found a wife :( his elaborate scarf collection sold for $1.2M in 2011. he and his closest male friend, Chauncey, with whom he shared a bed, died within weeks of one another. they were known for their dinner parties."

How did you find OMGLOL and what are your favorite parts of it?

I first heard it from Maique who had mentioned it a number of times when we were both using Micro.blog — if you check the omg.lol referral network I'm pretty sure Maique is the person with the most referrals there. I jumped in right before a price rise at the end of 2022.

I think my favourite part is social.lol. I want a Mastodon instance that I know is reliable and isn't flooded with spam accounts. With omg.lol being a paid service, spam is basically non-existant on social.lol. I also make heavy use of paste.lol.

Promotion time: What do you want us to know about and check out?

I would be a terrible businessman if I didn't mention my singular project that is paid: EchoFeed. It's a cross posting tool that fetches RSS feeds and posts to various places including Mastodon and Bluesky. omg.lol members get a $5 discount and I think it's pretty good.

I'm also getting a lot of use out of Lens, my metadata checker and I really like how Slash Pages turned out.

What is one thing you’ve discovered that someone else created that you’d like to promote?

This isn't one thing, this is three, I'm going rogue:

• ArtFeed is a feed reader focused on photos which I'm really interested in
• Dan is doing wonderful font work at SimpleBits
• My friend Keenan is extraordinarily handsome and talented so you should go check out their writing, videos, and photography