matteason

I'll look into the Sonos API. The problem I've found with other casting/streaming APIs (Google Cast in particular) is that it expects a single URL to stream from, whereas Ambiphone is just loading individual sound files and playing them simultaneously on your device. It should work fine over Bluetooth but I appreciate that's not the best experience with Sonos and other smart speakers

This is a good point. I like the safety of being able to have my own local copy of my data so json export/import would be a good first step

This is exactly what I do on https://www.matteason.co.uk/scotbeats/ actually - any settings change is reflected in the URL and read back on load. When I implement sharing of individual mixes it'll probably look a lot like this

Good point, I'll get this cleaned up

Yes great idea!

Coincidentally I'm also building a live ISS tracker which embeds NASA's live camera stream [0]. Sometimes I have Ambiphone and the ISS tracker running at the same time and it's nice when the ISS chatter pops up, so I think the Apollo recordings would work really well.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9C25Un7xaM

Oh this is great feedback, thanks. I'll look at putting a deadzone around the volume slider so it's harder to mix them up

Yeah, it's actually surprisingly tricky to get sound to persist with the screen off, especially on iOS, but I managed it in the end.

I'm testing a PWA version at the moment too so it'll be installable to your home screen - the test version at https://test.ambiph.one is PWA-enabled if anyone would like to try it out

Thank you! I had wanted to do that but it's marginally trickier than fading in - I agree it would be a much nicer experience than a harsh cut-off though, I'll look into it

Thanks for the great feedback!

I'm building the ability to save mixes at the moment actually - good point about being over to move them over to a new device. At the moment I'm just storing saved mixes in localstorage but people will definitely want the ability to sync at some point. I've been trying to avoid having an account system in the interests of keeping things simple but I might have to bite the bullet or come up with another clever way to keep things in sync

Thanks! It's built in Vue 3, UI is all built from scratch.

The sounds are FLAC files, which is the only compressed format which loops seamlessly across all browsers. Sound files are hosted in an S3 bucket, which is behind Cloudflare (free) to minimise S3 egress costs, so thankfully it doesn't cost much to run at all.

The sounds are all permissively licensed and mainly sourced from freesound.org and freemusicarchive.org - I'm hugely grateful to everyone who shared such high-quality sounds and music for free. There's a list of credits at https://ambiph.one/acknowledgements

Thank you!

Thanks!

I had a little dig into this in January - Christmas and New Year are the only bank holidays that get tinsel (now lights), everything else gets red, white and blue bunting: https://twitter.com/MattEason/status/1610240761047531520

There's a 'bunting' property in https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json which drives whether the bunting is shown for any given bank holiday

hidden="until-found" will make this possible in JS-based accordions and other hidden content but is unfortunately only in Chromium-based browsers for now: https://developer.chrome.com/articles/hidden-until-found/

Oh amazing! I've really wanted to make some kind of spherical desktop display so I'd love to hear how you get on.

You can just use the image URLs directly if you want to, but if you want to do more processing on the source images the code is all in index.js in the linked repo. It's just a Node script. I've tried to make it clear what's going on in the comments so it should be pretty straightforward to port to other languages if JS isn't your thing.

You can see the source IR image (which incorporates GOES data) here: https://navigator.eumetsat.int/product/EO:EUM:DAT:0330

It took quite a while to work out how to process it to get a level of realism I was happy with. IR is tricky because the same level of grey could either be warm cloud or cold land, so just discarding anything below a certain level to try and get rid of the land also loses a lot of cloud detail. I've combined that IR map with another false-colour image which lets me recover some of that detail, then I'm also extracting clouds from a true-colour image which restores more detail for areas in daylight.

Thank you! Yeah I've tried to make it as no-nonsense as possible. I'm planning to add some other handy bits around it (eg a txt/JSON file giving the last update time) that might be useful for some types of project.

Thanks! Yes you're right, it does become a lot more pronounced when it's used on a sphere. I'll find a nice way to fill in the gaps that doesn't just make it more obvious

You can grab the source data from EUMETSAT directly - the URLs are all listed in https://github.com/matteason/live-cloud-maps/blob/3be662483c...

The products used are:

"Geostationary Ring IR10.8 μm Image - Multimission" - https://navigator.eumetsat.int/product/EO:EUM:DAT:0330

"Geostationary Ring Dust RGB - Multimission" - https://navigator.eumetsat.int/product/EO:EUM:DAT:0334

"Geostationary Ring Natural Colour RGB - Multimission" https://navigator.eumetsat.int/product/EO:EUM:DAT:0336

I know, I'm sorry! It's very hard to name something like this without including "no, not _that_ kind of cloud"

It's an API endpoint testing app, like Postman and Insomnia

Yeah, ours was to an email account I'd registered for my son but wasn't checking regularly. Once we found out someone else had used it for Spotify I found loads of marketing spam from them in the inbox. I think it is fixed for new accounts but they obviously haven't bothered to go back and verify everyone who registered before that change.

> I also contacted Spotify and they are absolutely sure that it's not possible to create accounts without confirming e-mails and can't do anything about it.

Yeah that's not true. We discovered someone was using my son's email address for their Spotify when he tried to register for an account. There are plenty of other accounts of this happening: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Why-Does-Spotify-N...

It might be fixed now, but what you're saying was definitely true for a good few years.

This project is co-led by Ben Goldacre, who the HN crowd may know as the author of Bad Science and Bad Pharma:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Goldacre_book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Pharma

I'm now also seeing (not sure if permanent or an experiment) related keywords being comingled with the result category buttons you're talking about, and it's absolutely infuriating. 90% of the time I'm using those buttons to switch to image search but it's a crapshoot whether Images will be where I expect it to be or in some random place in amongst other related keywords I don't want to search for.

For example, I just did a test search for 'bbc'. My options in that bar are now News, Live, TV guide, Sport, Football, Online, Images, Weather, Bbc news world

I'm fine seeing related keywords, but not where I'm used to switching the result type

It means that you can keep your eyeline focussed on the middle of the viewport (or the top, or wherever's natural for you) as you scroll new content into view. On a regular page, once your scrollbar reaches the bottom you have to start reading down the viewport because there's no more space to scroll. I don't know how much practical difference it would actually make to readability - would be interesting to measure - but I thought it was neat

> The bottom of every page is padded so readers can maintain a consistent eyeline.

That's a nice little detail, I haven't seen that before

Do you mind sharing an example? This sounds really interesting

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