December Adventure

Previous adventures:

2024: orllewin.uk/digitalgarden/blog/2024_12.html - working on Control which was a bit too ambitious and could do with starting from scratch. The idea was to have an app for various HiFi streamers that had a better UX than the 1st party offerings. It was also a bit of a toolkit that let you craft http requests like in Postman, a more opinionated/targeted specific set of controls would be better, rather than a general utility.
2023: orllewin.uk/digitalgarden/blog/2023_12.html - a more successful adventure, there's lots of good stuff in there: an experiment porting Modular Play to LÖVE, a hardware bike light project, setting up Nova to build SDL C projects, some work on my camera app Lento, some work on my various old radio apps, and a first look into controlling my old Cambridge Audio AXN10 (now sold) outside of the 1st party app.

Thursday 11th December

Managed to find a little time to work on the Android PCR app, view the repo: git.merveilles.town/oppen/pudsey_clough_radio_android. There's now a full media service in place for radio playback, the schedule format defined yesterday is now being parsed in Kotlin with the UI built in Compose. It's getting there... also looking at somewhere to write blog posts and possibly a 'proper' web host, some cheap VPS based in the UK/Europe.

Wednesday 10th December

As part of building a proper Android app for PCR I need to represent the show schedule in data, after a little discussion on Merveilles I've settled on a few tab-separated fields ((thanks @d6/∴ esoterik ∴)): show name \t show_type \t start_time \t end_time, eg. Whirlaw Stones daily 08:00 11:00 with the second field being a constant with, at the moment at least, one value: daily.

With this format the entire current schedule can be built in a just a few lines in a text file on the server, changing the schedule and adding new shows is trivial:


Pudsey Clough Pool  daily 00:00 08:00
Whirlaw Stones  daily 08:00 11:00
Noon Hill daily 11:00 14:00
Nant Wood daily 14:00 17:00
Pudsey Clough Pool  daily 17:00 19:00
Orchan Mast daily 19:00 22:00
Pudsey Clough Pool  daily 22:00 00:00

orllewin.uk/pcr/schedule.txt

Tuesday 9th December

First go at an Android app for PCR: git.merveilles.town/oppen/pudsey_clough_radio_android, the app itself is just a variation on the main website in a webview (well, a 'Trusted Web Activity') but it includes a full Android Auto implementation

Pudsey Clough Radio on Android Auto

Monday 8th December

More music uploaded for the morning 'Whirlaw Stones' ambient show including lots of Japanese ambient from the 1970s and 80s.
I've been playing with @exquisitecorp's excellent new Processing-for-lua project L5
Working on a PCR flyer to leave in cafes and bars around town:

A flyer, asking for contributions to Pudsey Clough Radio

Sunday 7th December

A quick look at 'small-scale DAB multiplex' DAB licenses. Not seriously, but for the future if by some miracle PCR grows beyond a pool of nice music.
Flyer design. The next step now the system itself is set up and there's a substantial pool of music is to try and get some community involvement (and more listeners). To take things offline (outside of my safety zone) I need to design and print some flyers to leave in some local pubs and cafes.

Saturday 6th December

Weekend family day, so not much progress. We did head up to Pudsey Clough as the day ended which gives the radio station its name.

pudsey_stream.jpg: The stream at Pudsey Clough, more powerful than usual due to heavy rain (43kB) - view original 602kB

Friday 5th December

A new morning show called Whirlaw Stones is in progress. It'll play from 8am until Noon Hill starts at 11. Music will be calm ambient and have older music (the other shows are mostly all current releases) including 1980s Japanese ambient
I wanted to find a way to add a link back to the releases so listeners can easily buy it and read about the artists (most of the music comes from Bandcamp). I can't see any easy way to do that in the radio software (CentovaCast), you can add comments to tracks but it's private, and doesn't show in the stream status feed orllewin.radioca.st/status-json.xsl, I have added track and album data from cosmo.shoutca.st/rpc/orllewin/streaminfo.get and the last 5 recents which are available in cosmo.shoutca.st/recentfeed/orllewin/json/.

Thursday 4th December

Orchan Mast now runs an extra hour to 10pm thanks to a load of new uploads making the pool large enough to minimise repetition.
That 'forward with masking' feature from my registrar is literally just an iFrame, judging by how slow it is it might be created dynamically, visiting pudseyclough.uk takes around 5 seconds. I'll have to think of something better, maybe just pay a few quid a month for a web host.
Slow progress on the Android app for Pudsey Clough, too much on with work and school.
I have been looking at mobile Linux again after a discussion on the Fediverse about Android and Google's various manoeuvrings, both moving development to a private in-house branch, and the very unpopular 'developer verification' changes. I'm actually in the minority by not being overly outraged by any of the changes. I'm also bloody-minded enough to refuse to sign up to their Android developer verification. I might have a go at setting up a GTK with Vala dev environment.

Wednesday 3rd December

Not a lot to report. I started a Pudsey Clough Radio Android app, mainly because I want a dedicated app for in-car use. I've done media session implementations at two day jobs (current employer: Focal & Naim (yeay), and previously at Yoto (boo, hisss)), so it's all fairly simple now (apart from Android's Media3 bugs), there's a huge amount of boilerplate to get through though.

Tuesday 2nd December

I'm trying to decide how best to handle the pudseyclough.uk domain. It currently redirects to orllewin.uk/pcr and sits on my home ThinkCentre (the web frontends are still there even with all the media/streaming moved to streamrr.co). I'm not sure how easy it'd be for me to host all three of my domains properly on that one box (more accurately I don't want to go through the pain of figuring it out), my domain registrar offers 'forward with masking' which sounds like a quick win, I'm not sure how that's viewed as a solution but I'm not a web dev so it'll do - maybe by the time you read this the domain won't show it's really sat at orllewin.uk/pcr. I'm continuing to gather media for the automatic playlists, currently there are three shows: Noon Hill for fairly easy going unchallenging experimental, crossover jazz, folk, which is then followed by Nant Wood which goes into noisier droney territory, then there's an evening show called Orchan Mast which is higher energy experimental sound design and rave/techno. At all other times a pool of my own field recordings and audio experiments play which is a nice way to fill the 'dead' space.

Monday 1st December

It's #DecemberAdventure time, see Eli's original post: eli.li/december-adventure.

This year with a fried brain from delivering a big feature at Day Job I'm taking it easy. Pudsey Clough radio has been gradually building from when it was first registered as a domain on the 4th February 2025: pudseyclough.uk, I was probably tinkering with streaming audio months before that too. Originally it was fully hosted on a little ThinkCentre in my house, making use of the static IP Plusnet offer, but power-cuts are fairly common here and my hacked together mess of scripts didn't recover well. I'd been running a proxy stream via streamerr.co/ anyway to protect my home bandwidth so last month I took the sensible decision to host media there too, it only costs an extra couple of pounds a month.