133arc585

Oh man! I had ripped them to mp3 but they sit on my phone as single 45 minute files. I tend to listen all the way through but being able to seek to specific songs would be great.

Thanks!

There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like “Ad: X”. In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who’s name begins with "Ad: ", though I don’t know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn’t be very useful.

Another method that could work on some podcasts that don’t use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like “time for ads”, and the ads will insert. Sometimes it’s always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase “the money zone” on MBMBAM), but that’s not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

In summary, I don’t know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.

I have an idea about why they’d come to a weird conclusion like that:

A “hot” topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don’t have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an “every day” topic.

Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.

They do chain them up and work them, they just don’t pick cotton anymore, they build military equipment, staff call centers, and build furniture, producing products worth $11B a year with no pay^[1].

Quoting JetBrains,

Fleet is free to use during the public preview

(emphasis mine)

So it is only temporarily free. Once it’s polished it will no longer be free. Better to not get tied in to something that will be taken away from you before long.

Depends on how much you want to set up. For my purposes, I just check for connectivity every minute, and record true or false as a new row in a sqlite database if there is connectivity.

This is what I use on my raspberry pi,

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from datetime import datetime
import sqlite3
import socket
from pathlib import Path

try:
    host = socket.gethostbyname("one.one.one.one")
    s = socket.create_connection((host, 80), 2)
    s.close()
    connected = True
except:
    connected = False
timestamp = datetime.now().isoformat()

db_file = Path(__file__).resolve().parent / 'Database.sqlite3'
conn = sqlite3.connect(db_file)
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('''CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS checks (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, timestamp TEXT, connected INTEGER)>
curs.execute('''INSERT INTO checks (timestamp, connected) VALUES (?, ?);''', (timestamp, 1 if connected else 0))
conn.commit()
conn.close()

and I just have a crontab entry * * * * * ~/connectivity_check/check.py >/dev/null 2>&1 to run it every minute.

Then I just check for recent disconnects via:

$ sqlite3 ./connectivity_check/Database.sqlite3 'select count(*) from checks where connected = 0 order by timestamp desc;'

Obviously, it’s not as full-featured as something with configurable options or a web UI etc, but for my purposes, it does exactly what I need with absolutely zero overhead.

Ah I see you mentioned the cuts are only a few seconds long. This wouldn’t catch that very well.

If you have a server outside of your network you could simply hold open a TCP connection and report when it breaks, but I’ll admit at that point it’s outside of what I’ve had to deal with.

So far, the USA alone has spent more on this war than Russia has. And the USA is not the only one sending money and resources to Ukraine.

Honestly it looks like it got bought and has been used by someone else? The domain has been registered with the current owner since 2022-05-07, and if you look at the Wayback Machine for 2022-05-12 it says it’s up for sale. It looks like the domain used to be used for the Center, for example this snapshot from 2016. Even back in March 2023 the site wasn’t showing porn but was not being used by the Center.

No

Thank you for taking the time to make a nuanced argument. I’m particularly happy with how much effort you went to source your statements and then synthesize them into a useful conclusion that I hadn’t considered before. It is always nice to see a comment like yours that proves that people do read articles (and not just headlines)! I wish we could all contribute as much as you do.