Rubenerd

If you’re seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.

Quoted on Anvari.org.

Many of you repoted issues accessing the Rubenerd Show earlier this year. Overnightscape Underground master feed subscribers were fine, but iTunes was returning this erroneous error when people were accessing this show directly in iTunes:

“Item Not Available: The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the Singapore/[Country] Store, but it is available in the Australian Store. Click Change Store to view this item.”

Assuming you even had an Australian store account though, you’d get this:

“The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the Australian store.

Not to get all Merlin Mann on you, but turns out there were a few issues with the show feed that have since been fixed, and it had nothing to do with geography. Well, other than our bungled NBN, but that’s a separate issue.

The feed is now fixed. Most podcast clients were fine during this, but I noticed Overcast removed the feed when iTunes did; Marco must poll iTunes. His permalinks still handle accented characters poorly, but it doesn’t cause listening issues.

I’ve set up a redirect, but if you subscribed to the feed manually and are no longer getting shows, please update your client to point here instead:

http://showfeed.rubenerd.com/

Fixing the problem

I wanted to give a big shoutout and thanks to Chel and Hahn from the Podcasts Connect support team at Apple for putting me on the right track. For those facing a similar issue with older shows, these are what I had to address:

1. iTunes now supports HTTPS delivery of audio and the RSS feed (nice), but the latter can’t be served with Let’s Encrypt (darn). I’m now serving the show feed on a separate, HTTP subdomain.

2. The minimum show art size has been bumped up to 1400x1400. I set mine at the maximum 3000x3000 to stave off the next necessary jump.

3. At some point, I’d clobbered my RSS iTunes tags such that they weren’t nested properly. This was nobody’s fault but my own! Double and triple check your iTunes tags, then get a cup of coffee, and check again. They look okay? No, really, check again.

4. How are those iTunes tags looking?

Thanks for listening, hiven glaven.

This article by Tom Lamont in The Guardian is one of the finest pieces of long form journalism I’ve read in a long time. Here’s a taste:

What had begun as the quiet removal of Winner from Norway – a journey scarcely noticed by anyone outside the oil business – was now a richly public event. Nothing quite like it had happened in the Hebrides since the 1940s, when the cargo ship Politician, abundantly loaded with bottled spirits, ran aground on the nearby island of Eriskay. The local response on that occasion – an outrageous carrying-away of the booze – inspired a novel and a film, Whisky Galore. In the case of [the oil rig named] Winner, her plunder value existed in her bones – her predominantly steel frame – and it was residual value that would not be easily released; something to which Transocean could by now attest. It had in its fleet more rigs than any other drilling company – more than 70 in 2016 – and the earlier pruning of about a dozen of these vessels had been conducted with discretion. Now the sun was up on a fiasco.

The photos are also incredible.

France looked at Brexit, Trump, and hard-right populism, and said non! I’ve been threatening to stop political commentary on Rubenerd, but what great news to start the week.

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36:58 – A tribute to the legendary Mr John Clarke of Clarke and Dawe fame, one of the all-time greats. Also the impact of studies and work on hobbies, uni assignments, expectations, abandoned buildings with toxic signs, clouds, looking for affordable housing in 2017 Sydney, unfortunate Mascot street names, and other spontaneous observations. Brought to you by Lars Torders, an incendiary device repairer.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released May 2017 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Speaking of amazing satire, this mock interview with Marc Andreessen is almost too real:

Interviewer: Doesn’t the new CSS Flex model fix vertical centering?

Andreessen: It’s a bandaid. It doesn’t fix the real problem: as long as putting one element inside another element has a visual meaning, it will be impossible to separate presentation from the HTML. [..]

Speaking of Flex, isn’t it a hot mess? We spent all this time telling people not to use tables, and here they are, back again, more complex than ever, and the html ordering matters visually. We’re such hypocrites! But not really, because our goal was always to make things as complicated as possible. And now with Angular.js and React.js we have yet another layer of complexity on top of that! Try getting a semantic web when everything is built in Javascript! It’s getting so complex I’m feeling guilty.

The witty, fabulous interviewee from the legendary Clarke and Dawe duo passed on last month, and I’ve been dragging my heels posting because nothing I write seems to do the bloke justice.

His sharp, dry wit aside, I loved his uncanny ability to reproduce the talking points and attitudes of his subjects, without needing to mimic their voices. He just weaponised their words.

Clarke and Dawe’s three minute skits have been a fixture of Australian TV for decades, and most of their material is now on their YouTube page. I’d recommend every single one, but here are just a few of my recent favourites, along with arguably the all time classic at the end. Thanks for your time, Mr John Clarke.

The use of English language in Australia:

The Presidential Race is Beautifully Poised:

The Energy Market Explained:

The European Debt Crisis:

The Front Fell Off:

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the legendary Jimbo. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:45:16 – A family of podcasters and monologists gang up to honor Shambles Constant! Bonus: Five brand new, fun, Hometownville skits starring Shambles! Intro (w/ special guest Musca Domestica) .. Chad Bowers .. Dustin Hoffman .. Hometownville Special Scene 01 .. Ruben Schade (Rubenerd) .. Jimmy Fallon .. Hometownville Special Scene 02 .. Frank Edward Nora* … Hometownville Special Scene 03 .. a fun Week in Review .. PQ Ribber .. Mike Boody .. Hometownville Special Scene 04 .. Ringo Starr .. Shambles Constant .. show end .. Hometownville Special Scene 05 .. MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE (Sam Westphalen) (written by: Sting) [YouTube]

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

I don’t like these sentence structures.

1. Whether it’s something, or another thing, sentences that start with this always sound like PR spin.

2. That sentences start so abruptly like this is most unpleasent.

3. Person X, writing for Y, on article Z, discussing point A, about the issue of B, from person C, writing for D, hasn’t saved you reading time, because you have to parse this mess.

4. It’s only a third percent, you don’t have time to read the far more natural “third of a percent”.

I’d prefer passive voice over these. No wait, if I had to choose among these structures, I’d prefer a passive voice.

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01:29:42 – Because it's episode 360! Shaddup. Take a wander with your esteemed host as he records three separate episodes, doesn't have time to produce all of them, and subsequently smashes them into one convenient episode. In Buzzfeed style, you'll never guess what he talks about! Mostly because the episode doesn't have a proper description.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released April 2017 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.