Earlier this month, I made my first attempt at cooking pizza in an outdoor wood-fired oven. I’ve been making pizza for years: how hard can it be?
Do you know what temperature Teflon (PTFE) burns at? I do. Now. (About 470ºC.)
It turned out: pretty hard. The oven was way hotter than I’d appreciated and I burned a few crusts. My dough was too wet to slide nicely off my metal peel (my wooden peel
disappeared, possibly during my house move last year), and my efforts to work-around this by transplanting cookware in and out of the
oven quickly lead to flaming Teflon and a shattered pizza stone. I set up the oven outside the front door and spent all my time running between the kitchen (at the back of the house)
and the front door, carrying hot tools, while hungry children snapped at my ankles. In short: mistakes were made.
I roped in Robin to help make dough, because he’s damn good at it. And because I had a mountain of work to do today.
I suspect that cooking pizza in a wood-fired oven is challenging in the same way that driving a steam locomotive is. I’ve not driven one, except in simulators, but it seems like you’ve
got a lot of things to monitor at the same time. How fast am I going? How hot is the fire? How much fuel is in it? How much fuel is left? How fast is it burning through it? How far to
the next station? How’s the water pressure? Oh fuck I forget to check on the fire while I was checking the speed…
“How hot is it?” is a question I’m now much better at answering. Thanks, technology! This oven’s still warming up. (!)
So it is with a wood-fired pizza oven. If you spend too long preparing a pizza, you’re not tending the fire. If you put more fuel on the fire, the temperature drops before it climbs
again. If you run several pizzas through the oven back-to-back, you leech heat out of the stone (my oven’s not super-thick, so it only retains heat for about four consecutive pizzas
then it needs a few minutes break to get back to an even temperature). If you put a pizza in and then go and prepare another, you’ve got to remember to come back 40 seconds later to
turn the first pizza. Some day I’ll be able to manage all of those jobs alone, but for now I was glad to have a sous-chef to hand.
Also, if too much of the flour you use to keep your peel moves slick falls into the oven, it catches fire. Now you have two fires to attend to.
Today I was cooking out amongst the snow, in a gusty crosswind, and I learned something else new. Something that perhaps I should have thought of already: the angle of the pizza
oven relative to the wind matters! As the cold wind picked up speed, its angle meant that it was blowing right across the air intake for my fire, and it was sucking all of
the heat out of the back of the oven rather than feeding the flame and allowing the plasma and smoke to pass through the top of the oven. I rotated the pizza oven so that the air blew
into rather than across the oven, but this fanned the flames and increased fuel consumption, so I needed to increase my refuelling rate… there are just so many
variables!
You know what, though? Everything turned out pretty-much okay.
The worst moment of the evening was probably when I took a bite out of a pizza that, it turned out, I’d shunted too-deep into the oven and it had collided with the fire. How do I know?
Because I bit into a large chunk of partially-burned wood. Not the kind of smoky flavour I was looking for.
But apart from that, tonight’s pizza-making was a success. Cooking in a sub-zero wind was hard, but with the help of my excellent sous-chef we churned out half a dozen good pizzas (and
a handful of just-okay pizzas), and more importantly: I learned a lot about the art of cooking pizza in a box of full of burning wood. Nice.
My Facebook account was permanently banned on Wednesday along with all the people who take care of the Cork Skeptics page.
We’re still not sure why but it might have something to do with the Facebook algorithm used to detect far-right conspiracy groups.
…
If you have a Facebook account you should download your information too because it could happen to you too, even though you did nothing wrong. Go here and click the “Create File” button now.
Yeah, I know you won’t do it but you really should.
…
Great advice.
After I got banned from Facebook in 2011 (for using a “fake name”, which is actually my real name) I took a similar line of thinking: I
can’t trust Facebook (or Twitter, or Instagram, or whoever else) to be responsible custodians of my content, so I shan’t. Now, virtually all content I create is hosted
on my WordPress-powered blog, at my own domain, first and foremost… and syndicated copies may appear on various social media.
In a very few instances I go the other way around, producing content in silos and then copying it back to my blog: e.g. my geocaching/geohashing expeditions are posted first to their
respective sites (because it’s easiest and most-practical to do that using their apps, especially “in the field”), but then they get imported into my blog using a custom plugin. If any of these sites closes, deletes my data, adds paid tiers I’m not happy with, or just bans me from my
own account… I’m still set.
Backing up all your social content is a good strategy. Owning it all to begin with is an even better one, IMHO. See also: Indieweb.
This folktale comes from The Big Book of Myths of Shropshire by Sir Colin Ogden. In 1701, a big cat died of “collick”, contracted from a dead fish.
…
This folktale is spoken of in North Yorkshire. In 1520, a witch named Nana Clayton received a bejewelled stool, said to have the power to see right from wrong, from a virgin in the
inn, The Five Horses.
…
I might start using this widget to generate random background detail for fantasy roleplaying games.
I’ve been changing my relationship to being online.
Some of it is keeping in touch with friends who are fascinated by the same sorts of hybrid creations I am. Friends who build things. Friends in different professional communities.
Paying attention when they mention some new discovery or avenue of interest.
Some of it is using an RSS reader to change the cadence and depth of my consumption—pulling away from the quick-hit likes of social media in favor of a space where I can run my
thoughts to their logical conclusion (and then sit on them long enough to consider whether or not they’re true).
…
I wish I could get more people to see the value in the “slow Web”. The participatory Web. The creative Web. The personalised Web.
When you use an app to browse a “stream” in most social media, you’re seeing a list of posts curated to keep you watching, keep you seeing adverts, keep you on the app so that as much
personal data as possible can be leeched from your behaviour. If it feels satisfying and especially if it feels addictive, the social network has done its job, but don’t be fooled: its
job is not to improve social connections – it’s job is to keep you from doing anything else.
You don’t have to use the Web this way. You can subscribe to the content creators and topics that actually interest you. You can get that content on basically any device or medium you
like, or across a mixture: want notifications by email? Slack? IRC? Discord? In a browser? In an app? As-it-happens or digests? You
can filter for what interests you most at any given moment, save content for later, and resharing is supported thanks to an old-school invention called a “URL“. And you’ll see fewer ads and experience less misuse of your behavioural data.
Sure, there’s a learning curve. But it’s worth it. I wish I could get more people to see that.
Dialect could be described as a rules-light, GM-less (it has a “facilitator” role, but they have no more authority than any player on
anything), narrative-driven/storytelling roleplaying game based on the concept of isolated groups developing their own unique dialect and using the words they develop as a vehicle to
tell their stories.
It’s also super-pretty to leaf through and hold.
This might not be the kind of RPG that everybody likes to play – if you like your rules more-structured, for example, or
you’re not a fan of “one-shot”/”beer and pretzels” gaming – but I was able to grab a subset of our usual roleplayers – Alec, Matt R, Penny, and
I – and have a game (with thanks to Google Meet for videoconferencing and Roll20 for the virtual tabletop: I’d have used Foundry but its card support is still pretty terrible!).
The Outpost
A game of Dialect begins with a backdrop – what other games might call a scenario or adventure – to set the scene. We opted for The Outpost, which put the four of us
among the first two thousand humans to colonise Mars, landing in 2045. With help from some prompts provided by the backdrop we expanded our situation in order to declare the “aspects”
that would underpin our story, and then expand on these to gain a shared understanding of our world and society:
Refugees from plague: Our expedition left Earth to escape from a series of devastating plagues that were ravaging the planet, to try to get a fresh start on another
world.
Hostile environment: Life on Mars is dominated by the ongoing struggle for sufficient food and water; we get by, but only thanks to ongoing effort and discipline and
we lack some industries that we haven’t been able to bootstrap in the five years we’ve been here (we had originally thought that others would follow).
Functionalist, duty-driven society: The combination of these two factors led us to form a society based on supporting its own needs; somewhat short of a caste system,
our culture is one of utilitarianism and unity.
Our finished game board, or tableau.
It soon became apparent that communication with Earth had been severed, at least initially, from our end: radicals, seeing the successes of our new social and economic systems,
wanted to cement our differences by severing ties with the old world. And so our society lives in a hub-and-spoke cave system beneath the Martian desert, self-sustaining except for the
need to send rovers patrolling the surface to scout for and collect valuable surface minerals.
In this world, and prompted by our cards, we each developed a character. I was Jeramiah, the self-appointed “father” of the expedition and of this unusual new social order, who
remembers the last disasters and wars of old Earth and has revolutionary plans for a better world here on Mars, based on controlled growth and a planned economy. Alec played Sandy –
“Tyres” to their friends – a rover-driving explorer with one eye always on the horizon and fresh stories for the colony brought back from behind every new crater and mountain. Penny
played Susie, acting not only as the senior medic to the expedition but something more: sort-of the “mechanic” of our people-driven underground machine, working to keep alive the
genetic records we’d brought from Earth and keep them up-to-date as our society eventually grew, in order to prevent the same kinds of catastrophe happening here. “Picker” Ben was our
artist, for even a functionalist society needs somebody to record its stories, celebrate its accomplishments, and inspire its people. It’s possible that the existence of his position
was Jeramiah’s doing: the two share a respect for the stark, barren, undeveloped beauty of the Martian surface.
We developed our language using prompt cards, improvised dialogue, and the needs of our society. But the decades that followed brought great change. More probes began to land from
Earth, more sophisticated than the ones that had delivered us here. They brought automated terraforming equipment, great machines that began to transform Mars from a barren wasteland
into a place for humans to thrive. These changes fractured our society: there were those that saw opportunity in this change – a chance to go above ground and live in the sun, to expand
across the planet, to make easier the struggle of our day-to-day lives. But others saw it as a threat: to our way of life, which had been shaped by our challenging environment; to our
great social experiment, which could be ruined by the promise of an excessive lifestyle; to our independence, as these probes were clearly the harbingers of the long-promised second
wave from Earth.
Even as new colonies were founded, the Martians of the Hub (the true Martians, who’d been here for yams time, lived and defibed here, not these tanning desert-dwellers that
followed) resisted the change, but it was always going to be a losing battle. Jeramiah took his last breath in an environment suit atop a dusty Martian mountain a day’s drive from the
Hub, watching the last of the nearby deserts that was still untouched by the new green plants that had begun to spread across the surface. He was with his friend Sandy, for despite all
of the culture’s efforts to paint them as diametrically opposed leaders with different ideas of the future, they remained friends until the end. As the years went by and more and more
colonists arrived, Sandy left for Phobos, always looking for a new horizon to explore. Sick of the growing number of people who couldn’t understand his language or his art, Ben
pioneered an expedition to the far side of the planet where he lived alone, running a self-sustaining agri-home and exploring the hills until his dying day. We were never sure where
Susie ended up, but it wasn’t Mars: she’d talked about joining humanity’s next big jump, to the moons of Jupiter, so perhaps she’s out there on one of the colonies of Titan or Europa.
Maybe, low clicks, she’s even keeping our language alive out there.
Retrospective
The whole event was a lot of fun and I’m keen to repeat it, perhaps with a different group and a different backdrop. The usual folks know who they are, but if you’re not one of
those and you want in next time we play, drop me a message of some kind.
It’s that time of year again when I comparison-shop for car insurance, and every time I come across a new set of reasons to hate the developers at Confused.com. How do you confuse me?
Let me count the ways.
No means yes
I was planning to enumerate my concerns to them directly, via their contact form, but when I went to do so I spotted this bit of
genius, which clinched it and made me write a blog post instead:
Clicking the word “Yes” means “Yes”. Clicking the word “No” means “Yes” as well.
Turns out that there’s a bit of the old sloppy-paste going on there:
Honestly, I’m used to my unusual name causing trouble by now and I know how to work around it in the way that breaks the fewest systems (I can even usually
get airline tickets without too much difficulty nowadays). But these kinds of (arbitrary) restrictions must frustrate folks like Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe’ekahaunaele.
I guess their developers didn’t realise that this blog post was parody?
Also, that’s not my title!
This one, though, pisses me off:
As everybody knows, there are only six titles, and two of them are “Dr”.
This is a perfect example of why your forms should ask for what you actually want to know, not for what you think people want to tell you. Just ask!
If you want to know my gender, ask for my gender! (I’m a man, by the way.)
I don’t understand why you want to know – after all, it’s been illegal since 2012 to risk-assess/price car insurance differently on the grounds of gender – but maybe you’ve
got a valid reason. Which hopefully you’ll tell me in a tooltip. Like you’re using it as a (terrible checksum) when you check my driving license details, that’s fine!
If you want to know my title, ask for my title! (I prefer not to use one, but if you must use one I’d prefer Mx.)
This ought to be an optional field, of course, and ideally you want a free text input or else you’ll always have missed somebody (Lord, Reverend, Prince, Wing Commander…).
It’s in your interests because I’m totally going to pick at random otherwise. Today I’m a Ms.
Consistency? Never heard of it.
It’s not a big thing, but if you come up with a user interface paradigm like “clicking More… shows more buttons”, you ought to stick to it.
Maybe their internal style guide says “a More… button with three additional options should use buttons, but four additional options should be a drop-down”. But it seems more-likely
that they just don’t have one.
Again, I’m not sure exactly what all of this data is used for, nor why there’s a need to differentiate between married couples and civil partnerships, but let’s just assume this is all
necessary and legitimate and just ask ourselves: why are we using drop-downs now for “More…”? We were using buttons just a second ago!
This was just crying out for a type-in field. But I guess the same developer who did the “Title” question did this one too, and wanted to show off the fancy “more buttons” control
they’d written. (Imaginary style guide be damned!)
What’s my occupation again?
There’s so much to unpack in the “occupation” part of the form that I’m not even sure where to begin. Let’s just pick out a few things:
I never answered a question this hard even in the exams I did when I was a student. Why do we care where students live… except if they’re postgrads? If I’m a mature student
studying a postgraduate course in medicine while living at home with my parents… which of the five possible options should I pick? And, again: what difference could it conceivably
make?
The student thing is just the beginning, though. You can declare up to two jobs, but if the first one is “house person/parent” you can’t have a second one. If you’re self-employed, that
has to be your first job even though the guidance says that the one you spend most time on must be the first one (this kind of thing infuriated me when I used to spend 60% of
my work time employed, 20% self-employed, and 20% studying).
I’m not saying it’s easy to make a form like this. I know from experience that it’s not. I am saying that Confused.com make it look a lot harder than it is.
Well that clears everything up. Also, I think you mean “houseperson”, unless you’re referring to somebody who is half-house/half-person, like some kind of architectural werewolf.
What do you mean, you live with your partner?
At a glance, this sounds like a “poly world problem”, but hear me out:
What you’re seeing here is a reference-identity error. I can’t possibly be living together with somebody as a couple if their marital status isn’t “Living With Partner”.
I put Ruth‘s martial status as married, because she’s married to JTA. But then when it asked how she was related to me, it wouldn’t accept
“Living together (couple)”.
If I put Ruth as the primary policyholder (proposer) though, I don’t even get the option of “living together (couple)” to describe her relationship with me. ‘Cos it’s physically
impossible to have a partner and be married, right?
Even if you don’t think it’s odd that they hide “living with partner” button as an option to describe a married person’s relationship to somebody other than their spouse… you’ve still
got to agree that it’s a little bit odd that they don’t hide the “spouse” button. In other words, this user interface is more-okay with you having multiple spouses than it is
with you having a spouse and an unmarried partner!
And of course this isn’t just about polyamorous folks: there are perfectly “normal” reasons that a person might end up confused by this interface, too. For example a separated (but not
yet divorced) couple, one of whom has a new partner (it’s not even inconceivable that such a pair might share custody of a car). Also interesting is the fact that the form doesn’t
care about the gender of your spouse (it doesn’t ask for “husband” or “wife”) but does care about the gender of your parent, child, or sibling. What gives?
Half a dozen easy fixes. Go for it, Confused.com.
Given that their entire marketing plan for most of the last two decades has been that they reduce customer confusion, Confused.com’s user interface leaves a lot to be
desired. As I’ve mentioned before – and speaking as a web developer that’s been in the game for longer than their company has – it’s not necessarily easy to get this kind of
thing right. But you can improve a form like this, a little at a time. And every little win counts for something: a more-satisfied returning customer, perhaps, or a new word-of-mouth
recommendation.
Or you can just let it languish and continue to have the kind of form that people mock on the public Internet.
It’ll be a year until I expect to comparison-shop for car insurance again: let’s see how they get on, shall we?
Update (21 January 2021): Confused.com Respond!
I didn’t expect to receive any response to this post: most organisations don’t when I call-out the problems with their websites (not least
because I’m more than a little bit sarcastic about it!). I never heard back from the Digital Climate Strike folks, for example,
when I pointed out that their website was a great example of exactly the kind of problem they were protesting. But Confused.com
passed on my thoughts to Product Manager Gareth who took a look at them and gave me a £20 Amazon gift card by way of thanks. Nice one, Confused.com!
On account of the pandemic, I’d expected my fortieth birthday to be a somewhat more-muted affair than I’d hoped.
I had a banner, I got trolled by bagels, and I received as a gift a pizza oven with which I immediately set fire to several pieces of cookware, but I hadn’t expected to be able to do anything like the
“surprise” party of my thirtieth, and that saddened me a little. So imagine my surprise when I come back from an evening walk the day after my birthday to discover than an
actual (remote) surprise party really had been arranged without my knowing!
“Hello, remote guests! What are you doing here?”
Not content with merely getting a few folks together for drinks, though, Ruth and team had gone to great trouble (involving lots of use of the
postal service) arranging a “kit” murder mystery party in the Inspector McClue series – The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame – for us all to play. The story is sort-of
a spiritual successor to The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, which we’d played fifteen years earlier. Minor
spoilers follow.
“Hello, local guests. Wait… why are you all in costumes…?”
Naturally, I immediately felt underdressed, having not been instructed that I might need a costume, and underprepared, having only just heard for the first time that I would be playing
the part of German security sidekick Lieutenant Kurt Von Strohm minutes before I had to attempt my most outrageous German accent.
Fortunately I was able to quickly imbibe a few glasses of champagne and quickly get into the spirit. Hic.
The plot gave me in particular a certain sense of deja vu. In The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, I played a French nightclub owner who later turned out to be an English
secret agent supplying the French Resistance with information. But in The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame I played a Gestapo officer who… also later turned out to be
an English secret agent infiltrating the regime and, you guessed it, supplying the French Resistance.
As she had previously with Sour Grapes, Ruth had worked to ensure that a “care package” had reached each murder mystery guest. Why yes,
it was a boozy care package.
It was not the smoothest nor the most-sophisticated “kit” murder mystery we’ve enjoyed. The technology made communication challenging, the reveal was less-satisfying than some others
etc. But the company was excellent. (And the acting way pretty good too, especially by our murderer whose character was exquisitely played.)
The largest bottle, though, was with us: we opened the Jeroboam of champagne Ruth and JTA had been saving from their
anniversary (they have a tradition involving increasing sizes of bottle; it’s a whole thing; I’ll leave them to write about it someday).
And of course the whole thing quickly descended into a delightful shouting match with accusations flying left, right, and centre and nobody having a clue what was going on. Like all of
our murder mystery parties!
I’m not sure how I feel about Google Meet’s automatic transcription feature. It was generally pretty accurate, but it repeatedly thought that it heard the word “Jewish” being spoken
by those of us who were putting on German accents, even though none of us said that.
In summary, the weekend of my fortieth birthday was made immeasurably better by getting to hang out with (and play a stupid game with) some of my friends despite the lockdown, and I’m
ever so grateful that those closest to me were able to make such a thing happen (and without me even noticing in advance).
Clearly those closest to me know me well, because for my birthday today I received a beautiful (portable: it packs into a bag!) wood-fired pizza oven, which I immediately assembled,
test-fired, cleaned, and prepped with the intention of feeding everybody some homemade pizza using some of Robin‘s fabulous bread dough, this
evening.
Fuelled up with wood pellets the oven was a doddle to light and bring up to temperature. It’s got a solid stone slab in the base which looked like it’d quickly become ideal for some
fast-cooked, thin-based pizzas. I was feeling good about the whole thing.
But then it all began to go wrong.
The confined space quickly heats up to a massive 400-500ºC.
If you’re going to slip pizzas onto hot stone – especially using a light, rich dough like this one – you really need a wooden peel. I own a wooden peel… somewhere: I haven’t seen it
since I moved house last summer. I tried my aluminium peel, but it was too sticky, even with a dusting of semolina or a light layer of
oil. This wasn’t going to work.
I’ve got some stone slabs I use for cooking fresh pizza in a conventional oven, so I figured I’d just preheat them, assemble pizzas directly on them, and shunt the slabs in. Easy as
(pizza) pie, right?
Within 60 seconds the pizza was cooked and, in its elevated position atop a second layer of stone, the crust began to burn. The only-mildy-charred bits were delicious, though.
This oven is hot. Seriously hot. Hot enough to cook the pizza while I turned my back to assemble the next one, sure. But also hot enough to crack apart my old pizza
stone. Right down the middle. It normally never goes hotter than the 240ºC of my regular kitchen oven, but I figured that it’d cope with a hotter oven. Apparently not.
So I changed plan. I pulled out some old round metal trays and assembled the next pizza on one of those. I slid it into the oven and it began to cook: brilliant! But no sooner had I
turned my back than… the non-stick coating on the tray caught fire! I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen.
Hello fire. I failed to respect you sufficiently when I started cooking. I’ve learned my lesson now.
Those first two pizzas may have each cost me a piece of cookware, but they tasted absolutely brilliant. Slightly coarse, thick, yeasty dough, crisped up nicely and with a hint of
woodsmoke.
But I’m not sure that the experience was worth destroying a stone slab and the coating of a metal tray, so I’ll be waiting until I’ve found (or replaced) my wooden peel before I tangle
with this wonderful beast again. Lesson learned.
Can you tell me how to get in touch with your technical/security team @firstdirecthelp? Apparently my report about a vulnerability in your website contains characters that aren’t
“valid” for your sucky feedback form… but it doesn’t say which ones.
When this comic (go read the full thing) came out at the tail end of last year, I thought to myself: yeah, that’s about right.
I’m resharing that on my birthday in a week or so.
‘Cos I’m forty today, and I sort of had a half-baked dream that I’d throw some kind of big party and get people together. My surprise party for my
thirtieth birthday party was an excellent (and much-needed) bash, and I guess I’d thought I’d try to replicate the feel of that, but a decade on (and
not a surprise party… although in the end the last one wasn’t either).
But 2020’s the year that keeps on giving, so I’m postponing my party plans to… “some other time”. And so this comic really spoke to me.
Sara’s back! You might remember a couple of years ago she’d shared with us a comic on her first year in a polyamory! We’re happy to have her back with a slice of life and a frank n’ real
conversation about having kids in her Poly Triad relationship.
This sort of wholesome loving chat is just the thing we need for the start of 2021.
…
Start your year with a delightful comic about the author negotiating possible future children in a queer polyamorous triad, published via Oh Joy Sex Toy. Sara previously published a great polyamory-themed comic via OJST too, which is also worth a look.
While talking about external CSS, he hinted at what I consider to be a distinct fourth way with its own unique use
cases:; using the Link: HTTP header. I’d like to share with you how it works and why I think it needs to be
kept in people’s minds, even if it’s not suitable for widespread deployment today.
Injecting CSS using the Link: HTTP Header
Every one of Jeremy’s suggestions involve adding markup to the HTML document itself. Which makes sense; you almost always
want to associate styles with a document regardless of the location it’s stored or the medium over which it’s transmitted. The most popular approach to adding CSS to a page uses the <link> HTML element, but did you know… the <link> element has a semantically-equivalent HTTP header,Link:.
A webserver adds headers when it serves a document anyway. Adding one more is no big deal.
Why is this important?
This isn’t something you should put on your website right now. This (21-year-old!) standard is still only really supported in Firefox and pre-Blink Opera, so you lose perhaps 95% of the
Web (it could be argued that because CSSought to be considered progressive enhancement, it’s tolerable so long as your
HTML is properly-written).
If it were widely-supported, though, that would be a really good thing: HTTP headers beat meta/link tags for configurability, performance management, and separation of concerns. Need some specific examples? Sure:
here’s what you could use HTTP stylesheet linking for:
You have no idea how many times in my career I’d have injected CSS Link: headers using a reverse proxy server the
standard was universally-implemented. This technique would have made one of my final projects at the Bodleian so much easier…
Performance improvement using aggressively preloaded “top” stylesheets before the DOM parser even fires up.
Stylesheet injection by edge caches to provide regionalised/localised changes to brand identity.
Strong separation of content and design by hosting content and design elements in different systems.
Branding your staff intranet differently when it’s accessed from outside the network than inside it.
Rebranding proprietary services on your LAN without deep inspection, using reverse proxies.
Less-destructive user stylesheet injection by plugins etc. that doesn’t risk breaking icky on-page Javascript (e.g. theme switchers).
Browser detection? 😂 You could use this technique today to detect Firefox. But you absolutely
shouldn’t; if you think you need browser detection in CSS, use this instead.
Unfortunately right now though, stylesheet Link: headers remain consigned to the bin of “cool stylesheet standards that we could probably use if it weren’t for fucking Google”; see also
alternate stylesheets.
My friend still uses a seriously retro digital music player, rather than his phone, to listen to music. It’s not a Walkman or a Minidisc player, I suppose, but it’s still pretty
elderly. But it’s not one of these.
I’m not here to speak about the legality of retaining offline copies of music from streaming services. YouTube Music seems to permit you to do this using their app, but I’ll bet there’s
something in their terms and conditions that specifically prohibits doing so any other way. Not least because Google’s arrangement with rights holders probably stipulates that they
track how many times tracks are played, and using a different player (like my friend’s portable device) would throw that off.
But what I’m interested in is the feasibility. And in answering that question, in explaining how to work out that it’s feasible.
The web interface to YouTube Music shows playlists of songs and streaming is just a click away.
Spoiler: I came up with an approach, and it looks like it works. My friend can fill up their Zune or whatever the hell
it is with their tunes and bop away. But what I wanted to share with you was the underlying technique I used to develop this approach, because it involves skills that as a web
developer I use most weeks. Hold on tight, you might learn something!
youtube-dl can download “playlists” already, but to download a personal playlist requires that you faff about with authentication and it’s a bit of a drag. Just extracting
the relevant metadata from the page is probably faster, I figured: plus, it’s a valuable lesson in extracting data from web pages in general.
Here’s what I did:
Step 1. Load all the data
I noticed that YouTube Music playlists “lazy load”, and you have to scroll down to see everything. So I scrolled to the bottom of the page until I reached the end of the playlist: now
everything was in the DOM, I could investigate it with my inspector.
Step 2. Find each track’s “row”
Using my browser’s debugger “inspect” tool, I found the highest unique-sounding element that seemed to represent each “row”/track. After a little investigation, it looked like
a playlist always consists of a series of <ytmusic-responsive-list-item-renderer> elements wrapped in a <ytmusic-playlist-shelf-renderer>. I tested
this by running document.querySelectorAll('ytmusic-playlist-shelf-renderer ytmusic-responsive-list-item-renderer') in my debug console and sure enough, it returned a number
of elements equal to the length of the playlist, and hovering over each one in the debugger highlighted a different track in the list.
The web application captured right-clicks, preventing the common right-click-then-inspect-element approach… so I just clicked the “pick an element” button in the debugger.
Step 3. Find the data for each track
I didn’t want to spend much time on this, so I looked for a quick and dirty solution: and there was one right in front of me. Looking at each track, I saw that it contained several
<yt-formatted-string> elements (at different depths). The first corresponded to the title, the second to the artist, the third to the album title, and the fourth to
the duration.
Better yet, the first contained an <a> element whose href was the URL of the piece of music.
Extracting the URL and the text was as simple as a .querySelector('a').href on the first
<yt-formatted-string> and a .innerText on the others, respectively, so I ran [...document.querySelectorAll('ytmusic-playlist-shelf-renderer
ytmusic-responsive-list-item-renderer')].map(row=>row.querySelectorAll('yt-formatted-string')).map(track=>[track[0].querySelector('a').href, `${track[1].innerText} -
${track[0].innerText}`]) (note the use of [...*] to get an array) to check that I was able to get all the data I needed:
Lots of URLs and the corresponding track names in my friend’s preferred format (me, I like to separate my music into folders
by album, but I suppose I’ve got a music player with more than a floppy disk’s worth of space on it).
Step 4. Sanitise the data
We’re not quite good-to-go, because there’s some noise in the data. Sometimes the application’s renderer injects line feeds into the innerText (e.g. when escaping an
ampersand). And of course some of these song titles aren’t suitable for use as filenames, if they’ve got e.g. question marks in them. Finally, where there are multiple spaces in a row
it’d be good to coalesce them into one. I do some experiments and decide that .replace(/[\r\n]/g, '').replace(/[\\\/:><\*\?]/g, '-').replace(/\s{2,}/g, ' ') does a
good job of cleaning up the song titles so they’re suitable for use as filenames.
I probably should have it fix quotes too, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Step 5. Produce youtube-dl commands
Okay: now we’re ready to combine all of that output into commands suitable for running at a terminal. After a quick dig through the documentation, I decide that we needed the following
switches:
-x to download/extract audio only: it defaults to the highest quality format available, which seems reasomable
-o "the filename.%(ext)s" to specify the output filename but accept the format provided by the quality requirement (transcoding to your preferred format is a
separate job not described here)
--no-playlist to ensure that youtube-dl doesn’t see that we’re coming from a playlist and try to download it all (we have our own requirements of each song’s
filename)
--download-archive downloaded.txt to log what’s been downloaded already so successive runs don’t re-download and the script is “resumable”
The output isn’t pretty, but it’s suitable for copy-pasting into a terminal or command prompt where it ought to download a whole lot of music for offline play.
This isn’t an approach that most people will ever need: part of the value of services like YouTube Music, Spotify and the like is that you pay a fixed fee to stream whatever you like,
wherever you like, obviating the need for a large offline music collection. And people who want to maintain a traditional music collection offline are most-likely to want to do
so while supporting the bands they care about, especially as (with DRM-free digital downloads commonplace) it’s never been
easier to do so.
But for those minority of people who need to play music from their streaming services offline but don’t have or can’t use a device suitable for doing so on-the-go, this kind of approach
works. (Although again: it’s probably not permitted, so be sure to read the rules before you use it in such a way!)
Step 6. Learn something
But more-importantly, the techniques of exploring and writing console Javascript demonstrated are really useful for extracting all kinds of data from web pages (data scraping), writing your own userscripts, and much more. If there’s
one lesson to take from this blog post it’s not that you can steal music on the Internet (I’m pretty sure everybody who’s lived on this side of 1999 knows that by now), but
that you can manipulate the web pages you see. Once you’re viewing it on your computer, a web page works for you: you don’t have to consume a page in the way that the
author expected, and knowing how to extract the underlying information empowers you to choose for yourself a more-streamlined, more-personalised, more-powerful web.
