Notices by James Cridland (james@bne.social)

I’m not allowed to talk about iOS26 - because if you download the developer beta, one of the terms you agree to is confidentiality (which makes me wonder about those YouTubers breathlessly covering every little thing).

The one thing I’ll say is that the changes to Apple Podcasts, particularly the multi-speed playback that can be saved specific to each show, is a game changer. So I’m back on this for now. Let’s see how well this works as a daily driver.

Spotify, publicly: "these selected creators who add video see amazing increases in consumption!"

Also Spotify, to selected creators: "if you add video, we'll give you $5000 in ad money to market it"

https://podnews.net/update/spotify-free-money

A dumb question: Podnews has over 500 citations on Wikipedia (yay!) but has no Wikipedia page. That might be nice. Are there any Podnews supporters who might be able to help there?

Exciting, @samsethi - my phone has your fancy app on it. All works so far…

This @tailscale post from Avery Pennarun made me switch Podnews's log-in cookie from daily to "permanent" (in fact, it's yearly). Very good article.

https://tailscale.com/blog/frequent-reath-security

My latest Radioland radio trends newsletter - a fancy title in Latin which won't do much for the SEO. Also mentions Bauer closing every radio station outside of London I've worked for, Radiodays Asia, 612 ABC Radio Brisbane, and BBC Radio 2. You're welcome!

https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/meliora-consilia/

@cubicgarden Interesting bit on Techgrumps regarding "self-hosting". While you were talking about your own hardware, @wendyg was talking about self-hosting her own stuff with a provider. Both equally valid, of course.

My blog is "self-hosted" but also it isn't: it is self-hosted because I'm not using Medium or Blogger or whoever; but it's not self-hosted because it's using flat-file Amazon S3 with a CDN in front of it. My Bitcoin node is actually self-hosted (using Umbrel on a Pi in my house), which offers much the same apps as @yunohost which you mentioned.

I don't know what the words are for "self-hosted but not on my metal" vs "self-hosted on my own hardware"; I'm nervous about self-hosting on my own metal for things that require constant security updates; and I think there are interesting reasons to do both.

(I'd also question your assertion that "it is getting more popular now". Citation needed!)

I think it's now clear that Google is lying to me. The latest about the odd podcast downloads - all coming from its audio news service. https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/odd-podcast-downloads/

Woot! Pocket Casts has been updated - now with "podroll" creator recommendations. It also supports the funding tag, as seen here.

My big story for later today... how disappointing.

https://podnews.net/article/radio-canada-versus-open-podcasting

#podcasting #podcastingchannel

CBC just called the Canadian election for the Liberals. So that's nice.

(If you're #auspol what they really mean is the good people, rather than the conservatives, who are the equivalent of the nasty, racist liberals we have here, who you will not be voting for on Saturday because you're a good person).

This is very cool - using OP3's real-time API, it's a live look at who is listening and where they are. https://earport.vercel.app

Amusingly, Indonesia and Malaysia is full of people listening to Podnews, because of Google...

Anyway - one for @js

Hurray for Pocket Casts - they now support the podcast:funding tag. Simple to support, and the fact that they have got this through Apple compliance hopefully means that @marcoarment might consider bringing it back to Overcast as well. (Safety in numbers!)

@js Mozilla Firefox at 9.7% of all podcast downloads should surely be ringing some alarm bells? As a browser, it's running at a market share of 4%, and that's almost entirely desktop, rather than mobile. And why the big jump at the end of 2003? (Podnews Weekly Review has a share of 0.33% for Firefox).

One for @samsethi and @dave - the excellent @mijustin has added Bluesky podcast comment integration to Transistor. They pull the comments back from Bluesky to Transistor websites, too.

One small step further, and they could also support the socialInteract tag. And another small step, and they can put the comments in an RSS feed, using the <comments> tag, for podcast apps to display easily, as per my suggestion here: https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/discussions/680

(Thought for @js - is there a simple piece of code for "turn this Bluesky discussion thread into an RSS feed", or a service to do that? I wonder if I could build something to pull that from my auto-postings on Bluesky for the Podnews Daily? I bet I could.)

@glynmoody Rather good. I was last there in 2007. I loved the solitude at the top of the rock. It’s a funny old place, as you say. (The village the other side of the rock from the town, Catalan Bay, was nice. And it was fun to walk into La Linea, if only to walk across the border to a different country).

Have some photographs! #travel

The view from the kitchen window seems to have something magnificently extra today.

@jwz You didn’t. And it’s pretty clear that I haven’t been heard! Carry on.

@jwz There is a hairdresser which is cash-only (to make some kind of political point). It is very close to where I live. It did me a good haircut the first time I went in, only to discover that I had to go and find some cash, and the only cash machine near it was broken, and in the end I had to send him money via a bank transfer,p, and it was an aggravating, time-sucking, nuisance.

I chose there and then to never go into a place that doesn’t let me pay the way I want to pay.

(I haven’t paid for anything with cash since about 2018).

@tchambers @dave @johnspurlock It is not accurate as I understand it, in terms of how Apple charts work. Apple’s are trending charts, which reward recent subscriptions. https://podnews.net/article/understanding-podcast-statistics