Marco Dengel

BookPlayer is a really nice audio player for iOS, not only for audiobooks. It comes with all features needed for longer (offline) audio sessions, incl. lock screen & control center playback, playback speed, chapters, CarPlay and Apple Watch stand-alone support (Pro).

To import audio files, BookPlayer has support for AirDrop, the Files app, AudiobookShelf, Jellyfin and there is also a simple iOS url scheme:

bookplayer://download?url=$(FILE_URL)

I fully automated the process of recording a daily radio show (on a Raspberry Pi), upload it to pCloud, create a public link and then send a push notification to my iPhone via ntfy.sh.

When I tap on the push notification, it automatically runs a Siri shortcut on my iPhone which extracts the raw pcloud download url and forwards it to the BookPlayer app by using the url scheme mentioned above. As a result, I can listen to this daily radio show on my iPhone with just one simple tap.

In more detail:

1. record radio show with ffmpeg (via cron)

TODAY=$(date +'(%a) %d-%m-%Y')
TARGET_FILE="/output/radioeins_Der_schoene_Morgen_$TODAY$.mp3"
ffmpeg -y -i $STREAM_URL -c copy -t 04:58:00 -metadata title="Der schöne Morgen - $TODAY" -metadata artist="radioeins vom rbb" -metadata album="Der schöne Morgen" $TARGET_FILE

2. Upload to pCloud

fileiId=$(curl -s -F "file=@$TARGET_FILE" "https://eapi.pcloud.com/uploadfile?folderid=47110815&auth=$authToken" | jq -r '.metadata[0].fileid')

3. Get pcloud public link

pcloudLink=$(curl -s "https://eapi.pcloud.com/getfilepublink?fileid=$fileiId&auth=$authToken" | jq -r '.link')

4. Send push notification to iPhone (with Siri shortcut link)

curl -s -X POST 
-H "Title: radioeins vom rbb" 
-H "Click: shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=pcloud-to-BookPlayer&input=text&text=$pcloudLink" 
-H "Tags: loud_sound" 
-d "Die heutige Ausgabe von 'Der schöne Morgen' liegt jetzt in der pCloud. (Tap to play)" 
https://ntfy.sh/******

Siri Shortcut Download: pcloud-to-BookPlayer

yt-dlp is the swiss army knife when it comes to downloading videos (not only!) from YouTube.

In order to get the best compatible format for the Apple ecosystem, I’m always adding a static -f argument. It makes sure to download the best possible H.264/5 video and m4a audio and avoids using webm or opus codecs.

Example:

yt-dlp -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4' "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=******"

In order to check all available formats and codecs, use the -F argument.

Put together, this gives us:

• Small, cheap hardware (1-7€ per tag)
• One year of battery life from a single coin battery
• (semi) complete control of our data (it does flow through Apple’s servers, but it’s encrypted and not connected to any account)

Source: reddit

Out of curiosity I made a short speed comparison with a Raspberry Pi 4 running on the internal SD card vs. an external SSD (via USB3). Fun fact: the 256 GB SSD I’m using is only 4€ more expensive than the SanDisk SD with the same size. Write speed of a 400 MB file:

SD (SanDisk microSDHC UHS-I):
419430400 bytes (419 MB, 400 MiB) copied, 32.6095 s, 12.9 MB/s

​SSD (SSK 256GB portable):
419430400 bytes (419 MB, 400 MiB) copied, 1.93642 s, 217 MB/s

And this is only plain write speed. Not to mention the huge general I/O speed bump and durability. Internal NVMe SSDs are even faster.

Der Film rückt die Geschichte des erfolgreichsten Albums “Disintegration” von The Cure ins Zentrum, das 1989 den Nerv einer Welt kurz vor der Zeitenwende trifft – und ergründet eines der erstaunlichsten Phänomene der Musikgeschichte.

arte Mediathek

This is the best tv show I’ve seen in a while. In Germany it’s available on Sky.

This is probably the best video I’ve ever seen about photography and the exposure triangle (Aperture, Shutter speed and ISO). It is clear, concise, easy to understand and gives real world examples.