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You have uBlock Origin or another ad blocker installed, their cookie banner disables scrolling but your ad blocker is blocking the cookie banner (same thing happened to me)

Same here with uBlock on iOS. This happens every now and then, not too often. But when it does, I usually decide the page is probably not worth reading anyway.

> Here’s the best part: the battery lasts for years

I wonder how many years?

> The battery lasts for up to years of average use.

...how many?

> a battery that lasts for years

How many years does the battery last?

> That’s up to 2 years of usage.

Ah.

I guess "2" is the absolute minimum that you could describe as "years".

It's a shame because it does look like an interesting proposition. It might be more compelling if it was "send your ring back to us for recycling - and we'll send you a new one". I doubt the economics would work at this price point though.


I really don’t want to wear a battery in that form factor.

Sure a phone or watch can burst into flames, but at least you’ve got a chance of dropping it or taking it off.

I also don’t see the bother of talking to your wrist rather than your hand.


Given it's doing nothing when not activated, I would imagine it heavily depends on how often you're using it. Still would be nice to be able to say "1,000 hours of recording" or something like that

It says 12-15 hours of recording in the article.

FTA

>No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.


> After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.

this is ridiculous...


I have an 'Ambient Radio' channel on https://ambiph.one, my soundscape generator: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+Radio-bf100

There are some great less-well-known artists on there - if you tap the album art it'll link you to their Bandcamp if they have one


Something doesn't have to be perfect to be better


That's not the argument that was being made.


Well the argument certainly wasn't "nobody dies of cancer in places with universal healthcare"



Are there any software-oriented licenses in the same spirit as CC BY-NC? I'm aware that it likely wouldn't be a true Open Source license if you completely prohibit commercial use, but I've looked for a license like that in the past and didn't have any luck


The GPL is pretty close and still true Open Source. The GPL is technically closest to CC BY-SA, but the virality of the GPL (or especially the AGPL if you like/trust it, which I don't but that's a longer conversation) has been enforced enough that a lot of companies, especially smaller ones with fewer lawyers are wary of it/try to avoid it, but even a lot of big companies with many lawyers can be very conservative about how they use or don't use GPL software.

But yeah, both FSF and OSI see some commercial use as a freedom a Free/Open Source license should have so if you want a truly non-commercial license both will tell you it is not by definition a Free/Open Source license.


He mentions in an earlier blog post [0] that the audio files are behind Cloudflare already so if Cloudflare did its job so I think the actual bandwidth impact on the origin server should have been pretty limited. Hopefully he'd turned on the option to ignore the query string to avoid the cache being bypassed.

I run a similar audio-heavy site [1] that's reached the front page of HN, also behind Cloudflare - the traffic spiking to terabytes a day is a bit of a shock at first but if everything's configured properly CF works well

[0] https://mynoise.net/blog.php#landed

[1] https://ambiph.one


Really neat! If you're interested in adding clouds to your basemap I built a service [0] which generates free, almost-live cloudmaps (with alpha channel or precomposited onto a Blue Marble image) as part of my own ISS tracker project

[0] https://github.com/matteason/live-cloud-maps


Wow, this is pretty legendary work: https://iss.matteason.co.uk/


Oh man your work is amazing. Just saw this https://tf230.matteason.co.uk amazing usage of gov.uk design system. They should make this official :D


That's really cool! Starred so I can find it later, might be challenging putting it on the esp32 but if there's an easy way to downsize the images then it should be do-able. Thanks!


I had a quick look - it's sample-based (eg organ has 4 preloaded samples, http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/sounds/organ440.mp3 plus 110, 220 and 880Hz variants), and different notes are created by adjusting the playbackRate of the closest sample

It's also all just vanilla JS which probably helps keep it snappy


It's actually surprisingly hard to get iOS Safari to keep playing audio with the screen off.

When I made https://ambiph.one I ended up having to route everything through a MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode to trick Safari into thinking it's a livestream, which is apparently the only type of audio allowed to play in the background

Minimal demo here if it's helpful for anyone: https://codepen.io/matteason/pen/VYwdzVV


The solution I found after approximately two months of struggling with this problem: you have to generate an audio file that is a few seconds of silence, play it on a loop, and play it at the same time as the actual audio file you want to play (via separate audio elements, or an AudioContext). Specifically I believe you need to make sure the silence is “playing” at track boundaries for the real audio, so there is never a single moment where your webapp stops playing audio.


How do you even accept to use/and develop for a device that forces you to do that?


Apple makes webapps/PWAs hard because they want you to make a native app instead.


Ohhh that's interesting, so the root cause for my workaround working might be that the "live" audio node that I stream everything else to effectively never stops


Does iOS let you play multiple audio at the same time?


I have been able to have multiple streams on iOS, but not easily. GarageBand might be able to do this via imports, but I’m not sure it it lets you queue/play multiple samples simultaneously like it will on macOS iirc.

If you are playing music through Spotify in the background, foreground audio in Snapchat still plays normally while recording and playing back just recorded snaps, as well as snaps or memories you have prepared earlier. Sometimes you need to start playback on Spotify again via Control Center, because Snapchat steals focus or takes priority for audio output or something, but it is just part of the jankyness of this workflow, which is probably not intentionally designed to be used the way I use it. If you combine these quirks with Screen Recording, you can make simple audio loops by recording simultaneously via Snapchat and iOS Screen Recording, then use those videos as uploads to Snapchat to stack the loops over each over by selectively queuing them, with audio from a video in Snapchat playing at the same time as audio from Spotify.

It’s kind of a weird workflow, but it’s neat that it works. It feels intentional, as most apps stop background audio playback when starting recording on the same device, but at least Snapchat does not do this, so it’s at least technically possible.


It works on iOS 18. Safari’s audio support was pretty rough on earlier versions, especially <17, but I didn’t need to support those for my project.


Hey Matt! I've been a fan of Ambiphone for a while and I see your comments on HN surprisingly often. I've been trying to build a different web audio player with inspiration taken from yours. I haven't figured out the screen off audio thing, so thank you so much for sharing this demo!!!


Thanks so much, that's really cool to hear! Let me know if you ever hit any more problems, I've been meaning to blog about a bunch of problems I had to work round in various browsers but haven't got round to it yet, so happy to answer any questions


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