spaghettifythis

Here in NZ we have a wonderful publicly-funded ad-free radio station RNZ! (Radio New Zealand.)

The main channel "RNZ National" is a mix of news bulletins [1], panels featuring interesting people [2], and episodes of the numerous high-quality podcasts they produce [3].

The really channel one is "RNZ Concert" through - it's just msuic. They have a best-in-class audio team who record concerts (e.g. choirs, orchestra, or anything else) as well as getting famous artists in to their studio to record their own music or a cover. Played for free all the time with no ads! It was super exciting as a kid in a community choir when we got the chance to be recorded by RNZ, and then find out roughly when it would be on so we sat by the radio in anticipation all day waiting for it to play. It also made getting to the finals of choir nationals [4] extra exciting knowing your performance there would be played nationwide.

[1]: Interestingly, despite us having reasonably good private competition for news here, the government-funded news source was recently votes the most trusted in the country - I reckon it's because they aren't beholden to advertisers: https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/17/rising-trust-should-keep-p... [2]: Regularly including top politicians like the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, top academics, CEOs, investors, and the like [3]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcasts [4]: Yes competitive classical choir is a thing here, and it's treated just as seriously as rugby or any other code. You might travel will your high school choir all the way across the country to perform at Finale. https://nzcf.org.nz/events/nzcf-events/big-sing

My main gripe with this is the pretty shocking performance on old "supported" iOS devices (e.g. an iPhone SE 2). When you have too many tabs, or watch more than a couple videos it just starts freezing and will sometimes crash the phone - you get an unresponsive sideshow screen for a bit before it goes to the lock screen with fingerprint login disabled (like after a restart). I can only assume they've accidentally found a way to make webkit leak memory?

Though given most people use gmail or outlook, the two main oauth providers (Google and Microsoft) will know anyway

Also worth checking out, this guy's Open-Source 60hz e-ink screen: [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4

"Is the text too readable? Colors too pleasant? Not enough whimsy?"

I found text in the theming section quite funny. I think most custom themes for many different pieces of software manage to provide solutions to at least the first two of those questions.

Not op, but I often do say 'whilst' out loud. It feels more structured and certain than 'while', which feels floppier as a word.

I think the prompts being "easy" in this way is sort of the point. An applicant can demonstrate their mastery of language and the topics they select, producing an essay that goes far beyond the obvious leading direction (which most of the questions have).

The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.

Same problem here in NZ - they only ship to AUS, despite lots of people here being keen on their laptops. I know multiple people who have made it a point to time a trip to AUS with buying a Framework so they can pick it up while they're over there.

As an aside, this company's services seem incredibly sketchy - they let you have fake residential or commercial addresses so you can pretend to have a US office or other address

lmao there's an XSS popup on the main page

My MTG playgroup kept taking too long to play rounds because of indecision on which cards to play, and we consistently ran out of time part-way through games.

A proven solution to this problem already existed - chess clocks. However, those only work for two-player games, and we play games with the number of players ranging from 2 to 6.

So I made a little web app that's like a chess clock but supports several players rather than just 2. It's designed to be used on a phone and put between the players on the table. Your turn ends when you tap your clock. There's also a pause button for during combat so that you can't unfairly run down another player's time while deciding which creatures to block with. The KO button distributes a defeated player's remaining time amongst the players who are still in the game.

Made with 100% organic, home grown typescript. No React in sight.

https://mtg.viggers.net/