Ciaran’s Random Writings

I’m totally bored of this subject now, but I’ve been told that if I want my story made into a Hollywood blockbuster I can’t omit the happy ending so here we are:

Nationwide Autocentres, Harrogate

Summary: Hurrah

I know I shouldn’t have gone anywhere near one of these places after the experience at their Manchester branch, and the price quoted at the Leeds one. However, we’ve taken our various cars here many times and they’ve never put a foot wrong. At a cost of £69, I drove in, the wheel bearing got fitted in no time, and I drove away happily listening to the engine purring rather than the hub grinding away. The end.

(I really wasn’t taking any chances this time mind you - I went with a shiny new set of bearings in the glove compartment in case of any shennanigans, but they weren’t required.)

This ought to be the last mention of wheel bearings for a long time, but unfortunately the same wheel bearing on Nibby’s car is making an unpleasant noise now. With any luck though, there will be nothing worth writing about that.

I just want a wheel bearing replaced. This should be simple but it’s turned out to be a nightmare, more like a round-up of the decades’s best clips from Garages from Hell. If, and it seems unlikely, such a TV programme doesn’t exist, I’ve got enough material for the first few episodes already.

(more…)

I ‘need’ to write some Shoutcast stream discovery code. It took some tracking down, but happily the procedure could hardly be any simpler as it’s just a case of retrieving XML via HTTP as follows:

1. http://www.shoutcast.com/sbin/newxml.phtml returns a list of genres
2. http://www.shoutcast.com/sbin/newxml.phtml?genre=XXXXXX returns a list of streams for the given genre
3. http://www.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=NNN returns a playlist for the given ID, taken from the previous response

The above covers radio streams. There is a similar protocol for TV streams, which I haven’t figured out fully yet, but I will do when I get around to implementing this.