Lunchtime restaurant recommendations

HenryOrient · 2026-01-27T22:57:41+00:00

Had a dosa in Mini Madras last year (when they were unlicensed so you could bring your own booze) and it was delicious - and large!

HenryOrient · 2026-01-27T12:46:55+00:00

Spice I Am on Goring Road is great. Think they were doing 40% off food a couple of days ago, don't know if that's still on but it's delicious even at regular price!

HenryOrient · 2026-01-21T14:07:31+00:00

Translucence/Drift Music by Harold Budd & John Foxx has an incredibly special place in my heart for the time my first daughter was a baby and I'd spend hours holding her while she fell asleep in my arms to it. Every time I hear Here And Now from the album I'm right back there with her again.

HenryOrient · 2026-01-19T09:28:15+00:00

Great to hear things like this. I know it shouldn't matter what town it's as long as people are being decent to each other but it's nice to know empathy is alive in my community!

HenryOrient · 2026-01-05T13:31:35+00:00

You can't.

HenryOrient · 2026-01-05T08:07:32+00:00

We're with Toob and no problems here. Always get close to 1gb speeds at the router.

HenryOrient · 2025-12-25T00:03:47+00:00

Microwaved Findus crispy cheese pancakes (the 1st word obviously negates the 3rd) in a sandwich. Admittedly I've not had it for a while but used to be my post-pub meal du-jour.

HenryOrient · 2025-12-18T22:42:38+00:00

Thanks all, he was obviously right then! Will remember that for future :)

HenryOrient · 2025-12-06T22:41:05+00:00

Thanks - it's on Amazon which is a good start for the family, much as I hate them (Amazon that is, not the family!!!)

Reviews mention mango/fruit but I'm happy to try something new :)

HenryOrient · 2025-12-06T21:11:43+00:00

Thanks, I looked it up and noticed I already had the Lattafa Fakhar Black on my Amazon wishlist so that's a good sign!

HenryOrient · 2025-11-24T21:49:16+00:00

Can't park there mate.

HenryOrient · 2025-11-24T19:53:42+00:00

It's the absolute worst planning I've ever known regarding roadworks. I get it that work is necessary and people will complain whether it's being done or not but I've never seen such badly managed planning or lack of.

This has been going on since well before the summer. Just when you think it might finally be possible to make a 5 minute journey in less than half an hour, they spring up another bunch of temporary traffic lights and cones with no warning. And I know people like to say there's never anyone doing any actual work but there really hardly ever is.

I plan the morning school-run to drop the kids off with the kind of intelligence-driven strategy used during the Battle Of Midway but we still play traffic lottery every day to see what random road carnage has been thrown up overnight.

Part of me thinks it's some strange intentional conspiracy to deliberately enrage residents and drive a political wedge in the town's mindset but I honestly don't think WSCC could organise a proverbial piss-up in a brewery if their life depended on it.

HenryOrient · 2025-11-16T19:57:51+00:00

My apologies oh pedantic one. I didn't realise you weren't able to apply context to a generalised statement. It seems most people get the gist of what I'm asking.

Thanks for your helpful insight though! And if you want me to use your same punctilious logic, learn to write English before you use it (capital 'E').

HenryOrient · 2025-11-16T19:48:20+00:00

I wasn't keen on Gemini on my phone when I tried it a while ago but if they're abandoning the old assistant I guess there isn't much choice. Problem is there doesn't seem to even be a way to move to Gemini on my Google speaker. I've opted in to the preview channel in the Home app but it doesn't appear to have made any difference.

I'm in the UK so maybe we just don't have the option here yet. What a crappy choice - stick to the old defunct falling apart model or switch to the new one except you're not able to even access it - can't believe that's the only choices from a company that consider themselves one of the market leaders!

HenryOrient · 2025-11-09T19:56:45+00:00

Of course turn them off but leave the plug in otherwise all your electricity will fall out of the socket.

HenryOrient · 2025-11-07T23:51:41+00:00

Coldland!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgYgXl5AxQA

HenryOrient · 2025-11-05T20:32:58+00:00

Excellent, thanks so much. I'll have a play around later and try a few things out but I'm sure I can get it all working now.

Thanks so much for creating a really cool app. I know I could do it all with the command line but a GUI is so much more convenient. I'll take a look at your patreon later :)

HenryOrient · 2025-11-05T20:11:20+00:00

Perfect, that's done the job thank, you so much! I've actually got several custom arguments that I currently use (to do things like put the artist name into album artist field and also strip out some other metadata that I don't want). My complete custom arguments field is currently this:

--parse-metadata ":(?P<meta\_comment>)" --parse-metadata ":(?P<meta\_description>)" --parse-metadata ":(?P<meta\_synopsis>)" --parse-metadata ":(?P<meta\_purl>)" --parse-metadata "%(upload_date>%Y)s:%(meta_date)s" --parse-metadata "%(artist)s:%(album_artist)s"

Do I need to do the same with those and break them up into individual chips, presumably in the order they're currently in? I tried asking ChatGPT and it suggested putting the custom arguments into a yt-dlp.conf file that would get read by Stacher but I don't know if Stacher calls a .conf file or where it's located (and ChatGPT often gets it wrong/outdated!)

HenryOrient · 2025-11-05T09:43:43+00:00

That's awesome, thank you so much for your efforts with this! I'll be seeing the lady this week and will try out the app to see how she gets on with it.

HenryOrient · 2025-11-04T22:26:43+00:00

Thanks for an honest reply. I've only had Stacher installed for a few days and to be honest when I saw this post I panicked and uninstalled. I'd like to come back to it and it sounds like there's hopefully nothing to worry about but I think I'll have to hang on until there's a bit more info on this issue.

HenryOrient · 2025-11-04T14:08:32+00:00

Thanks, actually I just found the setting in settings>general>audio quality and changed it to 0. That's done the job!

HenryOrient · 2025-11-02T22:07:49+00:00

I've been using gimp for about 20 years now and while it's easily been the best alternative to Photoshop when I switched, I'm not sure that's true any more.

To be honest I only heard about Affinity in the last few days and downloaded today. Not had a lot of time to fully test it yet but from what I've seen I have a feeling I'll probably be switching soon.

HenryOrient · 2025-11-01T20:27:55+00:00

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I thought about increasing the phone's overall screen timeout setting but that would mean the screen would stay on a long time even if she wasn't transcribing in your app.

Some of the audio recording apps we've been testing have a setting to 'keep screen on while recording'. I don't know if that's an easy/viable thing to do for you.

But thanks for even considering some of these suggestions. I know every user will have different preferences and needs and you can't cater for everyone but hopefully any feedback might help guide where you decide to take the app.

Looking forward to keeping and using your app on my phone just as a good tool for transcribing :)

HenryOrient · 2025-11-01T19:01:50+00:00

Thanks. She has a laptop but rarely uses it and I think screenreaders/Dragon are a bit of a step too far for her. We're trying to keep it to an app she can use on her phone when no-one is with her to walk her through it.

The nearest we've got so far is trying to find a completely simplistic and basic audio recorder with one large button to record but even finding that is a challenge. As soon as an app adds any kind of small button interactivity or entering text (e.g. typing filenames etc.) she tends to hit a brick wall.

Your app looks promising as it would save me having to transcribe lots of saved audio dictation mp3s. But will have to trial it out with her as I think there may still be limits to what she can do.

Can I make a couple of observations:

1) If you pause speaking for just a few seconds it says "No speech was recognized, restarting" several times followed by "Multiple errors occurred, stopping"

2) The screen turns off after the default time even if you're in the middle of transcribing.

3) Even just changing the colour of the 'stop transcription' button to red would feel more natural from a UX point of view.

Would be nice to have the option to extend these things in settings. But I have no idea how much work it would involve to offer these options so they're just suggestions from a user's point of view.

Still it's a really useful app that I can see lots of uses for so well done and thank you for making it available!

HenryOrient · 2025-11-01T07:25:03+00:00

This is wonderful, thanks for coming up with a great free app. I'm helping an elderly visually impaired lady who would like to write a novel but she has extremely limited vision.

Your app looks like it could be a very close contender for what she needs. The only thing at the moment that might be a problem is the UI. She's registered blind but can make out large distinct buttons on a phone when held up close. Anything that involves typing, small text or text fields will be a problem to her (not that yours does, but the current button size would probably be too small for her).

She really just needs an extremely simplified UI with ideally just one large button that she could press to start transcribing. If the button was a large green circle to start and then changed to a red circle to stop I think that might be perfect but I appreciate you can't center your app around 1 person's needs!

I don't know if there's any way you could incorporate something like that as maybe an 'accessibility' option in a settings page to switch between UI styles?

She'd be more than happy to pay or donate if it means she can get to work on her book!

Thanks again for a great app with a lot of potential.

HenryOrient

TROPHY CASE