Oolite Bulletins

This program tonight may be interesting.

Thanks for the heads-up. Recording it on Sky+.

I've just noticed the programme after it is called 'Do we need the moon?' and also might be interesting.

definitely interesting.

what's this BBC iPlayer thing ?
Does it mean the video is freely accessible by webbrowser or e.g. VLC ? Or do I need some horrible special BBC soft and some license or so ?

If a video is with little to no action then my PC can sometimes actually play it, else I only get the sound and all (video) frames skipped.

snork wrote:

what's this BBC iPlayer thing ? Does it mean the video is freely accessible by webbrowser or e.g. VLC ?

In Britain, the BBC iPlayer is free and requires no license (or special software) if viewed after the program has aired.
How it is in Europe/Germany, I do not know.

cool, thanks.

Then I guess it will be usable here, too. Now it is up to my PC, if it can handle the stream.

The BBC iPlayer is a really handy thing, especially for people like me who have no television. I rarely watch anything tbh, but for the occasional program like this, it's invaluable. I've been keeping track of news of the Antikythera Mechanism for years, as it fascinates me.

Thargoid wrote:

is only available to UK IP addresses,

For a second there, I read that as UKIP which is a very different animal.

Thargoid wrote:

iPlayer (at least the TV part of it) is only available to UK IP addresses, due to how the BBC is funded. So unless your IP address happens to be a UK one, it won't let you watch anything on it.

I run into this problem regularly.. fortunately, there are UK-based proxy servers that can help. .

now I am annoyed with myself, resp. with our shared-TV-channel situation*. :grumpy:

It was on Germnan TV 3 weeks ago (arte.tv), at a time where we do not have arte available (shared TV-channel), but whenever they have sth. on TV, they also have it on the net - for a week.

But I do not look through the program for times when I can't watch it (on TV) anyway, so I missed it. Ah, well, reading about it is interesting, too.

(* I mean like e.g. nickelodeon in the daytime, comedy central in the evening and night -on the same "channel")

El Viejo wrote:

For a second there, I read that as UKIP which is a very different animal.

looked that up, had to laugh out loud at the suggestion for road charges for non-UK trucks on UK-roads.
It is a popular populist subject every summer on the continent, but to also find it used in Britain is just too funny.

It was absolutely fascinating. Some guys saying that it was beyond the engineering abilities of the time and one guy making a similar mechanism using hand-tools. Hats off to Archimedes.

Thargoid wrote:

iPlayer (at least the TV part of it) is only available to UK IP addresses, due to how the BBC is funded. So unless your IP address happens to be a UK one, it won't let you watch anything on it.

For those who are in the UK, another option is TVCatchUp for watching live TV (any channel that's on Freeview).

And I didn't suggest at this point to google "Expat Shield"...

However, there is iPlayer for iOS which also works in Germany and some other countries. You have to pay for access but at least you do get access if you want it.

Two years ago, I was in a play that had a scene about this thing. We put in some research and it was really interesting.

The premise was that someone was building the machine, and then a series of ancient Greek management execs would come in and say "we would like it to do this" or "hey, wouldn't it be great if it could do that" and the whole thing ended up so complicated and contrived that no-one could understand how the thing worked.

Hey, since when do we have this 5 character minimum length for posts? And I had already been wondering why El Viejo <chortles> so much