Is this the Hogwarts Express? 🚂🧙

At least we had the perfect weather at that moment (every five minutes it changed between sun and rain) and also a perfect place for a nice view of the Jacobite Steam Train passing the Glenfinnan Viaduct.

GoToSocial seems like a promising alternative to Mastodon. It’s written in Go (👍 in my opinion), lightweight and pretty good documented so far. It’s still “alpha software” but seems to make great progress. In the past, I self hosted a microblog.pub instance and then after some time without any Fediverse profile other than my blog, which has ActivityPub support as well, signed up at Fosstodon to be able to reply to blog comments from the Fediverse. I already set up an instace of GTS, but will probably wait to use it as my primary Fediverse profile until GTS enters the beta stage sometime in 2023 according to the roadmap.

Yesterday, I fixed GoBlog to be able to be followed by GoToSocial users. I didn’t know that some ActivityPub servers require requests to get information about the remote actor to be signed. But that should work now. 😄

Someone gave me the tip (thank you!) to use VLC to play YouTube videos with my Chromecast. Although it is possible to stream YouTube videos directly in the VLC Android app itself, it somehow doesn’t work in combination with the output to the Chromecast. An alternative is of course to first use NewPipe to download a video and then play it on the Chromecast using VLC.

However, I have now found another possibility. In Windows, you can also use Microsoft Edge to stream YouTube videos to the Chromecast. There, they are not opened with the YouTube app (which constantly shows me ads), but only with a video player. I have now tested this with a few videos and did not see any ads. Whether uBlock Origin also plays a role in the Edge browser, I have not tested.

Update: I came across SmartTubeNext, which does exactly what I want. YouTube Premium and Premium Lite are not options for me, as Premium Lite is not available in my country and I don’t need the music in Premium, as Deezer is my music streaming service of choice.

I regularly watch videos on YouTube via my Chromecast with Google TV. But I feel like I’m seeing more and more commercials. It’s almost like private television, where every video is interrupted every few minutes with advertising. And most of the time it’s two commercials in a row that can’t be skipped. I think I have to think about an alternative solution for YouTube…