Month: January 2023

In this post I said, “As of now, I probably won’t resubmit [Edge Cases] to Apple Podcasts”.

I wasn’t going to.

But now I have.

And the details might be mildly interesting to someone.

I needed to log in to my Apple Podcasts Connect account anyway, for the sake of the podcast I’m on that we’re moving from the Incomparable.

Once I logged in, I saw the deactivated Edge Cases podcast. What the heck, I said to myself. Let’s try submitting it now that the files are back up, and see if it works.

Nope!

But the only error was that we needed a larger artwork file.

Here’s the original (shrunk down so it doesn’t disrupt the flow of this article):

It’s just the title “edge cases” in white text on black, 512 by 512 pixels.

Apple’s error message said it needed to be 3,000 by 3,000 pixels.

I could have just taken the existing file and upscaled it, but I wanted to do better than that.

Whatever original art file Wolf used to generate this is lost in the seas of time. So to make a bigger version, I’d have to recreate it.

First problem: the font is unusual. I didn’t know what it was, and it didn’t appear to exist on my computer.

The Internet to the rescue! There are apparently websites out there which take an image, and spit back out the names of the fonts that are used in it.

I’m going to try not to think about how free websites like this make their money, probably by taking the image and uploading it to evil ChatGPT artwork generators, but hey, free service.

Here’s the one I used: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator

It told me that the font was “Gara”. Yeah, I definitely didn’t have that one already. Another Internet search told me that I could indeed download the Gara font for free from a variety of websites. The one I chose was FontZillion: https://www.fontzillion.com/fonts/iaki-marqunez/gara

(It apparently was added to FontZillion a quarter century ago.)

So, first of all, I downloaded the font files and added them to my Mac via the Font Book application.

Then I went about recreating the logo, in Acorn. I upscaled the old image into a new 3,000 x 3,000 Acorn image file, and typed in, resized, and arranged the new text until it matched as much as it was going to. If you squint at this animated gif long enough, you’ll see the minute changes that occur when I switch from the old file to the new one:

I uploaded the new file to the https://edgecases.com website with the same name as the old one, waited a bit for that change to propagate, and bam, the next time I submitted the podcast to Apple, it was accepted.

Case closed!

Let’s talk podcasts!

First, the website for Edge Cases, the developer podcast that Wolf Rentzsch and I hosted some years ago, is back online — in case you even noticed it was down.

To be clear: the podcast is still over. Apologies, anyone hoping for new episodes!

As of now, I probably won’t resubmit it to Apple Podcasts, so sorry if you wanted to find it there. You can always use the RSS feed link that’s on the website directly.

Second, let’s talk about my other podcasts.

I was on Team Cockroach, a podcast about the NBC comedy The Good Place, on the Incomparable podcast network. This podcast is also over (as is the TV show!) but if you’re looking for per-episode reviews and season wrap-ups from me and some lovely friends of mine, you might want to check it out.

A podcast I’m still on is Stargate SG-Fun, a podcast about the late-90s/early-2000s science fiction show Stargate SG-1, that (a) is currently also on the Incomparable podcast network, and (b) has been on hiatus. Both of those things are going to change! We’ll be switching to our own standalone website shortly, and will have new episodes up soon. I’ll let you know when that happens. While the TV show is long finished, me and some other lovely friends are still working our way through reviews of the noteworthy episodes of it, and are currently on season 2.

So there’s lots more to come.