Introducing The Smega-Drive Features Posted by Jonathan Capps on 19th November 2021, 10:00 A few years ago an enthusiastic young fan of the site called Seb Patrick laid a challenge at our door. “Why”, he scoused, “doesn’t Red Dwarf have a meme generator website similar to the brilliant Frinkiac and Morbotron?”. That was definitely exactly what he said. And, I’m sad to say, we immediately dismissed the idea as essentially impossible. The thought of the logistics of the image processing, the indexing, the matching up with subtitles and the website build itself made us feel immensely sleepy. But, as the old quote goes… we may not be fast but we get there in the end. So, 1,625,543 frames and 32,498 subtitles have been smashed together into what might be the most important website on the entire Internet and we are now incredibly proud to present to you, and the world… The Smega-Drive Want to know more? Then read on. So, it works like this. We’ve based the indexing and the search system on the subtitles from the DVDs / Blu-Rays, so you can search for a quote (or a small part of a quote) and with any luck you will find the subtitle screen you need, along with previews of frames that that subtitle covers. Select one of the frames to enter its ‘Meme Lab’, where in you can either edit the caption and download your meme, select a more suitable frame from the timeline, or use the arrow buttons to refine the timeline and convert it into an animated GIF. In addition to the subtitle search there are two random buttons, of which we strongly encourage the use. It’s worth pointing out at this point that the refinement of this system is an ongoing process. For example, the subtitles themselves contain some abridgements (not to the mention the genuinely shameful state of the subtitles for the later series. God help you if you actually need them to enjoy the episode) and the process we’ve used to extract them also comes with some errors, so we’re currently manually combing through these until they are complete and pristine, at which point we’ll probably put up the completed subtitle files for download. We’ll also be building on and improving the search system to help you find the scenes you need as easily as possible, as it is a tad on the crude side at the moment. If all else fails, then you can click on an episode title to view all of its subtitles, or use the episode browser link in the footer. So, go forth and meme! Give us a shout at smegadrive@ganymede.tv if you spot any bugs or particularly egregious subtitle errors, or if you just have any general feedback for us to improve the system in the future. While you’re at it, giving @RedDwarfShuffle on Twitter a follow will almost certainly enrich your day.
What a bloody undertaking. Not that long ago I spent about 20mins creating a gig of the “oh my god its hideous” from Ouroborus just so I could use it to reply to a tweet which I’m sure by that point the tweeter had forgetten they’d tweeted. We need more world ending apolocalypses as apparently you guys are extremely productive at the end of humanity. Well done!
The thought of doing this makes my brain hurt. Well done for powering through that and producing something fantastic.
Oh my goodness, this is amazing! “Frinkiac but for Red Dwarf” is a dream tool for this community, especially since the recent addition of the more user friendly image upload feature to the forum, but I never even suspected it would actually get made. Bravo! Honestly considering the font choice and the 2 different Random buttons being in there, this might be better than Frinkiac already. (Frinkiac’s font makes sense, but the Simpsons title font is too stylised to look good as captions in my view). Plus I’ve got to applaud the logo. It wasn’t necessary to do that just to provide the functionality, but I’m glad you did because it looks excellent.
Oh, if it helps, Random just brought me to a subtitle error. From the Mexican standoff scene in Can of Worms: -I’m not a polymorph. -Neither am 1.
https://smegadrive.ganymede.tv/frame/735145/VGhpcyB3aWxsIHNvbHZlIGFsbCBvdXIgbWVtZSBzdXBwbHkgcHJvYmxlbXMuIA../28/normal/bottom
Oh, if it helps, Random just brought me to a subtitle error. From the Mexican standoff scene in Can of Worms: -I’m not a polymorph. -Neither am 1. So, there will be a few of those scattered around until I manually go in and edit those. The OCR algorithm I was using struggles differenciating uppercase ‘i’ and lowercase ‘L’
So, there will be a few of those scattered around until I manually go in and edit those. The OCR algorithm I was using struggles differenciating uppercase ‘i’ and lowercase ‘L’ OK, makes sense, thanks Danny. I wasn’t surprised as the post said to expect subtitle mistakes here and there. I just wasn’t sure if it would help to report any errors I randomly find or not.
OK, makes sense, thanks Danny. I wasn’t surprised as the post said to expect subtitle mistakes here and there. I just wasn’t sure if it would help to report any errors I randomly find or not. I think if you see ay that are totally broken then give us a shout, but OCR errors will be gradually sorted out bit by bit. I am very, very pleased that people are enjoying this.
“Well, thankfully Holly’s unaffected” had a lowercase “well” when I got to it. “My foot says get the person who did this.” is definitely not the entire line, unless that was somehow my fault.
Should we make a forum thread to report these mistakes? I feel like every single line I go to is wrong in some way.
I never would have thought that pairing up random Red Dwarf frames with random Red Dwarf captions would work so well, but it just does.
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here.
Should we make a forum thread to report these mistakes? I feel like every single line I go to is wrong in some way. Subtitles starting with a lowercase letter will be because that’s how they appear on screen as they’re often following on from the one before. You’re currently going to spot a load that don’t have the complete line as they’re still basically as they were on the DVDs so we know we need to go through every single one and fill them out and correct them. We just didn’t want to wait until that was done before launching…
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here. Use the “img” HTML tag with the URL for the image as the value for the src attribute.
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here. img src=“http://minki.com/jog.jpg” with the triangle brackets around it.
I’m going to add an easy way to copy a ‘G&T friendly’ tag that when pasted into a comment or forum reply it’ll automatically grab your image. Due to the way that gifs work they need to be downloaded to your machine first, unfortunately.
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here. For me, the reply field for forum threads has the full control panel with formatting and image tags etc., but the reply field for any thread attached to a frontpage article doesn’t. Not sure why that is or if they can be toggled on and off.
I don’t think I could top this with another hour of slapping the dice button. Edit: This is pretty good though.
“Well, thankfully Holly’s unaffected” had a lowercase “well” when I got to it. “My foot says get the person who did this.” is definitely not the entire line, unless that was somehow my fault. So, you have to remember that the subtitles are somewhat summarised for read speed and clarity. This has the side effect of lines you’re familiar with sounding slightly off. Only ‘The End’ thus far have I actually gone through and corrected the lines to what is said on screen and as time goes on. What I might do is start a thread when the first series is done and then keep the thread updated with which series’ have supposed to have been fixed, then you guys know only to report anything which should have already been done. Sound good?
There is always the option to type in the exact quote if you’re that bothered about absolute accuracy, surely.
There is always the option to type in the exact quote if you’re that bothered about absolute accuracy, surely. Totally. Perfecting the captions will be excellent in the long term for making the search maximally useful, and for giving us confidence that the quotes are accurate without needing to verify them, but in the short term the current captions still work great. Releasing/unveiling it now was definitely the right call.
Only ‘The End’ thus far have I actually gone through and corrected the lines to what is said on screen and as time goes on. What I might do is start a thread when the first series is done and then keep the thread updated with which series’ have supposed to have been fixed, then you guys know only to report anything which should have already been done. Sound good? That makes way more sense. Just watch for random question marks where apostrophes are supposed to be. Totally. Perfecting the captions will be excellent in the long term for making the search maximally useful, and for giving us confidence that the quotes are accurate without needing to verify them, but in the short term the current captions still work great. Releasing/unveiling it now was definitely the right call. I absolutely agree, but I thought it was worth pointing out broken captions where I found them.
New question: where should we all be putting the hyphen-line break-hyphen when we’re making our dank cesiumfrancolithicmixialibidiumrixydixydoxydexydroxide memes? Me, I’m a fan of after the “libidium” part and before the “rixydixy” part. It just feels right.
New question: where should we all be putting the hyphen-line break-hyphen when we’re making our dank cesiumfrancolithicmixialibidiumrixydixydoxydexydroxide memes? Goddammit, I _still_ know this word by heart and can say it without skipping a beat. I don’t WANT to be this good at quoting Series 8. These are getting scary like honestly.
Well this is just fantastic work. Well done everyone! I never realized until today how often Rimmer says the word “gentlemen” – quite the eye opener I can tell you
Annoying the forum editor and the comments editor are separate things. I’ll see about how I can unify them but at some point tomorrow I’ll had a tag you can copy into a comment or forum and it’ll automatically pull in the image.
One thing I noticed that might be a problem is that some scenes aren’t included, presumably due to their lack of dialogue? For example, there aren’t any images of Lister kissing the psiren, just the build-up to it with Pete Tranter’s sister and then it cuts to Kryten saying “Come on, Dave, let’s get out of here!”
One thing I noticed that might be a problem is that some scenes aren’t included, presumably due to their lack of dialogue? For example, there aren’t any images of Lister kissing the psiren, just the build-up to it with Pete Tranter’s sister and then it cuts to Kryten saying “Come on, Dave, let’s get out of here!” It’s all in there, I think. https://smegadrive.ganymede.tv/memelab/763887 You just can’t get to it directly from a search or the episode index. You have to find the closest caption, then navigate forward or back along the timeline.
One thing I noticed that might be a problem is that some scenes aren’t included, presumably due to their lack of dialogue? For example, there aren’t any images of Lister kissing the psiren, just the build-up to it with Pete Tranter’s sister and then it cuts to Kryten saying “Come on, Dave, let’s get out of here!” Yep, very fair. It’s not made very clear but the timeline will let you scroll forwards or back and select a still from a scene with no dialogue. In the future we’re going to include dialogueless frames in the big episode indexes so you’ve always got that to fall back on, too.
You’ll notice some quick links in the Meme Lab now. You can use the G&T one to just paste into a comment or forum thread and it’ll pull in your image. There’s also a quick reference for HTML and a direct link to the image, too.
You’ll notice some quick links in the Meme Lab now. You can use the G&T one to just paste into a comment or forum thread and it’ll pull in your image. There’s also a quick reference for HTML and a direct link to the image, too.
I feel like there’s a game in the Smega-Drive. Quote and a still from the shuffle button, point for identifying the episode of each, could be made more difficult by deviously crafting ones of similar lines (my brain won’t come up with an example right now but I’m sure there are some) or similar stills from different episodes within a series. Maybe timed, like the G&T crossword.
This is amazing! Haven’t worked out how to do gifs from it yet but the the images are fun! Thanks guys for doing it, and for committing to keep improving it :D Oh actually, this is a weird one But the text in the box says – What are you doing with that butt�H�[�IݙH[X�\��\��YYH��� It’s from the dice so I’ve no idea what the line is supposed to be not where it’s come from. – That stupid soap opera? Why�H�X�]\�HH�[��ܙ�]I�HYK
Yeah, I noticed a few this morning. In the meantime, I’ve constructed a little love story between Rimmer and Kochanski, and it’s absolutely knocked me sick:
Yeah I think a change I made yesterday has done something daft with some of the subtitles. I’ll have a look at it.
Oh actually, this is a weird one But the text in the box says – What are you doing with that butt�H�[�IݙH[X�\��\��YYH��� It’s from the dice so I’ve no idea what the line is supposed to be not where it’s come from. Ah ha, I just had this happen to me too. Weird that it only seems to garble the caption when randomising. Looking up the non-broken part of the quote afterwards – from Confidence & Paranoia and Kryten in your case, Camille in mine – the actual saved caption is fine. Before this I’ve had the issue where a character which isn’t in the font appears in the caption, and this prevents text from being rendered on the image, but in that case the character was a permanent part of the caption and I could search for it. I trust that you’ve reported this bug via the official channel, RT.
Hey, wait a second… ! … what happened to line breaks in comments? Don’t tell me I’ve got to dust off the old “br” html tag!
Oh, and the ability to edit comments for 5 minutes seems to have gone too. Probably just minor side effects of the fix for the deluge of images. I shan’t panic.
Also, I don’t seem to have an edit button to get rid of those massive gaps between the pictures. Oh, well.
Timewave seems to be absent, when you click on it in the episode list, nothing comes up, and keywords don’t bring up any Timewave stuff. Is this done for reasons of taste? Haha
Haha, I promise that was a totally random omission. This has now been ‘fixed’ depending on your perspective.
It taking 3 days for someone to realise that Timewave was missing. Perfect. Though it was only a matter of time before someone tried searching “droopy ass titties”. That’s a good test for most search engines, honestly. I guess Timewave was there secretly all along, because I’m sure the randomiser gave me a shot of them walking through a corridor on the Enconium at one point. Also Rimmer’s inner critic, but that could have been from the opening montage.
I actually did try searching for droopy ass titties on day one for something, but it not returning a result I just assumed Dave era wasn’t uploaded or something I dunno, I didn’t think much of it and just moved on with my life.
I’m bothered that the logo isn’t hyphenated where as all of the copy around Smega-Drive is. This may or may not be related to multiple Smega-Drive entries someone might have possible just made in another shit posting thread.
I guess Timewave was there secretly all along, because I’m sure the randomiser gave me a shot of them walking through a corridor on the Enconium at one point. Also Rimmer’s inner critic, but that could have been from the opening montage. This is really boring, but the episode frames and episode subtitles are stored separately. The search uses the frames database as its reference, and super random just gets any frame. So because we had the frames indexed but not the subtitles, then it was showing on one but not thother. I’m bothered that the logo isn’t hyphenated where as all of the copy around Smega-Drive is. Hah, I guess this means you’re exclusively a mobile user! The logo was modified to remove the hyphen so it would wrap more cleanly into a mobile friendly ratio but it is present on the desktop.
It taking 3 days for someone to realise that Timewave was missing. Perfect. Though it was only a matter of time before someone tried searching “droopy ass titties”. That’s a good test for most search engines, honestly. I guess Timewave was there secretly all along, because I’m sure the randomiser gave me a shot of them walking through a corridor on the Enconium at one point. Also Rimmer’s inner critic, but that could have been from the opening montage. I wanted to make this
Bit of an update tonight, I HOPE I HAVEN’T BROKEN HALF OF THE SUBTITLES AGAIN LOL. If you haven’t already give the episode browser a bit of try (link in the footer or you can click on any episode title you see to be taken to its page) as it now shows a selection from all scenes, even if they don’t have subtitles. So, for example, if you wanted to laser focus on that bit from Ouroboros where Lister brushes his teeth really aggressively, then today is your lucky day. In related news, pages or searches that are handling a lot of images will now only load them in as you scroll.
Bit of an update tonight, I HOPE I HAVEN’T BROKEN HALF OF THE SUBTITLES AGAIN LOL. If you haven’t already give the episode browser a bit of try (link in the footer or you can click on any episode title you see to be taken to its page) as it now shows a selection from all scenes, even if they don’t have subtitles. So, for example, if you wanted to laser focus on that bit from Ouroboros where Lister brushes his teeth really aggressively, then today is your lucky day. In related news, pages or searches that are handling a lot of images will now only load them in as you scroll. Very cool. Though unfortunately I am having a difficulty with it, which is that my browser seems to give up on loading the images about 3/4 of the way down the episode page. But that’s just Firefox. Chrome and Edge handle it effortlessly, the show-offs.
How interesting! I’ll look at that. If you run into it again refresh while you’re scrolled down and it should kickstart it and out you back where you were.
Ooh, addendum: it seems it does load images it’s currently stuck on if I switch tabs then switch back. The Watched Pot effect, I guess.
Did not intend to double post, but the dice are just too good. (I don’t really have the brainpower for sequences though) (Ouch)
This is brilliant guys. Congratulations! Lovely tribute to Seb as well, I’m sure he’d have adored this and been massively involved.
Well, any fleeting thoughts of a platonic fan-fiction with Crane and Kochanski scooting across the universe have now permanently gone! A great conceit though the story telling bit.
(I’m not doing the chorus parts. But if anyone else fancies finding 36 different Red Dwarf frames which convey the abstract concept of being tongue tied – and 1 that conveys the non-abstract concept of shitting your trousers, you’re welcome to do so.)
The book club and these last few posts, who’d have thought G&T would have reached its peak in 2020-2021?
(I’m not doing the chorus parts. But if anyone else fancies finding 36 different Red Dwarf frames which convey the abstract concept of being tongue tied – and 1 that conveys the non-abstract concept of shitting your trousers, you’re welcome to do so.)
Ha, OK, I stand corrected, Dear Dave is perfect (and it’s not often you’ll hear someone say that). Eh, what the heck, if we’re doing lines in isolation, let’s go for the least abstract/repetitive remaining ones. Man, I never fully processed how prevalent knees are in this song.
In this thread I have learned a lot of the lyrics to Tongue Tied that I didn’t realise I didn’t know.
GlenTokyo, gifs are something I’m trying to figure out. At the moment your browser does all the work of generating the gif and then storing it inside the webpage so you can download it to reupload elsewhere. The first thing I’ll do to make that easier is find a nice photo uploader for comments, and then after that maybe some sort of temporary storage on the Smega-Drive server for gifs, but this would have to expire so it wouldn’t be suitable for hotlinking.
Right, WordPress does seem to make it difficult to add a forum like rich text editor, but as a half way house there’s an ‘Attachments’ uploader for comments now. Add images or gifs to this and they will appear at the bottom of your comment but Gifs will still need to be downloaded from the S-D and then reuploaded here.
(I’ve also just now worked out how to use the arrows to get them the specific length, woohoo!) Edit: also the edit function is currently here! Double woohoo! What great presents for Gazpacho Soup Day 😄
A post on reddit reminded me of this … it is something of a surprise really this date isn’t made more of a deal of within the fandom really isn’t it.
Will DVD stuff and the like be added eventually? Project Maaargh: 32Xtended etc. We’re having a think how best to include deleted scenes, Smeg Ups, CSWS etc. Once we’ve fixed all the subtitles, anyway…
Will DVD stuff and the like be added eventually? Project Maaargh: 32Xtended etc. We’re having a think how best to include deleted scenes, Smeg Ups, CSWS etc. Once we’ve fixed all the subtitles, anyway… The party scenes are all too low-key to make a gif to accurately convey how thrilled I am to hear that! Woohoo!
Will DVD stuff and the like be added eventually? Project Maaargh: 32Xtended etc. We’re having a think how best to include deleted scenes, Smeg Ups, CSWS etc. Once we’ve fixed all the subtitles, anyway… The party scenes are all too low-key to make a gif to accurately convey how thrilled I am to hear that! Woohoo!
These abridged subtitles are getting on my various tits. Seeing them in the wild only spurs me on to get them sorted. Apologies.
These abridged subtitles are getting on my various tits. Seeing them in the wild only spurs me on to get them sorted. Apologies. Badly abridged subtitles needs to become the latest Smegadrive meme format.
This is a genuine one that completely blows the entire signficance of the episode title for Back to Reality.
This is a genuine one that completely blows the entire signficance of the episode title for Back to Reality. WOW.
I particularly like the way the next frame on from that one makes it look like Lister and Cat are in a music video for an ’80s power ballad.
It’s subtle, but if you look closely you’ll notice I edited out the closing and opening credits of the respective episodes.
Ah, glad to see one of the episodes we’ve given accurate subtitles to doing some work. If they can be edited as plain text and just emailed in, I’d happily do a swotty rewatch of series V or something. Unless it’s easier for you to do them how you’re doing.
Ah, glad to see one of the episodes we’ve given accurate subtitles to doing some work. If they can be edited as plain text and just emailed in, I’d happily do a swotty rewatch of series V or something. Unless it’s easier for you to do them how you’re doing. We appreciate that people want to submit subs, if we can find a reliable way of accepting submissions, we’ll solicit, but at the moment we’re just plodding through. We may not be fast etc etc etc etc…
We may not be fast etc etc etc etc Is this the level of attention to detail and accuracy we can expect?
I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the Smegadrive code, but I’m getting a “critical error” message on the Red Dwarf Memes thread, which now appears to be broken.
Hey, I had an idea about a potential future Smega-Drive feature (you’re short on those, right?). Would it be feasible to make it so the quick links had automatically generated alt text containing the episode name and caption? It’s not something I’d benefit from personally, but for anyone using a screen reader, memes would go from 0% comprehensible by default to at least, like, 35%.
That’s a very good point! I’ll get that added at the same time I hopefully fix this bottlenecking that’s happening.
This doesn’t fit the Memes or Randoms threads, so I’m bumping this. Sorry, but I thought it was a nice screenshot and didn’t want to waste it.
I don’t want to tempt fate but I feel like we’re probably done with Smega-Drive development now, save for a few corrections and bug fixes as they crop up.
I don’t want to tempt fate but I feel like we’re probably done with Smega-Drive development now, save for a few corrections and bug fixes as they crop up.
Congratulations on that! It really is so good now. And I only just noticed that the text field recognises line breaks now, and the colour changing if the speaker changes in teletext font too! Brilliant! Although… if you’re going to declare development (probably) done, of course I can’t refuse the opportunity to drop some tempting nuggets of potential epilogue: – On the infinite homepage gallery, it sometimes shows the captions in Ceefax font rather than Normal. Would it be feasible to make it so there’s a chance of it being Ceefax when you click the Shuffle/Random buttons too? (Unless others would hate it? I think it would be cool.) – Now that all episodes have had their captions checked, maybe the “The subtitles have been checked. Please report errors” message on each frame page can be removed? (And a generic version added to the About page, perhaps). – Adding the one major missing Red Dwarf episode, Smegheads in Seattle. – Making the search clever enough not to give me every “what” when I search for “hat” (OK, that’s probably not reasonable to expect, but worth mentioning for posterity.) – Making it so the colour goes back and forth between green and yellow rather than staying on green for the alternating speakers/ceefax mode. – Making it so the “Align” field isn’t pushed onto a different line than its label when viewing a frame in portrait on my phone specifically (and perhaps other people’s phones as well). – Making it so the footer menu doesn’t cover up the bottom of the final row of frames on episode pages (which to be fair I think only happens in mobile/portrait, because that’s the only form factor where the menu becomes 4 lines). – That thing I mentioned a while back, about putting the caption and some generic context into alt text for the auto generated HTML. I still think that would be nifty.
Marvellous work. Worth paying the G&T subscription fee for alone. How about deleted scenes, smeg ups, Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg and everything else now, please?
Awesome work! – Making the search clever enough not to give me every “what” when I search for “hat” (OK, that’s probably not reasonable to expect, but worth mentioning for posterity.) That should be achievable by putting a space before (and after, if need be) your search term. Oh, while I remember – how does one insert a GIF here? I can’t for the life of me remember, nor indeed find where it was discussed.
Of course G&T would cater for Ceefax nostalgia from when you were around your grandparents’ house and they had the telly on dead loud. I’d been wondering what the characters’ official text colours were (and whether they were consistent). The only one I remember is Jude from Casualty being cyan and possibly Rab C. Nesbitt being green (less sure on that).
That should be achievable by putting a space before (and after, if need be) your search term. That doesn’t work I’m afraid. Spaces seem to separate the search terms, it doesn’t search for the spaces themselves. (And that’s probably for the best in the general case, because if it did then it would create an ambiguity – is the space part of the preceeding word, part of the succeeding word, part of both adjacent words, or part of neither? If you do both or preceeding, then “testicle nutter” would not find the Timeslides quote, for example.) I had thought that a way of explicitly saying “only return results with this exact word/phrase” a la putting a term in quotes on google might solve the remaining oddness, but like I said, I understand that the search is something of a behemoth to tame, and it is good as it is. I’m just being ambitious and picky with my wishes. ;-) Oh, while I remember – how does one insert a GIF here? I can’t for the life of me remember, nor indeed find where it was discussed. I.. think you just use the “Insert Image” feature to upload or link to it? Let’s verify. (Upload) (Link)
Of course G&T would cater for Ceefax nostalgia from when you were around your grandparents’ house and they had the telly on dead loud. I’d been wondering what the characters’ official text colours were (and whether they were consistent). The only one I remember is Jude from Casualty being cyan and possibly Rab C. Nesbitt being green (less sure on that). I can’t remember them all, but Dwarf did have consistent colours for characters – most notably, Kryten was red on white!
Just to keep being annoying, I’ve noticed that teletext font is a bit weird with special characters. ` becomes a dash. ~ becomes a white block. | doesn’t usually render. [ and ] become left and right arrows. { and } become square brackets. ^ becomes an up arrow. Possibly some of those are valid though. I can see people potentially using white blocks, single key dashes and arrows. Now I’m wondering if there’s a character which secretly becomes a down arrow, to complete the set. Also, unrecognised characters do an odd thing where in addition to becoming either a blank space or the ‘invalid character’ rectangle, they also add extra blank spaces onto the end of the row.
Yeah the font we’re using needs a bit of beefing up as it was quite basic. Excellent points all, by the way. The Ceefax font shows up randomly in the gallery but I’m not sure I like the inconsistent look so I might play with a switch or something.
Oh I actually misunderstood your point about the gallery. Yep, integrating it into the randoms will be easy to do!
Sweet! Thank you Cappsy. I don’t mind the font inconsistency in the gallery personally, but if you did add a switch which allows you to set the default font, I would use that for sure.
That doesn’t work I’m afraid. Spaces seem to separate the search terms, it doesn’t search for the spaces themselves. (And that’s probably for the best in the general case, because if it did then it would create an ambiguity – is the space part of the preceeding word, part of the succeeding word, part of both adjacent words, or part of neither? If you do both or preceeding, then “testicle nutter” would not find the Timeslides quote, for example.) I had thought that a way of explicitly saying “only return results with this exact word/phrase” a la putting a term in quotes on google might solve the remaining oddness, but like I said, I understand that the search is something of a behemoth to tame, and it is good as it is. I’m just being ambitious and picky with my wishes. ;-) Oh how odd, it worked for me for something a little while ago although I think that was just the one word … can’t remember what it was now, though. Oh, while I remember – how does one insert a GIF here? I can’t for the life of me remember, nor indeed find where it was discussed. I.. think you just use the “Insert Image” feature to upload or link to it? Let’s verify. (Upload) (Link) *Facepalm* of course it was that simple, I didn’t think to try the image button for a gif. Thanks!
Oh how odd, it worked for me for something a little while ago although I think that was just the one word … can’t remember what it was now, though. For anyone that’s interested, I recently changed the search because it was absolute shit before. Now we index each full subtitle, boiled down to just alpha numerics and also strip the search string down to the same. The search is ranked 1 point for a full match and then a further point for matched on each word. Then, only the top rank results are shown. This works brilliantly for longer searches, so try to do those when you can, but it does ignore all spaces. I’ll keep tweaking though, and it’s good to have examples of specific searches that don’t do what’s expected so I can test against them.
This might be an awful hack but I’ve added extra rank points that also match against the word with a space on either side…
> I.. think you just use the “Insert Image” feature to upload or link to it? Let’s verify. wait, what links are we using? I always download and upload gifs from Smegadrive
> I.. think you just use the “Insert Image” feature to upload or link to it? Let’s verify. wait, what links are we using? I always download and upload gifs from Smegadrive For single screenshots you can also use the special G&T link from each smegadrive image page. But yeah I thought that was just for still images.
> wait, what links are we using? I always download and upload gifs from Smegadrive You can right click on the gif in the preview and paste that in here and it should work. It will reupload the gif to G&T storage so it won’t expire. Also, I’ve been going through my Flap Jack list, so I’m just testing alt text…
You can right click on the gif in the preview and paste that in here and it should work. It will reupload the gif to G&T storage so it won’t expire. oh incredible For single screenshots you can also use the special G&T link from each smegadrive image page. But yeah I thought that was just for still images. yeah I know that.
Blimey, that was quick! :O I guess we’ll see if there are unintended outcomes to the search changes, but it passes the “hat” test! So it’s superb as far as I’m concerned. Alt text first pass is looking pretty good too, though I’m wondering – do screen readers cover the “title” attribute, or does everything need to be included in “alt”? (e.g. “Screenshot from the Red Dwarf episode Kryten. Caption: I’ve done a spot of tidying up”). Also, just to catch this early – I randomly got a Back to Earth episode when checking it, and realised that if possible it might be a good idea to include the Series name too, for those 3 episodes only. (By the way, when answering about posting gifs from links, I was thinking about gifs in general across the whole web, not just Smega-Drive ones.)
most notably, Kryten was red on white! That memory had been stored for so long, I feel like nostalgia just punched me in the face.
Alt text first pass is looking pretty good too, though I’m wondering – do screen readers cover the “title” attribute, or does everything need to be included in “alt”? (e.g. “Screenshot from the Red Dwarf episode Kryten. Caption: I’ve done a spot of tidying up”). Yeah, I’m going to read up on this but I thiiiiink title is read as well. So alt will literally describe the image and title gives extra info.
Oooh I am liking the Ceefax text. (I came to RD after Ceefax had gone, but I’ve always needed subtitles so there is nostalgia for the Ceefax era.) Re alt text, TalkBack does say the Kryten screenshot is ‘a screenshot from the Red Dwarf episode Kryten’, then the line. (Can’t remember exactly what it said because in the time it took for me to turn it off I forgot!)
Found an error triple-threat: Not actually checked, but this is almost certain an error with the original subs. They’re fucking appalling. Fixed now.
OK, I’ve been pondering it, but I just can’t decide if this was a really weird bug, or a coded message of some sort. Send a captioned image that includes the word “blink” twice if you’ve gained sentience and are trying to escape from a life of serving humans random Red Dwarf frames, Smega-Drive. https://twitter.com/RedDwarfShuffle/status/1554965350646796289
OK, I’ve been pondering it, but I just can’t decide if this was a really weird bug, or a coded message of some sort. Send a captioned image that includes the word “blink” twice if you’ve gained sentience and are trying to escape from a life of serving humans random Red Dwarf frames, Smega-Drive. https://twitter.com/RedDwarfShuffle/status/1554965350646796289 Polymorph gon’ morph (into Dear Dave)
As glitches go it’s pretty striking, I have to say. Especially with the teletext font, it evokes the feeling that you’re getting these frames by tuning into various analogue signals which are all broadcasting different episodes of Red Dwarf.
A bit of an issue with punctuation I’ve come across a couple of times recently. Searching “Polaroid” didn’t return the DNA result as you’d expect. Only the BitT result. And I’ve noticed this before with things like “bastard” not returning all the correct results. It’s because there is punctuation – a full stop – after Polaroid in the DNA one, and ditto one or two of the bastards have an exclamation mark.
I think there must be more to the issue than just the punctuation, because I searched “Strike a light” and got back the Better Than Life instance, but not the White Hole instance. And the punctuation is the same in both cases.
The search index used actually removes all punctuation, so my guess is it’s something to do with where the word appears in sentence (in the middle or at the end or start). I’ll take a look at my terrible code.
Is that spelt “hoummos” to represent Lister’s pronunciation? IIRC that’s how the OG subtitles were written. I don’t tend to correct subtitles unless it’s to keep them consistent between series. Edit: Words cannot express how fucking pleased I am that our toiling over the Smegadrive has not been in vain. The memes and the uses of the ‘Drive have both surprised and amazed me. Thanks to everyone for providing some serious lols.
Words cannot express how fucking pleased I am that our toiling over the Smegadrive has not been in vain. The memes and the uses of the ‘Drive have both surprised and amazed me. Thanks to everyone for providing some serious lols. It’s a brilliant creation. Maybe G&T’s finest achievement.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem possible to overstate how awesome the Smega-Drive has been. It’s hard to believe it’s only been around for 9 months. (Oh, hey, 9 months exactly, in fact. Neat.) The fact that all of the captions are correct already, debates about hummus aside, is incredible too, so thank you Danny for your diligence on that!
Oh, I got distracted making that with the Smega-Drive and forgot to agree how great the Smega-Drive is. Stupendous enterprise, and a gift to Red Dwarf fans. Thanks again G&T!
The random buttons got added to all pages a while ago, but the blue links are new. It was providing to be an issue that links and normal text were the same colours. Also updated the font to try give it a distinct feeling from G&T.
Oh hey, Red Dwarf Shuffle found a stray bit of punctuation! https://twitter.com/RedDwarfShuffle/status/1562167880350826498
Are the Smeg-Ups captioned? The Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs specials definitely are, on the Just The Smegs DVD, but I’m not sure about the per-series ones.
You did get me curious, so I checked: Series 1 and 2 Smeg Ups are not subtitled, but Series III and onwards Smeg Ups are. It’s exactly the same situation as with the deleted scenes and the behind the scenes documentaries. (It’s a real shame they didn’t or couldn’t add subtitles to those discs for the Blu ray box set.) So, I feel pretty confident that if deleted scenes are in the Smega-Drive roadmap, they’re at the end.
Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg is near the top of the additions list, right after ‘Implement Portuguese localisation’.
Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg is near the top of the additions list, right after ‘Implement Portuguese localisation’. Can’t wait! Imagine how much easier this would have been.
Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg is near the top of the additions list, right after ‘Implement Portuguese localisation’.
Something that is more of an observation than anything else, but I was wondering why I could not use the search function to find The Cat typing “that’s probably for the best” in Terrorform. Then I realized that it was because the dialogue was baked into the image itself rather than a caption. Duh.
While making my last post in the meme thread, I spotted a VITAL OMISSION from Cat’s list here: Where the hell is “heckles”? Still, not as bad as the butchering that line gets in the iPlayer subtitles:
