Europe's top five football leagues, in English and Chinese, as it breaks.
Meterplane reads the English football press as it publishes, fetches each story in full, tags it by club, topic and format, and translates it into Chinese. Live match data, podcasts and videos sit next to the news. It is a website, a macOS menu bar app and an MCP server, all fed by one pipeline I built and run myself.
The same pipeline feeds the website, the Mac app and the MCP server, so a story, a score or a podcast point shows up everywhere at once.
40 English-language feeds, from BBC Sport, Sky Sports and the Guardian to outlets that follow La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1. Each story is fetched in full and translated with a shared glossary, so a player keeps one Chinese name everywhere.
Live score and xG, a win-probability model that moves with the match, the live table and season projections. After full time: key moments, what the podcasts said, and a face-off page with both clubs' own posts side by side.
123 football podcasts in one player that keeps playing as you move between pages. New episodes are transcribed, and what the hosts argue, and who said it, shows up next to the news.
Ask a question on any page, or press ⌥⇧Space in any Mac app. Answers cite the stories they draw on. Articles end with how each outlet covered the story, and hovering a name opens a card about that person.
The menu bar shows today's count and turns into the live score when a club you follow plays, with a notification for every goal. Widgets, Shortcuts, Spotlight and a three-minute audio brief for your clubs. Signed, notarized, and it updates itself.
meterplane.com/mcp gives Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor ten tools: search the news, read articles and stories, look up players, clubs, tables, fixtures and matches, or ask a question and get an answer with sources.
Captured from meterplane.com in October 2026. Every page exists in English and in Chinese.
Most of Meterplane is plumbing. These are three pieces of it I'm glad I got right.
Podcast hosts stitch different ads into each download. One episode fetched from mainland China carried five 31-second slots our copy didn't have, so its timestamps drifted by up to two minutes. The episode page reads small windows of the listener's own file, hashes MP3 frames and matches them against a 24 KB fingerprint, so the highlighted line stays on the words being spoken.
Chinese media often spell the same player more than one way. A glossary kept on the server pins one name per person, following Chinese media convention. Translation and the Mac app both read from it, so a player keeps the same name in every headline.
Every article, match, player, club and episode has a share card, rendered by a headless browser in either language, light or dark, with a QR code back to the page. When search engines started fetching about 340 previews an hour, link previews moved from 2.2 MB PNGs to 80 KB JPEGs.
One server, one database file, and a native Mac app. Boring where it can be.
One FastAPI service and about 40 systemd timers for feeds, full text, translation, transcripts, social posts and media. SQLite holds it all, and Caddy serves the site.
Model calls go through Relay, my own AI gateway: DeepSeek first, MiniMax as the fallback, and MiniMax speech-to-text for podcasts, with every call metered.
Episodes are cut at silences into eight-minute parts for transcription. Club videos become 720-wide H.264 files plus six-second loops. Share cards are screenshots taken in a Playwright container.
A native menu bar app with widgets, Shortcuts and Spotlight. Releases are universal, notarized DMGs, and the updater checks the checksum, notarization and Team ID before it installs anything.
