Test messages for the first run begin shortly!
As a result of me trying to do far too much at once, please be aware of the following hiccups:
- The broadcast, not including test messages, will actually be about two hours long (now with 400% more FREE!)
- I thought I could support USOS (unshift on space) this time, but never mind-- best for those of you who have USOS mechanisms that can be enabled to disable them, but if not, you shouldn't see anything that'll materially mess up the broadcast anyway.
If you care about WHY, see the following; if you only care about how it affects you, TLDR above:
- Turns out I WILDLY miscalculated the length of the broadcast by putting in one too many leading zeroes (good thing I'm not working for NASA or Tesla, huh?). I was thinking 30 minutes was much too short but didn't measure twice before I sent the email yesterday.
- I've been wanting to support USOS for several years now. If I was retired and wasn't working for the bulk of most days, I probably would have worked it out by now, along with a lot of other magical teletypery. Without going into major detail, it's a matter of fixing an algorithm to properly calculate how long to keep transmitter running. Right now it tends to keep it open a bit longer than it needs to but within the realm of reason, but adding in extra, invisible shifts into the calculation either keeps it open MUCH too long or not long enough. I have some ideas to move away from the algorithm entirely and simply watch the stream for when there's no more text, but that's a project for future me. Yes, I know there's existing software that does all this efficiently, but part of the fun was rolling my own to see what I atrocities in bash I could come up with.
Very sorry for the haphazardness. If I could do teletypery for my full time occupation, I absolutely would.
-
Jordan Spencer Cunningham
On Sun, Oct 30, 2022, at 12:56 PM, Jordan Spencer Cunningham wrote:
Hi GK friends,
It's that time of year again for the annual Halloween Broadcast. I'm a bit late in sending this out, so hopefully other plans won't conflict with being able to run your machines for a bit on Halloween.
This year we're taking a slight detour from the tradition of a longer, single story sent as if from the main character with instead a few short spooky stories written by myself and another GreenKeys member, Tom Hunter. Also at the end will be one pix (no overstrike), something new created specially for this broadcast.
Since it's shorter than all previous broadcasts, I'll send it twice on Monday (tomorrow), October 31, according to the following schedule:
- First run
- 1:00 PM MST: Test messages including Halloween poems and songs every 15 minutes
- 2:00 PM MST: Stories (will last roughly 30 minutes)
- Second run
- 5:00 PM MST: Test messages including Halloween poems and songs every 15 minutes (different than the first set if you're that into them and want to catch 'em all)
- 6:00 PM MST: Stories (will last roughly 30 minutes)
The stream will be available at
http://tty.nerdology.org:8000/halloween (right now this URL will result in a 404; you'll see that change around 15 minutes before the scheduled test messages). As before, simply use the same configuration you'd use for ITTY for this stream.
Enjoy, and happy Halloween!
-
Jordan Spencer Cunningham