Teletext Bad Apple | Hacker News Reader

Teletext Bad Apple

bitshifters.github.io

114 pointsbemmu33 comments

Very cool! I spent a lot of my youth navigating Teletext. Also lots of people doesn't seem to realize that Teletext is still alive and updated daily in some European countries like Spain.

It's still hugely popular in the Netherlands, but somewhat ironically mostly viewed through the web or apps. I wrote a simple command line reader scraping the web version: https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt

Hang on, I'm Dutch, I know it still exists, but how you'd say, is it still "hugely popular"?

Personal observation, but also the app is #12 for news on the App Store and NOS themselves stated in 2017 that the service is popular:

https://www.spreekbuis.nl/npo-en-nos-over-de-toekomst-van-te...

(I’m not going to argue about where to drawn the line between ‘hugely’ or merely popular etc)

Anecdotal, but my dad uses it daily though the app. I love that such a limited canvas still has use.

It's not unlike twitter in that sense.

Still there in Finland. :) https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv

(ESP32 + Ikea FREKVENS)

Also Related: 8088 Domination

https://youtu.be/_yTsCOy7j0M?t=174

(live version fro demo party, energy in the room is wild)

For reference on what teletext is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

I wonder how this could pass anyone who's now older than 10 years by. Are there countries that just never had (widespread adoption of) teletext?

Most people probably haven't used or seen teletext in years, but I'd expect people to know what it is anyways because there's cultural references aplenty.

As far as I know, it was never implemented anywhere in the US. I don't think I was aware of its existence until some time in my 20s, and then only because I took an active interest in retro- and unusually constrained computing environments, and their allies such as oldschool information services.

> Are there countries that just never had (widespread adoption of) teletext?

It was never really a thing in the US. There were a couple of short-lived attempts, but none of them ever caught on, and receiver hardware was rare.

IIUC the short version of the story is that PAL regions got Teletext while NTSC regions ended up with NTSC closed captioning instead?

Seems so. Teletext also supported subtitles (as we called it in Britain), by selecting Teletext page 888.

Last I checked, 888 still works on satellite, and most digital TV.

Nothing there, but a page 100 telling you that there's no teletext, but page 888 still has subtitles on it.

Two things:

1. AFAIK NTSC doesn’t support it, so North America never had it. There were equivalent standards but not one universal one to unify around.

2. Are there that many cultural references? I’m struggling to think of many that I saw growing up and I’m in my thirties. It existed (and I used it a lot!) but it wasn’t exactly part of the cultural zeitgeist. The internet had already taken over.

I think the only cultural references I see are football-result nostalgia. Quite a few do still crop up though (and even more so, almost every day I get an ad for a Ceefax inspired mug with my team's results on it).

I too have fond memories of using Ceefax for my football news pre-internet - the ones I remember were I think "302" for general football homepage or "310" for Scottish football scores.

Teletext holidays is still going. It was a place where you could browse for last minute holiday deals as far as I remember.

They have now transitioned to the web.

https://www.teletextholidays.co.uk/

21 years old here and this is the first I have seen it. At first after reading the wiki article I assumed they were talking about embedding closed captions in the vblank but I have literally never seen or heard anyone mention that you could create static "pages" over analogue tv.

In retrospect I probably have heard the term but it was not meaningful. I'm a north american.

mikefax

Kind of off topic: Judging by the title it's another one of these write-ups on how AAPL is the worst anti-competititve monopoly that is using its position to do bad things. Thankfully it's something completely unrelated.

Unless you're familiar with Bad Apple, that is. Sort of a meme, not exactly sure why, I guess the visuals, as far as the song goes I think it's one of the lesser Touhou tracks.

At some point the video became the standard thing to show on weird displays. We mostly have Marcan to thank for that [1], I think.

Kind of like porting Doom to prove that you have code execution on something that you never were meant to have code execution in the first place, but instead to prove you can display full motion video on something that was never meant to display full motion video.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSL0FDcsVJE

I remember seeing OpenLase after I developed a bunch of laser projector games [1] [2]. I wish I had known about it back then. Python was a huge bottleneck, and I had to come up with workarounds for the GIL and other problems.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans

That’s very cool and inspirational! I’ve been wanting to do laser projection too. Was your laser projector home built or bought online? If home built, do you have some links describing how to do it? If bought online, do you have a link to where you ordered it from?

The fact that the video uses exactly two colors and isn't even greyscale is probably a big part of it.

That is a feature of the content rather than the technology. The original video was a silhouette piece in black & white: https://youtu.be/G3C-VevI36s

That's also why it has so much presence in the demo scene. It loses very little fidelity when transcribed to different mediums, be it teletext, ascii [1], flip dots [2], or an oscilloscope [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT2ufnGe9Cc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko0z3SfXpm8

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psp0JfNlzRU

I assume it's also because it's ridiculously compressible compared to more normal video of similar resolution?

>as far as the song goes I think it's one of the lesser Touhou tracks.

There's basically a billion of Touhou tracks at this point and Bad Apple is the lesser of those?

As somebody who has mistaken AAPL Arguments for Touhou Talk in the past I'm glad we can balance each other out :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com