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gkmac.bsky.social
gkmac
@gkmac.bsky.social
56 followers 33 following 55 posts
Part-time teletext and retrotech dabbler. Maker of QTeletextMaker.
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gkmac.bsky.social
A #teletext tribute to Terence Burridge who passed away a year ago today.

His TV Whirl website lives on.
www.tvwhirl.co.uk
A Level 2.5 teletext page of a logo on a white background. The logo is the blue letters "TV" in a thick angular style on the top and a purple letter "W" in a cursive style on the bottom. Around the letters are a rounded lilac rectangle. The top of the rectangle has two diagonal lines emerging upwards from the middle in a "V" shape similar to an old-fashioned TV aerial. A Level 1 teletext page of a logo on a white background. The logo is the blue letters "TV" in a thick angular style on the top and a magenta letter "W" in a cursive style on the bottom. Around the letters are a rounded magenta rectangle. The top of the rectangle has two diagonal lines emerging upwards from the middle in a "V" shape similar to an old-fashioned TV aerial.
February 8, 2026 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by gkmac
nmsni.co.uk
The Pages from Ceefax live stream has now been running for a full year - as of about 5pm (GMT).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8OU...
Pages from Ceefax
YouTube video by Nathan Dane
www.youtube.com
February 2, 2026 at 8:37 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
A #teletext artwork of Bertha from the animated TV series of the same name, the huge, slightly sentient but lovely factory machine who could make anything.

Some three decades before 3D printers became affordable.
A teletext artwork of Bertha, a green industrial machine with features resembling a face including white round eyes, a red nose and a large hatch like a huge mouth. The top of the hatch has white protective flaps that look like teeth and at the bottom is a conveyor belt resembling a tongue. Text above and below the machine reads "Bertha, lovely Bertha, you are a lovely machine!"
January 6, 2026 at 9:24 AM
Reposted by gkmac
beeblepete.bsky.social
Happy New Year #Teletext
January 1, 2026 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
January 1, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
Teletextmas and a Blocky New Year.
December 25, 2025 at 9:49 AM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
It's still a work in progress, but seems stable enough for "public beta", so by popular demand here's a standalone version of the parametric clock generator I recently added to my online teletext viewer:
zxnet.co.uk/clock/#templ...
Recreated BBC1 clock circa 1991 BBC Two Northern Ireland clock 1970s mechanical BBC1 clock 1980s electronic BBC1 clock
December 6, 2025 at 6:20 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
QTeletextMaker 0.8.2-beta released. For AZERTY keyboard users the Level 2.5 #teletext editor has alternate keymappings for inserting colour attributes, using the top row of letters without having to Shift the numbers every time.

Windows .exe from the zip as usual: github.com/gkthemac/QTe...
A diagram of a partial AZERTY keyboard layout with coloured keys. From left to right: the "1" and "A" keys are red, the "2" and "Z" keys are green, the "3" and "E" keys are yellow, the "4" and "R" keys are blue, the "5" and "T" keys are magenta, the "6" and "Y" keys are cyan, the "7" and "U" keys are white and the "0" and "P" keys are black.
December 2, 2025 at 12:07 PM
Reposted by gkmac
xenoxxx.com
Ever fancied making your own Ceefax pages? Latest version of my #teletext editor is at github.com/peterkvt80/w...
Release Fixed Explorer file open not working · peterkvt80/wxted
Opening a tti file in Explorer would cause wxTED to allocate all the memory until Windows crashed. Fixed by checking file open status and switching to smart pointers.
github.com
November 23, 2025 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by gkmac
jamienemeth.bsky.social
A (horrible) alternate reality, inspired by yesterday.
#Cloudflare #Teletext #TeletextArt #Art
Teletext mockup/art inspired by yesterday's Cloudflare outage. P100 Teletext 100 Nov18 14:00:13 Internal server error Visit Cloudflare on p799 for more info. 2025-11-18 14:00:13 UTC Pixel art of a TV with bunny-ear aerial with a green tick, a TV transmitter with a red tick, and a PC with a green tick. You, TV: Working London, Cloudflare: Error Teletext, Host: Working What happened? There is an internal error on Cloudflare's network. What can I do? Please try again in a few minutes. Cloudflare Index
November 19, 2025 at 10:30 AM
gkmac.bsky.social
Were colour bitmap graphics possible in #teletext ?

With Level 3.5 DRCS they could have been. But hopelessly impractical; all the bitmap data is stored across 8 subpages and you'd need to wait for them all to come around.

Just for that one picture that's the biggest size possible in 16 colours.
A teletext page with a small 16 colour bitmap picture on the right of a Scarlet Macaw parrot sitting on a metal frame. On the left is the explanatory text "Level 3.5 DRCS. Mode 2 characters, 12x10 pixels of 4 bitplanes or 16 colours. 96 DRCS characters over 384 PTUs stored across 8 subtables. 12 rows of 8 columns or 96x120 pixels."
November 12, 2025 at 6:46 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
Level 2.5 #teletext needn't be that hard. Sometimes a simple palette remap is all an artwork needs to stand out.
jellicajake.bsky.social Jellica @jellicajake.bsky.social · Nov 4
a classic teletext honker
#teletext #pixelart
November 4, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by gkmac
illarterate.bsky.social
teletextart.co.uk/call-for-ent... #teletext
CALL FOR ENTRIES – 2025 Teletext Advent Calendar on Yle Text
This year’s loading bar is approximately ten twelfths complete, so it’s time once again for the traditional teletext community Advent calendar! This will be our fifth consecutive annual festive projec...
teletextart.co.uk
October 29, 2025 at 4:51 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
QTeletextMaker v0.8.1-beta released. No new features but the Level 2.5 #teletext editor has had a major bug squashed that sometimes caused the central page editor widget to get "lost" or squashed into a tiny corner of the main window.

Windows .exe from the zip as usual:
github.com/gkthemac/QTe...
October 26, 2025 at 3:05 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
QTeletextMaker v0.8-beta released. The Level 2.5 #teletext editor now renders DRCS characters and slightly improved diacritical'd G0 capital letters.

Grab a Windows exe from the zip at github.com/gkthemac/QTe... (mind the SmartScreen warnings!) or compile the source on Linux with #Qt6 and CMake.
A Level 2.5 teletext page with a dark green background on which there a spread of five playing cards. The top-most card on the right is the ten of clubs, the cards underneath are the jack of clubs, queen of clubs, king of clubs and the ace of clubs. The clubs on the cards are not blocky but are high resolution images courtesy of DRCS character definitions.
October 14, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
All the tellies up and running at #ChunkyFringe
October 4, 2025 at 1:39 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
As if black foreground wasn't controversial enough, should modern Level 1 and 1.5 #teletext decoders obey the double width and double height control codes?

The ETSI spec says they are Level 2.5 only, but in real life some Level 1 and 1.5 decoders made since about 1999-ish do interpret them.
October 2, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by gkmac
nmsni.co.uk
zxnet.co.uk/teletext/vie...
October 1, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
Another reminder that the #ChunkyFringe teletext editing system is online for anyone to have a go at creating real teletext pages:

blockparty.zxnet.co.uk

Channel your inner @mrbiffo.bsky.social* and come and admire your creations in all their chunky glory on CRT tellies in Harrow this Saturday!
Chunkytext page 200. "Your art here"
October 1, 2025 at 2:59 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
Ahh, good old #teletext with no cookie pop-ups, no registrations or sign-ins, no autoplaying videos... and no sudden geo-blocks either.
A teletext page mostly of a magenta background with the text "Content not viewable in your region" in the middle. At the top left is the text "Frame it" and at the bottom is the text "John, 5".
September 30, 2025 at 6:33 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
For the upcoming #ChunkyFringe the #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt is "Chunky" and/or "Fringe".

Here's a #teletext nod to an old chocolate advert; regrettably trademarks have had to be altered for legal reasons.
A Level 2.5 teletext graphic of a blue and white chocolate bar wrapping on a purple background. The wrapping has the word "Diary Bilk" in big serif letters, with "Crudeberry's" in smaller gold text above and "Chunky" in the corner. Below the bar is the slogan "one chunk leads to another". A Level 1 teletext graphic of a blue and white chocolate bar wrapping on a magenta background. The wrapping has the word "Diary Bilk" in big serif letters, with "Crudeberry's" in smaller yellow text above and "Chunky" in the corner. Below the bar is the slogan "one chunk leads to another".
September 28, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Reposted by gkmac
mrbiffo.bsky.social
One week today... we're going to be doing a whole bunch of nonsense at Chunky Fringe. It's all the fun of Digi Live without us having to spend a fortune on props. Details here: www.arbitraryfiles.com/events/cf25/...
September 27, 2025 at 9:49 AM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
The ChunkyText user pages magazine has been cleared out ready for next weekend, and the edit server is LIVE NOW.

blockparty.zxnet.co.uk

I thought since we have a week to go until Chunky Fringe maybe we should call those a #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt for anyone needing a bit of artistic inspiration 😁
September 27, 2025 at 6:43 PM
gkmac.bsky.social
My first ever attempt at getting a Level 2.5 #teletext DRCS bitmap onto a real TV!

24 monochrome characters is the maximum you can have on screen; the bitmaps (or Pattern Transfer Units as they're called) are downloaded from a separate hidden page.

DRCS rendering in QTeletextMaker coming soon...
A television showing a Level 2.5 teletext page. On the right is a small black and white bitmap of a parrot. On the left is the text "Level 2.5 DRCS. Mode 0 characters, 12x10 pixels of 1 bitplane. 24 DRCS characters over 24 PTUs. 6 rows of 4 columns or 48x60 pixels".
September 21, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by gkmac
zxguesser.bsky.social
I've finally got around to looking at how I could port teletext-twitter by mastodon.radio/@markpentler to the Bluesky api, and it turned out to be way easier than I expected! At least for the mode I wanted.

I've even added a couple of things teletext-twitter never had 😄

zxnet.co.uk/teletext/vie...
A teletext page full of today's Bluesky posts
August 27, 2025 at 9:01 PM