Ceefax Station
A recreation of the BBC's Ceefax teletext service as a desktop app, with an optional amateur-radio transport: browse numbered pages (101 weather, 200 news, 304 football, 402 lottery, 504 films) in a terminal viewer, and — if you hold a licence — transmit them over 2m packet radio and receive other stations' pages.
Python 3.11, MIT, 9 stars, 0 forks, v0.1.5-alpha. Created 2025-12-29, last push 2026-08-30, not
archived. Windows and Linux including Raspberry Pi OS, shipped as a .deb and a setup EXE with in-app
self-update from GitHub Releases (U in the viewer). curses TUI, FastAPI for the tracker API, Leaflet
for the map, pytest. Radio uses AX.25 AFSK1200 decoded by Dire Wolf,
bundled in the Windows installer and recommended as a distro package on Linux. Author: thaum-labs,
callsign M7TJF; project site ceefaxstation.com.
The two halves point opposite ways
This is the cleanest case in the corpus of one application whose autonomy is real on one axis and absent on another, and it is pocketpal-ai's split (synthesis → Two autonomies) with different axes.
The transport is genuinely off-grid. tx now / rx live move pages station-to-station as audio
over amateur bands. No server sits in that path; a licence and a radio are the whole dependency. That
is as far from a rented service as anything this spoke holds.
The content is a single hub, and the README says so in its glossary. The pitch is "You do not need API keys" — and the reason is that pages come pre-built from ceefaxstation.com. The glossary defines the hub as "shared pages hosted on ceefaxstation.com so stations don't need API keys," and the provenance table splits it plainly: news, sport, lottery, TV, films and UK weather are downloaded; only local weather (102) and the callsign page (700) are built on your machine. The local path still exists as a fallback — "if the hub is briefly down, Ceefax falls back to building pages on your PC (some pages then need API keys — usually you can ignore this)" — which is the same sentence admitting that the keys were never removed, only held by someone else.
And it reports in by default. After any transmit or receive session the app "automatically
uploads the new log to ceefaxstation.com," using the callsign and Maidenhead grid from
radio_config.json, to place the station on a public map. A licensed callsign is a legally registered
identity and a grid square is a location, so the default posts both. It is opt-out
(CEEFAX_AUTO_UPLOAD=0), documented in the same section, and never described as telemetry.
Where it sits
Against the founding finding (synthesis → relocation sold as removal, hometube), this one is neither buried nor pre-subtracted. Every fact above is stated openly, in a glossary and a table — but framed as convenience ("you don't need keys") rather than as a dependency, so a reader has to do the inversion themselves. That is a third posture, between hometube's omission and pocketpal-ai's explicit accounting.
It is also the first source here whose subject is hobby for its own sake. The 2025 survey found hobby outranking privacy and cost as a motive, and every application in the corpus until now still answered a practical need — a keyboard, a media downloader, an ERP, a window manager. Nobody needs teletext in 2026. This is the survey's dominant motive with no utility argument attached at all.
Small and unproven: 9 stars, no forks, alpha, one author, eight months old. The page-pack hub, the tracker and the domain are all one person's; nothing says what happens to installed stations if that person stops. Read the counts as what they are.
Related
foss-application · self-hosting · pocketpal-ai · hometube · self-host-user-survey-2025 · awesome-terminals