Features
Everything the feed does, which is deliberately not very much.
A short list is a feature. Each of these exists because a customer could not deploy without it, not because it looked good on a comparison table.
Six curated channels
Standards, Infrastructure, Meteorology, Transit, Objects and Horology. Subscribe to all six or pin one. Channels are stable; we have added two in eleven years and removed none.
The Dullness Index
Four calibrated scores on every item, returned in the payload. Set your own thresholds if ours are too permissive.
Citations in the payload
Three sources minimum, with document identifiers, travelling with the item. Render them or do not; they are there either way.
Units and locale
Metric and imperial rendered server-side, 41 locales, and number formatting that respects the reader rather than the developer.
Screen presets
16:9 for lobby displays, 9:16 for lifts and wayfinding, 1:1 for kiosks, plus a 4-line variant for the small monochrome panels nobody admits to still running.
Reading-level control
Every item is written at four reading levels between grade six and grade fourteen. Pick one per channel, or per display.
Rotation memory
Duplicate suppression across a window you choose, so a display in a waiting room does not show the same fact to the same person twice in an hour.
The offline pack
A signed tarball of the whole corpus, or any subset, with a manifest and a detached signature. Verify it, drop it on the box, disconnect the box.
Availability
99.95% on the hosted API, measured monthly. The offline pack has no availability figure because the concept does not apply to it.
Screen presets
Four shapes, because those are the four shapes screens come in.
Presets set type size, item length and rotation interval together. Pass preset=lobby and stop thinking about it.
| Preset | Ratio | Rotation | Intended for |
|---|---|---|---|
lobby | 16:9 | 24 s | Reception and foyer displays at reading distance. |
column | 9:16 | 18 s | Lift lobbies, wayfinding totems, door-side panels. |
kiosk | 1:1 | 30 s | Touch kiosks and attract loops, where dwell is longer. |
ticker | 4 lines | 12 s | Small monochrome panels. Plain text, no markup, 220 characters. |
Reading levels
The same fact, written four ways.
Set once per channel or per display. The item below is hor_0009 at each of the four levels.
| Level | Text |
|---|---|
grade 6 | A second is how long it takes a caesium atom to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times. |
grade 9 | The second is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium-133 atom. The number is not round because it was chosen to match the second already in use. |
grade 12 | The second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. |
grade 14 | The second is defined by fixing the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of caesium-133 at 9,192,631,770 Hz, a value selected for continuity with the ephemeris second rather than for arithmetic convenience. |
Put something on the screen that will still be true next year.
Ambient is free for one screen and one channel, and it does not expire. The key takes about a minute.