shay2000Alternative / Broadcast
Alternative designs
Direction 10 / Late-night broadcast

Useful software,
after dark.

An independent station for small tools: menu-bar utilities, self-hosted services and the notes that come with them. 6 channels on the dial, 6 programmes in the schedule, and no ads to sit through.

Tune to a channel Read the schedule

A static page. No audio, no autoplay, no tracking — the dial is artwork, the numbers are real.

TUNE CH 01–06
Original CSS and SVG: a tuning scale, a waveform and a needle. Decorative artwork — nothing on this page plays sound.
Station readings / static snapshot

What the dial is actually reporting.

The panel is styled like a live meter, but it is an honest one: every figure is read from this site’s own GitHub snapshot, captured 12 Sept 2026. Nothing here updates while you watch, and nothing is extrapolated from it.

On air since
5 Oct 2022 First commit in the snapshot
Latest transmission
12 Sept 2026 Most recent repository push
Repositories tracked
13 8 original · 5 forked
Public repositories
14 Account opened 26 Jul 2014
Commits sampled
660 Commits read by the site’s snapshot script
Active days
127 Days carrying at least one commit
Languages heard
26 Distinct languages detected
Stars · forks
1 · 0 Totals across tracked repositories
Duty cycle 127 active days / 1439 days on record

8.8% of the days between 5 Oct 2022 and 12 Sept 2026 carry at least one commit — roughly 5.2 commits per active day, across 26 languages and 13 tracked repositories. Quiet weeks are part of the picture too.

Channel selector / 6 stations

Pick a frequency. Read the liner notes.

Each channel is one real project. Choose with a click, or step through the strip with the arrow keys — the reader pane follows the tuning.

Tuning strip

Channel numbers are the order of this page’s project list, not a rating. Bands are the two categories already used across the site.

Now tuned 6 channels · updated 12 Sept 2026

Now tuned to CH 01 · Watt is it? — channel 1 of 6

Channel 01 / 06 Band · Mac utilities

Watt is it?

The honest wattage number, in your menu bar.

Stack
  • Swift
  • AppKit
  • IOKit
  • Menu bar
Category
Mac utilities
Provenance
Original repository
Repository key
watt-is-it
Open the project page
Programme schedule / writing

Tonight’s listings.

Six programmes, in the order they were filed. Slots are publication dates rather than airtimes — there is no transmitter behind this station, only a shelf of write-ups.

  1. Slot 01

    Finding duplicates without hashing your whole disk

    A three-stage filter that reads 64 KB from each file before committing to a full SHA-256 — and why 'size on disk' is the number you actually want to sort by.

    • Swift
    • macOS
    • Performance
    • SwiftUI
  2. Slot 02

    Your 140 W charger probably isn't delivering 140 W

    macOS reports a wattage that describes the adapter, not what your Mac is actually receiving. Building a menu-bar utility to show the honest number.

    • Featured
    • Swift
    • macOS
    • Hardware
    • Menu bar
  3. Slot 03

    Modelling a split-flap display in the browser

    A mechanical flip board is not an animation, it's a state machine with a sound effect. Building one in vanilla JavaScript, with no frameworks and no build step.

    • JavaScript
    • CSS
    • Canvas
    • Fun
  4. Slot 04

    The brightness range macOS won't show you

    XDR displays have headroom past 100%. Here's what it takes to expose it safely, and why the slider needs a warning label.

    • Featured
    • Swift
    • macOS
    • Displays
    • Menu bar
  5. Slot 05

    AI summaries that ask permission first

    A Zotero plugin built around a consent preview: what leaves your machine, to which provider, how much of it, and what might go wrong — shown before anything is sent.

    • JavaScript
    • Zotero
    • Privacy
    • AI
  6. Slot 06

    Turning YouTube channels into a private podcast feed

    Why podcast clients are so fussy about RSS, what it takes to bundle a whole Python media stack into a Mac app, and how to keep the feed on your own network.

    • Python
    • Self-hosting
    • Docker
    • macOS
All writing in the archive 6 programmes filed in total · tags shown are the real frontmatter tags
Language frequencies / 16 bands in the top set

What the station is mostly made of.

Byte shares from the same snapshot, mapped onto a tuning scale. The percentages and byte counts are exact; the tuning positions are an illustration, square-root scaled so the smaller shares stay readable rather than crushed against the left of the dial.

Language Share of bytes % Bytes Tuning
  • JavaScript 48.5% 11,388,897 B 108.0
  • Fluent 20.1% 4,717,590 B 100.9
  • C++ 16.4% 3,844,715 B 99.6
  • Swift 2.8% 661,847 B 92.8
  • Python 2.8% 657,375 B 92.8
  • HTML 1.9% 438,629 B 92.0
  • SCSS 1.8% 428,933 B 91.9
  • NSIS 1.2% 279,556 B 91.1
  • C# 1.1% 256,660 B 91.0
  • TypeScript 1.1% 254,089 B 91.0
  • Shell 1.1% 251,824 B 91.0
  • CSS 0.7% 153,625 B 90.4
  • Perl 0.2% 53,566 B 89.3
  • C 0.1% 27,688 B 88.9
  • XSLT 0.1% 19,695 B 88.9
  • Java 0.1% 13,941 B 88.9

16 languages carry a non-zero share of the 26 detected across the snapshot. Fluent and C++ are large here because they belong to a plugin codebase, not to a change of heart about JavaScript.

Design note / Direction 10

Broadcast

The mood here is late-night radio: a tuning scale, a channel strip, a programme listing and a waveform. All of it is original CSS and SVG drawn for this page — the needle, the ticks and the bars are generated from a fixed formula, not traced from anyone’s station identity.

The metaphor is deliberately kept honest. There is no audio, no live feed and no listening figure anywhere on the page; the readings carry the date they were taken, and every channel links back to an existing project page rather than to an invented case study.

Typography stays inside the three self-hosted families the other directions use. The channel strip is a real button group with arrow-key navigation and a visible focus ring, the reader pane announces its changes politely, and the waveform animation is switched off entirely when the reader prefers reduced motion.

  • 01Nothing plays on its own.
  • 02Numbers carry their source and their date.
  • 03Every channel leads somewhere real.
Back to the mood board