Mark.Senk@p0.f89.n129.z1.fidonet.org (Mark Senk) (10/31/90)
Index Number: 11423
[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]
I hope this gets out as Willie says he has been having trouble with the
local net feeds.
I wanted to give you my review of the news via cable tv service from
TCI cable.
The newws, stock quotes, features, file transfers are carried on a
sub-carrier of CNN. Well, actually it is carried along with info like
the captioning for the deaf during the period of video blanking while
the electron gun returns to the top left of the screen.
If you are served by a TCI owned cable company and get CNN call
800- 7PC - NEWS and ask for Steve.
The box attaches to a splitter for your cable feed and 9600 baud data
goes to your serial port.
The software required to view the info uses light bars and some
features may be accessed using alt key combinations.
I used : mode bw80 and Artic behaves better.
You can set your selections to pick out sports, weather, news (US and
international), business, finance, entertainment, etc.
These are stored until you change them. '
You may also choose to view all stories and filter them out by using up
to 16 keywords you have defined.
The stories use direct screen writes and you move through them with
cursor keys. I have to switch between a window which covers lines 7
through 21 and back to full screen when I access the menus. This looks
like a job for Vocal Eyes or some of those JAWS macros.
The stories are usually short pieces from USA Today, Knight Ritter,
Copley News Service, etc. There are also columns by Ellen Goodman and
George Wills and others.
These seem to be repeated every few hours and are not changed for a few
days.
It certainly is not as extensive as you would find on CompuServe, but
the price of $100 and no additional fees is fine.
The stories are stored in your meram, so once you have about 250 that
meet your selection criteria, you get nothing more until you delete
some of them.
Any more questions ? phone me at 412-681-4543 or Email to
senk2@unix.cis.pitt.edu
Mark
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