The GeekSpeak Show Timer: A flexible way to monitor and adhere to the 51-minute show length, plus flexibly taking two one-minute interstitial breaks.
One of the hardest parts of talking on air to thousands of people about technology is sounding like you know what you are talking about, as others wave hands inaccurately, signaling that it’s time to wrap up a story and go to a break. After too much confusion and broadcast befuddlement, I used a weekend to solve the problem.
The public radio format includes 3 segments for an hour-long show. The breaks should happen so that the segments work out to be about 14 minutes, 18 minutes, and 19 minutes long. But the two breaks don’t have to be taken exactly on time. All that is important is for the content to be 51 minutes long, leaving time for station breaks and top-of-the-hour news.
This timer fills in a ring for each segment, clearly showing how close to each break we are. But it politely keeps counting if a segment goes long. At any time, the Next Segment button will advance the timer, starting one of the 1-minute breaks. Most importantly, the next segment is automatically adjusted to make sure by the end of the 3rd segment, the total show time will add up to 51 minutes. This is the only timing that is truly important.
Although this project is now abandoned it is avalible in the GeekSpeak Show Timer repo on GitHub.
