Time/Weather Desktop

time and local weather (updated every 20 minutes)
As usual: EarthDesk, GeekTool and some fiddling.

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Comments

jameshome says:

gorgeous. nice to see you are still working on this!
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

bopuc says:

thanks James
I have to replace my old Environment Canada-scraping code as I am moving to Berlin soon.

I started with a script that checked FireEagle for my current lat-lon then queried weather-undergorund for current weather, but then figured, ach, I wanna know what it's like where my many of my peeps are too!

And besides I won't be moving around quite so much for the next little while.
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

aka.me says:

Hi Bo',
you planning on sharing this with yo peeps too? I'd love to have that on my screen too!
U take donations? ;-)
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

bopuc says:

Salut Paul :)
Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".
Times are generated by running shell commands like
env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date "+%l:%M %p"
every 20 seconds
The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

Voila! :)
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

quanza says:

looks awesome; thanks for the links!
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

bopuc says:

I should point out the Weather Underground API documentation as well. It's not comprehensive but you can get what you want out of it (like they don't say it but it looks like all methods support querying with lat-lon. :)
wiki.wunderground.com/index.php/API_-_XML
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

aka.me says:

so I guess you don't take donations, nor dinners ;-)
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

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Time/Weather Desktop

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jameshome says:

bopuc says:

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