Curling Weather and Simulated Time
Tue 10 May 2022 09:31:01 AM EDT
Two neat little things I want to share before I end up fogetting about them; both available running online, and both having source available for runnning at home.
wttr.in
I can’t really remember how I discovered this site, though I can guarantee it while while I went on a simple little search for terminal/console based things to do. wttr.in does several neat little tricks for displaying short term weather forecasts, with a character-based display being the common thread amongst all the outputs. What caught my attention about it was that I could pull the weather via curl–sure, maybe not the most exciting thing to some, but this side of computing–doing “big” things via command-line–is still new to me. Being in an SSH seesion with my tablet, thinking “I wonder what today’s high will be,” and typing in
curl http://wttr.in/Lexington?u
just fascinates me. To check out wttr.in, head on over to the site and check out the source at github.
https://wttr.in/
https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in
WWV Simulator
Several weeks ago I started talking to my wife about shortwave radio. Okay, maybe I didn’t do so much talking as I did introducing the concept and then showing a youtube video or two on the subject; but while I was watching the videos with her, I mentioned one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid and had access to my Dad’s receiver was tune in to WWV and listen to the station announce the time. (This also helped explain why I would occasionally look at a clock and if I was in the right mood say “at the tone, one hour, forty-six minutes,”)
In order to try and give her an example of the experience I did a quick little search to see if anyone was silly enough to record a portion of the broadcast and post it somewhere online–I mean, if we have weather radio sirens and EAS headers online, surely someone has recorded that… Well, I found something even better.
The WWV simulator uses your system clock and a bit of javascript to play out recorded samples from WWV or WWVH in your browser. Pretty neat, eh? I found it awesomely fascinating, and through it had my first experience hearing Hawaii.
You can check out the simulator and source at the links below:
https://wwv.mcodes.org/
https://github.com/kalafut/wwv
Thanks for reading;
–J