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Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national rada

Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national radar mosaic every 15 minutes. Explicitly setting the background programmatically was very unreliable in practice. The beauty of my script is that it simply wgets the image, checks if it is valid, resamples the image using a high quality algorithm (slow but worth it), places it in a folder, and deletes the old image. My background preference is set to shuffle between images in that folder every minute, therefore my script acts like a pipeline.

mrguyorama 9y ago
The "shuffle any image in this folder" background option in windows is incredibly cool and underutilized
- vollmond 9y ago
  I have a few dozen images in my folder... never thought of using it as a data feed like this. Awesome.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    Using a folder as a queue is pretty common in the Linux world, moving files between them as well to make a pipeline.
sachleen 9y ago
Do you mind sharing where you get the radar image from? I'm trying to do something similar so I can see how I should dress for my bike commute every morning. The only good/free one I have found is NOAA's RIDGE (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/doppler/ridge_download.html http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/doppler/ridge_download.htm...) but it's low resolution and ugly.
- peacelilly 9y ago
  I use the national base reflectivity radar. https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/Conus/RadarImg/latest.gif https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/Conus/RadarImg/latest.gif
shoover 9y ago
Brilliant. I never know what to use for a background and usually keep a solid color. I’m stealing this.