4 ms·

Show HN: Daylight – track sunrise / sunset times in your terminal

79 points by zero_shift 2y ago

I love the sunlight and dread the long, dark winter evenings of Northern Europe. I often look up sunrise / sunset times and count off the days until the darkness is gone. Now I've written a terminal app for this (Mac/Linux) Features: a colorful summary of daylight times for your location; projected change over the coming days; handles NO_COLOR and a ---short flag if you dislike the output format. The location is IP-based but you can override this if you're on a VPN. Just create a terminal alias with the --loc flag. The app supports areas in the arctic / antarctic circle too. Check our the repository for a preview and instructions on how you can install it with Homebrew. (There is a Windows build but it's not yet tested)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
japaget 2y ago
Windows build works fine (Windows 10 Professional x64 22H2).
- zero_shift 2y ago
  Thanks! (Don't have a Windows machine right now so that's very helpful)
rrr_oh_man 2y ago
Great looking app!! I immediately checked how you do location lookups: > IP lookup is powered by https://ipinfo.io https://ipinfo.io. They provide a good service so please don't spam requests. There was a thread about them recently — the scale of their operation was very surprising.
- zero_shift 2y ago
  It _is_ possible to use native OS APIs for location lookup, but these all seem to rely on cgo. Which was a bit intimidating for a "let's learn Golang" project (Probably not the nicest code and no doubt I've broken a lot of Go idioms, but it was a good learning exercise) IPInfo is a good service and their developer relations were surprisingly relaxed about me (mis)using their API this way
  - reincoder 2y ago
    "Surprisingly relaxed," you say. Let me tell you about the time our users reverse-engineered our apps, submitted 2.2 million IPs, and broke our systems for our hackathon. https://ipinfo.io/blog/ipinfos-ip-hunt-2-2-million-ips-submitted-over-3-weeks-2 https://ipinfo.io/blog/ipinfos-ip-hunt-2-2-million-ips-submi... This is just our user base, to be honest and we like them for their mindset. We are happy to see users try our service in different ways and we learn a ton from them in that process. I certainly learned from you :)
- reincoder 2y ago
  Thank you very much! I appreciate talking with you in the other thread! I told the repo owner not to worry about "spamming" our service. We are happy to support as many requests as people can throw at us. Internally, when it comes to API requests, we are doing our best to reach an "unlimited" level of API requests. On the operational side, we are just getting started. The distributed network of a thousand servers we operate only runs a handful of diagnostic tests (ping, traceroute, etc.). We have a lot of plans, and I hope you will find us providing more fun stuff as we continue to grow!
thenthenthen 2y ago
Cool! Can we use the sky hue as Terminal background or overal “theme”?
oftenwrong 2y ago
I was curious how the times were obtained. It uses https://github.com/nathan-osman/go-sunrise https://github.com/nathan-osman/go-sunrise , which links to this calculation method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_equation#Complete_calculation_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_equation#Complete_calc...
- achillesheels 2y ago
  Great link thanks!
ndegruchy 2y ago
Of course, you can get this information in Emacs, too. You'll need to get your lat and long, first: (setq calendar-latitude 12.3456 calendar-longitude -98.7654) Then, you can `M-x sunrise-sunset` and see the times (and total daylight hours) in the echo area.
- michaelmcdonald 2y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
jrootabega 2y ago
Is the noon color scheme supposed to look like Finn from Adventure Time?
voidUpdate 2y ago
Does this pull the times from an online service or are they calculated locally? I tried to read the code to work it out but I don't program in Go so I got a little lost
- zero_shift 2y ago
  It gets your latitude/longitude from an IP lookup service, then does a geometric calculation locally
  - jmholla 2y ago
    Is there a configuration file or command line option to provide location information manually?
    - zero_shift 2y ago
      Yes, you can use `--loc="12.34,56.78"` where the values are longitude and latitude. You can also override the Timezone with `--timezone` (passing an IANA timezone e.g. America/New_York).
kseistrup 2y ago
This is nice, I like it! Is there a way to make it use 24h time, rather than AM/PM?
- kseistrup 2y ago
  If I use e.g. `daylight --timezone=Europe/Copenhagen` it does actually show the 24h times, which is nice. But til still appends AM/PM, which is kind of weird. :)
JimmyDeep 2y ago
I live in a place where it often rains, and I really love sunny weather. It makes me feel a bit down when I see that it's already dark by the time I get off work. I was wondering, since the Earth's revolution is taken into account, the time you get should be different every day, right?

79 points by zero_shift 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

japaget 2y ago

Windows build works fine (Windows 10 Professional x64 22H2).

zero_shift 2y ago
Thanks! (Don't have a Windows machine right now so that's very helpful)

rrr_oh_man 2y ago

Great looking app!! I immediately checked how you do location lookups: > IP lookup is powered by https://ipinfo.io https://ipinfo.io. They provide a good service so please don't spam requests. There was a thread about them recently — the scale of their operation was very surprising.

zero_shift 2y ago
It _is_ possible to use native OS APIs for location lookup, but these all seem to rely on cgo. Which was a bit intimidating for a "let's learn Golang" project (Probably not the nicest code and no doubt I've broken a lot of Go idioms, but it was a good learning exercise) IPInfo is a good service and their developer relations were surprisingly relaxed about me (mis)using their API this way
- reincoder 2y ago
  "Surprisingly relaxed," you say. Let me tell you about the time our users reverse-engineered our apps, submitted 2.2 million IPs, and broke our systems for our hackathon. https://ipinfo.io/blog/ipinfos-ip-hunt-2-2-million-ips-submitted-over-3-weeks-2 https://ipinfo.io/blog/ipinfos-ip-hunt-2-2-million-ips-submi... This is just our user base, to be honest and we like them for their mindset. We are happy to see users try our service in different ways and we learn a ton from them in that process. I certainly learned from you :)
reincoder 2y ago
Thank you very much! I appreciate talking with you in the other thread! I told the repo owner not to worry about "spamming" our service. We are happy to support as many requests as people can throw at us. Internally, when it comes to API requests, we are doing our best to reach an "unlimited" level of API requests. On the operational side, we are just getting started. The distributed network of a thousand servers we operate only runs a handful of diagnostic tests (ping, traceroute, etc.). We have a lot of plans, and I hope you will find us providing more fun stuff as we continue to grow!

thenthenthen 2y ago

Cool! Can we use the sky hue as Terminal background or overal “theme”?

oftenwrong 2y ago

I was curious how the times were obtained. It uses https://github.com/nathan-osman/go-sunrise https://github.com/nathan-osman/go-sunrise , which links to this calculation method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_equation#Complete_calculation_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_equation#Complete_calc...

achillesheels 2y ago
Great link thanks!

ndegruchy 2y ago

Of course, you can get this information in Emacs, too. You'll need to get your lat and long, first: (setq calendar-latitude 12.3456 calendar-longitude -98.7654) Then, you can `M-x sunrise-sunset` and see the times (and total daylight hours) in the echo area.

michaelmcdonald 2y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/

jrootabega 2y ago

Is the noon color scheme supposed to look like Finn from Adventure Time?

voidUpdate 2y ago

Does this pull the times from an online service or are they calculated locally? I tried to read the code to work it out but I don't program in Go so I got a little lost

zero_shift 2y ago
It gets your latitude/longitude from an IP lookup service, then does a geometric calculation locally
- jmholla 2y ago
  Is there a configuration file or command line option to provide location information manually?
  - zero_shift 2y ago
    Yes, you can use `--loc="12.34,56.78"` where the values are longitude and latitude. You can also override the Timezone with `--timezone` (passing an IANA timezone e.g. America/New_York).

kseistrup 2y ago

This is nice, I like it! Is there a way to make it use 24h time, rather than AM/PM?

kseistrup 2y ago
If I use e.g. `daylight --timezone=Europe/Copenhagen` it does actually show the 24h times, which is nice. But til still appends AM/PM, which is kind of weird. :)

JimmyDeep 2y ago

I live in a place where it often rains, and I really love sunny weather. It makes me feel a bit down when I see that it's already dark by the time I get off work. I was wondering, since the Earth's revolution is taken into account, the time you get should be different every day, right?