Raging Computer

Weather data is pretty cool to play with. Especially when playing with home automation or just turning the current weather conditions into a meme.

For example:
Weather for Omaha, Nebraska on 4/13/2014 at 16:00

[text]
raging@virtualbox3:~/weather$ perl grabweather.pl
Forecast – Today:
weekday: Sunday
high: 61
low: 27
precip: 100
cond: Thunderstorm
month: 4
day: 13
hour: 22

Forecast – Tomorrow:
weekday: Monday
high: 43
low: 25
precip: 10
cond: Partly Cloudy
month: 4
day: 14
hour: 22

Forecast – Day After Tomorrow:
weekday: Tuesday
high: 66
low: 37
precip: 0
cond: Partly Cloudy
month: 4
day: 15
hour: 22

Current Conditions:
conditions: Overcast
temp: 34
relative_humidity: 86
wind: 10.9
wind_gust: 0
pressure_trend: –
feelslike: 26
precip_1hr: 0

Radar Static Image: /tmp/68127-radar.png
Animated Radar Image: /tmp/68127-amimatedradar.gif
[/text]

More info about Weather Underground’s API: www.wunderground.com/weather/api

Keep reading for my bit of Perl to grab it and make it usable.

Continue reading “Weather Underground ( wunderground ) XML API with Perl”

Edit: This post is pretty old and Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana have evolved a lot since it was written.

Since I mostly deal with Windows computers, and partially because I couldn’t figure out why phantomjs on my debian netinstall rendered fonts to be UGLY, I figured I’d use one of the many windows computers to render and email the reports. I’m using my gmail account for testing this.

Samples:
overview.pdf
overview.png

That looks pretty awesome, right? The secret sauce here is PhantomJS It pretty much a headless WebKit. A browser without a display. And it’s cross-platform!

I use PhantomJS to screenshot for PNG output and print to PDF. I then use ImageMagick to crop the PNG to a reasonable size. I use sendEmail to, well, send an email with the files attached.

Enough jibber-jabber.
Continue reading “Kibana3 Automated Email Reports Using Windows”

It’s that time again! Another construction project at work!

It was decided that I would run another time-lapse webcam of the construction process. This was a little last-minute. Our electrician mounted an analog camera and plugged into a network video encoder. http://www.axis.com/products/cam_m7001/

I haven’t had time to set up a proper linux box to manage all this so I threw together a batch file and a scheduled task to run on my workstation every 5 minutes until I get the rest set up.

I love how easy it is to get a jpg off the Axis M7001 Video Encoder http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/jpg/1/image.jpg

I’m familiar (and a fan of) wget. The win32 version works pretty well too.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

This uses my favorite method of generating zero padded time & date stamp files. It concatenates 0 and the variable then selects the right 2 characters.

constructioncamgrab.bat
[plain]
@echo off
REM Create the date and time elements.
for /f "tokens=1-7 delims=:/-, " %%i in (‘echo exit^|cmd /q /k"prompt $d $t"’) do (
for /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/-,() skip=1" %%a in (‘echo.^|date’) do (
set %%a=%%j
set %%b=%%k
set %%c=%%l
set hh=%%m
set min=%%n
)
)

REM zero-pad and see the result
set mm=0%mm%
set mm=%mm:~-2%
set dd=0%dd%
set dd=%dd:~-2%
set hh=0%hh%
set hh=%hh:~-2%
set min=0%min%
set min=%min:~-2%

echo %yy%%mm%%dd%%hh%%min%

set outFile=C:construction_cam%yy%%mm%%dd%%hh%%min%.jpg

"C:Program Files (x86)GnuWin32binwget.exe" http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/jpg/1/image.jpg -O %outFile%
[/plain]