ASCII Art Weather • Hacker News Board

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#61

Post by edw519 » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

           \/\/\/\/
         /         \
        /           \
       /             \
   /\_/     0    0    \_/\
  |                       |
   \/ \      |_|      / \/
       \             /
        \  \-----/  / ---------- Brilliant!
         \         /
          \_______/
            |   |

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#62

Post by user24 » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

tsukikage wrote: post #17

wttr.in/Cambridge looks completely wrong. Says Cambridge, UK at the top, but -2°C and heavy snow? Really? EDIT: looks like it's using http://www.worldweatheronline.com/cambridge-weather/scottish... rather than the one in East Anglia

Use a postcode instead: http://wttr.in/cb1

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#63

Post by torgoguys » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

mediumdeviation wrote: post #29

dredmorbius wrote: post #19

What's impressed me about this is how much faster it is than Web pages or Android apps. Really: just transmit the data necessary to convey your information. Your app is in the way. wttr.in on Android using Termux is actually pretty awesome.

Try looking at the source of the page. There's no way in hell anyone would call that "just" the data necessary to convey the information. The site is also unusable on mobile, because ASCII art unlike proper semantic HTML is not easily rescalable by the browser. And it's inaccessible by users relying on screen readers, ironically because of all the ASCII cruft.

>The site is also unusable on mobile, because ASCII art unlike proper semantic HTML is not easily rescalable by the browser. And it's inaccessible by users relying on screen readers, ironically because of all the ASCII cruft.

As web developers, we're used to "everyone" being the audience, but that's not the case here. As a stylized visual representation of the weather, it's fine. I dig it.

Making sure something is accessible to screen readers is generally an important thing (and could be worked on here) but I give this project a pass because the visual design is the whole point of the exercise.

And while I viewed this on mobile (and was fine for me with zooming), that clearly isn't the audience. Again, it could be improved if the author felt like it, but even if "fixed" (perhaps having morning, noon, evening, night being stacked vertically on mobile) I don't think this would be hardly anybody's goto weather reference on mobile. It's meant for us desktop users who are lovers of the terminal aesthetic.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#64

Post by torgoguys » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 1:53 PM UTC

manuw wrote: post #40

And the moon: http://wttr.in/Moon

The moon phase visualization takes arbitrary dates too: http://wttr.in/Moon@2016-Mar-23

For the forecast, it also appears you can append "?m" to the URL for metric units or "?u" for USCS units to override the default it uses based on your presumed location.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#65

Post by pixelbeat » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 1:54 PM UTC

Oh cool, this is using my ansi -> html conversion script!

http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#66

Post by rhplus » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

ape4 wrote: post #57

dredmorbius wrote: post #19

What's impressed me about this is how much faster it is than Web pages or Android apps. Really: just transmit the data necessary to convey your information. Your app is in the way. wttr.in on Android using Termux is actually pretty awesome.

It could be argued that you don't need an ascii icon for "sunny", etc.

Just one codepoint would do! Basic weather symbols like SUN (U+2600) and RAIN (U+2614) have been in Unicode since 1993. More detailed 'emoji' have been added in recent years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols

[2] i.e. http://emojipedia.org/fog/ etc

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#67

Post by tptacek » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

I don't know why looking at this makes me so happy, but it does.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#68

Post by acz » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #44

acz wrote: post #39

For PowerShell: (Invoke-WebRequest wttr.in/Brussels).AllElements | ?{$_.tagname -eq "pre"} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty outerText

Or you could just set/unset all the right headers and get the ASCII art directly (as `curl wttr.in/{location}` does) Although you'll need to interpret or strip the color codes.

There is a hack to make PowerShell print vt100 colours http://www.nivot.org/blog/post/2016/02/04/Windows-10-TH2-%28...

Doesn’t work for me, but works for others it seems.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#69

Post by jayrhynas » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

rhplus wrote: post #66

ape4 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be argued that you don't need an ascii icon for "sunny", etc.

Just one codepoint would do! Basic weather symbols like SUN (U+2600) and RAIN (U+2614) have been in Unicode since 1993. More detailed 'emoji' have been added in recent years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols [2] i.e. http://emojipedia.org/fog/ etc

the CLI application[1] that this is based on has an "emoji" frontend[2] that does just that

1: https://github.com/schachmat/wego

2: http://cl.ly/1w3b45242k3R

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#70

Post by jason46 » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 2:20 PM UTC

akerro wrote: post #27

We were unable to find your location, so we have brought you to Oymyakon, one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on the planet. >Freezing fog Don't want to know more about this place.

Any idea how to specify a location, I tried the site on a few different browsers and some are correct and others are not. I suppose some browsers are blocking its means for determining the location.

edit Looks like the issue is caused by some browsers/settings that hide the public ip prevent it from finding location.. would be nice to specify, i like the page.