bbweather 0.6.3 review
Downloadbbweather is a tool which displays the current weather conditions in an decorated window, simulating the look of the Blackbox toolba
|
|
bbweather is a tool which displays the current weather conditions in an decorated window, simulating the look of the Blackbox toolbar (Blackbox is a Windowmanager for X11). bbweather is heavily based on "bbdate" by John Kennis.
Furthermore, bbweather was inspired by wmWeather by Michael G. Henderson, from where I grabbed the perl-script that fetches the weather-conditions from your local station.
Requirements:
Wget
Perl 5.x
g++ 2.7.2/g++ 2.8.1/egcs 1.1 (or compatible)
GNU make (or compatible)
Installation
If you want to install bbweather from the RPM, you should know that I compiled bbweather with g++-3.0, so that the rpm will complain if you do not have g++-3.0 installed. You can download the source-rpm and recompile and install through rpm, or download the tar-ball.
In order to install bbweather from the tar.gz on your system, type the following in the directory to which you downloaded the bbweather distribution:
tar zxvf bbweather-0.6.2.tar.gz
cd bbweather-0.6.2
/configure
make
su
make install
This will compile bbweather and install it in /usr/local/bin/, its configuration files in /usr/local/share/bbtools/ and the man-pages in /usr/local/man/man1. bbweather also installs GrabWeather, a perl-script that fetches the relevant weather-data, in /usr/local/bin/
Usage
To use bbweather, you will need to know the station-ID of a weather-station to grab the information from. You can find out which stations are near you at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tg/siteloc.shtml. Note that you will need the 4-letter code and not the 5-digit code.
Once you determined the proper station, you need to run the perl-script "GrabWeather" with that ID as the first command-line parameter. Since you probably want to stay updated on the weather conditions, you might consider adding an entry to your crontab:
0 * * * * /path/to/GrabWeather StationID
This will create a directory called ".wmWeatherReports" in your $HOME in which it will place the data-files. You can then run bbweather:
bbweather StationID
If you prefer celsius over fahrenheit, pass the "-m" or the "--metric" option:
bbweather -m StationID
If you left-click on bbweather, it will display detailed weather information in an xmessage much like wmWeather.
If you specify the -c or the --cycle option, bbweather will cycle through the first four items in the list below. Per default, it only shows Temperature and Humidity. To cycle through ALL items, pass the -x or the --extra option. When in extra-cycle-mode, the following information is displayed in a one-minute interval:
1. T: Temperature H: Humidity
2. W: Wind speed and direction
3. V: Visibility
4. General Conditions
5. P: Pressure
6. DP: Dew Point
7. As of: Time Data collected
8. In: location
Additionally, cycling can be toggled at any time by middle-clicking on bbweather. Alternatively, you can cycle through the information by hand by right-clicking on bbweather unless the information to be displayed is too long to fit into the window, in which case it will be scrolled until the current cycle is over.
Per default, bbweather starts in the top-left corner of your screen. If you prefer another location, you can either change the configuration-file (/usr/local/share/bbtools/bbweather.conf) or pass the geometry as a command-line option.
Per default, bbweather displays the time the data was last updated in UTC. You can specify the local timezone by using the '-z' flag in hours deviation from UTC. bbweather does not automatically determine the local time, since it may be desirable to display several windows with information from different locations, thus allowing you to specify the local times at those places, rather than the local time at your location.
For example, to make bbweather start in the bottom-left hand corner of the screen and cycle through ALL the information for the weather station in New York City's Central park, you would start it like this:
bbweather -g +0-0 -c -x -z -5 KNYC
(Note that -z -5 is one argument with one paramter '-5', rather than two flags!)
bbweather 0.6.3 keywords