Planet Larry

I have finally gotten around to migrate my website to the new adress. The new one is hund.tty1.se. If you follow this website using my webfeed, don’t forget to update it to the new one: https://hund.tty1.se/feed.xml.

The old address (hunden.linuxkompis.se) was always a cheap solution. This is because my first website was my Swedish website, located at hund.linuxkompis.se (which is still around, but currently not that active). When I started my English website, I wanted a good address for it, but all good ones are already taken, so I decided to reuse the linuxkompis.se domain that I already have.

The name “Hunden” was a rather bad pun with the words “Hund” and “En” (Short for English). The word “hunden” is actually a Swedish word and it translates to “the hund”. I was probably the only person who even got that joke.

When it turned out that I still owned the old domain tty1.se, I decided to reactivate it and use it for my English website. I hope you like the new address as much as I do!

Some time ago, my rather old (zsh!) script for checking the current weather from the weather service Yr.no broke, after some looking around I found a new alternative called Forecast.

The script is written in Bash, and it’s pretty straightforward. It requires bash, curl and xsltproc.

This is the syntax for how you show the current weather:

$ forecast.sh -l "Sweden/Stockholm/Stockholm"
Stockholm, Sweden
Sunrise: 05:40  Sunset: 18:09
Forecast:
From 2021-03-23 10:00 to 12:00
Outlook: Clear sky 8°C
Wind: Light breeze 3.0 m/s W
Precipitation: 0 mm
Pressure: 1014.9 hPa

There are two flags available -l and -o. The -l flag is for location and the location itself is formated like Country/State/City. The -o flag is for offset, and the following time periods are available:

There are two flags available:

The following time periods are available:

• 23:30-05:30
• 05:30-11:30
• 11:30-17:30
• 17:30-23:30.

Period-offset of 0 (default) gives the forecast for the current period. A value of 1 gives the forecast for the next period and so on.

Using it with Polybar

I mainly use it with Polybar to show the current weather like this:

Since the weather doesn’t change that often, I have chosen to use a cron job that runs once every hour and saves the data to a file that Polybar then reads.

The cron job looks like this:

forecast.sh -l "Sweden/Uppsala/Örbyhus" -p 0 | grep "Outlook" | sed 's/Outlook: //'

And the command for Polybar looks like this:

[module/weather]
inherit = script/defaults
exec = cat /tmp/weather.log
format-prefix = " "
format-prefix-foreground = ${colors.blue}

It’s easy to take a lot of things for granted when you’ve been using them for longer than you can remember. Coloured manual pages is one of those things.

By default, there’s no colours for the manual pages, which can make it more difficult to distinguish parts and sections of the documentation than it has to be.

If you want to put some colours on your own manual pages; simply add this to your configuration file for your shell:

man() {
    env LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' \
    LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;33;5;74m' \
    LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' \
    LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' \
    LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[38;5;246m' \
    LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' \
    LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;39;5;146m' \
    man "$@"
}

If you want to change the colour of the yellow text, you have to change the value 33 on line 3 and if you want to change the cyan colour, you then have to change the value 36 on line 8.

Here are the codes if you haven’t memorised them: