Unobtrusive devices, Applescript and weather reports
So I was reading this New York Times article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/technology/10AMBI.html about unobtrusive devices, specifically an orb which can glow based on reports of various things coming in over a cellular (they say pager, but IIRC a pager just operates on the same topographical principle) network. You can watch the stock market, or a particular stock, or this or that or the other thing; just about anything which can be found online and parsed is an option here. (If you’ve decided you want one, “Brookstone sounds like they carry them. Keep in mind, for any kind of specific, customized information you have to pay $7 a month, according to the article.)
It’s actually a really, really bright idea (no pun intended, seriously): No one wants a gi-normous LCD on their wall charting the stock market’s ups and downs, you know, in glowing liquid colors; it works great at Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta but not so well on your living-room or study wall. What to do? Make it unobtrusive, like a watch, something you can glance at.
This rang a bell for me, because I remembered noticing that Cee Pee You”:http://www.unsanity.com/products.php (the unobtrusive menubar CPU monitor for OS X) can make your “PowerMate pulse in time with your CPU monitor. (Ironically, it’s probably going to pulse and glow more than it would if you didn’t do that, because Applescript is not cheap on CPU consumption, unfortunately for a PowerBook user with singed fingertips like me.)
But see, that’s the key. It had never occurred to me that you could use Applescript to drive the PowerMate; I just assumed it was heavy driver voodoo. (Wouldn’t surprise me.) My train of thought went something like this, at that point:
I wonder how you drive something like that with Applescript.
Download PowerMate driver package for OS X, with bundled scripts. Wow. That’s really easy.
Think for about 45 seconds.
I wonder how hard it would be to write a script that parsed weather data, in ranges, and could make your PowerMate brighter or dimmer depending on the temperature, and maybe make it pulse if it was raining or snowing, etc.
As a matter of fact, if any of you out there are Applescript weather gurus and have some idea of how to parse over the truly byzantine National Weather Service text reports available via FTP, more the power to you, and go ahead and do something like this.
(Actually, if any of you out there are still looking for a belated birthday gift for yours truly, a PowerMate sounds really good right now. Yes, it is a tad pricey for a birthday gift, at $45, but I’d love you forever, and besides that I don’t think I’ve actually gotten a purchased (i.e., paid for in cash rather than in labor) birthday gift from any of my friends since I was in ninth or tenth grade. Think of it as time to pay up, pal.)
The next step is to see if anyone has a marginally more stable report than the National Weather Service, without me having to resort to something hideous like SOAP (which is really overkill for this; talk about a waste of CPU).
Am I the only one who thinks that the brilliance of being able to glance at something the size of three quarters and see whether it’s cold, cool, mild, warm, or hot and whether it’s raining/snowing or not at a glance would be novel? That’s something that not even a novelty like Meteorologist (which I’d probably keep for more precise indications) can do for me.
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