Comment by dabluecaboose
9 hours ago
While it may not be flashy, I personally find the GOES sites extremely useful. Things are often simply placed at obvious and expected URLs, so scraping or monitoring is extremely easy.
I wrote the script that provides the GOES NavSum [1] and it pretty much just builds a standardized text file and drops it in the folder. The neat thing is that this makes it really easy to programmatically scrape and parse the data.
I wrote a personal script at one point that would download the GOES-EAST CONUS image and both EAST and WEST full disk images and composite them into a wallpaper. At one point my server had 500GB of archived GOES imagery. I liked to joke with my former coworkers that I could report image anomalies before they notice because my desktop wallpaper would change every 10 minutes.
Hey, I have a script for updating my background too! I'm not archiving the old images though, but I've thought about it to make some cool animations
Hah originally making an animation was my plan, but as so often happens it fell on the backburner and then I ended up with a massive archive. I just deleted it once I realized that A) Better archives exist elsewhere and B) I wasn't going to do anything with it.
I still have the script somewhere. I should throw an LLM at it and see if I can't sand off a few rough edges.
It would be great if an LLM could be trained to generate interpolated images between the 10m intervals of the full disk geocolor product. The animations would be fantastic.
I've got about 2.5 years worth of that imagery if someone knows a good way to do this on a budget.
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There's an app that updates the desktop https://downlinkapp.com/
make torrent of it
Maybe if the UX was nicer, you wouldn't need to write scrapers and parsers and could just use their site.
We don't need a bloated React framework to show a plaintext file with the fuel tank levels. It's NOAA, not Microsoft.
> We don't need a bloated React framework
Could have stopped there for 99% of websites
They're scraping to automatically update the wallpaper on their desktop. That's not something a website can do, even with fantastic UX.
"That's not something a website can do, even with fantastic UX."
Actually, I used to have a live-updating website AS MY BACKGROUND. Windows 98 and Me, website used AJAX and Comet to make it happen.
You used to be able to set websites as your desktop background.
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