ASCII Art Weather

[dredmorbius]

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.

[mediumdeviation]

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.

[amelius]

> just transmit the data necessary to convey your information

What is that cruft at the bottom of the page?

Also, I would prefer this as a CLI application, not as a webpage. Further it should have flags that make its output more friendly to further processing (e.g. grep).

Otherwise, nicely done.

[ape4]

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

[jordache]

Ok why not get Lynx on your Android device?

the rule of of diminishing return applies.. at some point, the usability shortcoming of ascii interface out weights the payload penalty

[pixelbeat]

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

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

[edw519]

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

[insulanian]

This is awesome!

But now I get:

> Sorry, we are runnig out of queries to the weather service at the moment. Here is the weather report for the default city just to show you, how it works. We will get new queries as soon as possible.

Can't you cache the data for an hour to prevent this from happening? Heck, just show me something even if it's fake as I love how the thing looks :)

[benzinschleuder]

It works in the Terminal, too!

curl http://wttr.in/london

[tsukikage]

"This is a web frontend for a console weather application wego, using it as a backend."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545180

[Jaruzel]

But not as native ANSI though? Unless it's doing some clever useragent detection? (I'm on Windows without curl/wget).

[manuw]

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

[torgoguys]

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.

[akerro]

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.

[jason46]

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.

[fabiendem]

Nice! :) alias weather="wget -O - http://wttr.in/london -q"

[xupybd]

Slight tweak watch --color "wget -O - http://wttr.in/Palmerston_North -q" Not that its going to need to update that much, its just, well it makes me feel like it's more accurate that way.

[tux]

Using 'watch' 'curl' (refresh every minute)

watch --color -n60 'curl -q http://wttr.in/london'

[korginator]

The weather data appears horribly inaccurate. I'm traveling in Vietnam (Hanoi) today and we're seeing temperatures between 25 and 31 deg C, but the site says we're roasting at 34 - 48 deg C.

I checked Bangkok where I will go tomorrow, and the site claims we will hit 45 deg C which is ridiculous.

[neic]

I don't think it's an interval. The second temperature seem to be the "Feels Like" temperature from worldweatheronline.com. I'm getting 52°C in Singapore which is ~15°C over the all time record.

[tsukikage]

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

[jvdh]

There is no way at all to handle duplicate location names. Another nice example is wttr.in/denhaag which uses the South African city of "Den Haag", which is so small even Google Maps searches for it end up with the South African embassy in the Dutch city of that name.

[user24]

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

[oneeyedpigeon]

It's pretty cool, but it doesn't quite line up for me. Unicode characters (but ... "ASCII"?) are the prime culprit, but something also going on with the 'delimitting' header lines too - they're way off.

[cvs268]

Broken for me as well.

Looks like certain assumptions about max length of weather numbers causes unnecessary additional padding resulting in misaligned borders.

http://imgur.com/vyupGUN

[itcrowd]

Works fine for me in Chromium, Firefox/Iceweasel and curl..

[d99kris]

Agree it doesn't render well in Chrome for example. In elinks and firefox under Linux it looks fine for me though.

[geoffry]

Nice! I like the aggregation into time blocks people tend to care about.

What's the definition of the probability of precip you're using? And how are you aggregating it? I ask because definitions can vary a lot and aggregation may not be straightforward.

Another thing to consider is how you interpret/convey wind direction. Usually weather data sources provide the direction the wind is coming from. And people seem split on if the arrow should point to the origin or direction, depending on their background. It's a shame there aren't more characters like ⎋ (with the arrow going the other direction) to better represent origin/direction.

[tyingq]

Related, "Forecast Font" takes an interesting approach to this, using a webfont: http://forecastfont.iconvau.lt/

Because it uses css to overlay elements, the woff font itself can be just the required pieces, rather than all the combinations. The woff font is 4.6kb. Not as tiny as ascii art, but still pretty small.

[buro9]

I much prefer weather via finger using graph.no:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11106354

https://0p.no/2014/12/13/graph_no___weather_forecast_via_fin...

And the command:

    finger [email protected]

Which produces this:

                  -= Meteogram for united_kingdom/england/london =-                
    'C                                                                   Rain (mm) 
    17                                                                   
    16      ^^^   ------^^^^^^                                           
    15   ^^^   ---            ^^^                                        
    14^^^                        ^^^                                     
    13                              ^^^                                  
    12                                 ^^^                               
    11                                    =========            ===   ^^^ 
    10                                             ============   ===    
     9                                            '  |                   2 mm 
     8                                      |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |    1 mm 
      _11_12_13_14_15_16_17_18 19 20 21 22 23 00 01 02 03 04 05 06_07_08 Hour
    
       SE SE  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S  S SE  S  S  S  S  E SE SE  S SW Wind dir.
        1  2  5  4  4  4  5  4  4  4  3  3  3  2  3  2  1  0  1  2  1  3 Wind(mps)
   
   Legend left axis:   - Sunny   ^ Scattered   = Clouded   =V= Thunder   # Fog
   Legend right axis:  | Rain    ! Sleet       * Snow

So it's 16'c with a light cloud cover until 1pm, clear until 4pm after which it gets a little cloudy again, some rain between 11pm and 7am, which is very light and heaviest around 2am.

That is the equivalent of this:

https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/hour_b...

Which has, for me, proven to be the most accurate and informative weather forecast.

And if you just want to use the latest meteogram image:

https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/London/avanse...

Also: Weather available via HTTPS! I dislike how the vast majority of apps on mobile devices use location for reporting local weather but do so over HTTP and leak location data. BBC, I'm looking at you.

If you're on Android there's a great widget that makes using any other weather app pretty redundant for most cases:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=widget.weather...

[Moru]

For me yr.no is almost always correct at least for the next few hours. It can be off a bit if you go a day ahead but it's updated regularly so just check often to get a picture of how the weather will be. I live in Sweden but have tried it extensively in Germany too with similar results.

[cat-dev-null]

Brilliant!

Try:

    curl -sk https://wttr.in/sfo

[masklinn]

If you use plain http, you don't even need the flags.

[yaronn01]

To visualize weather in the terminal you can also use:

$> a=$(curl -Ls "bit.ly/1OuRPDJ"); curl --data "$a" "tty.zone?cols=${COLUMNS}"

(via https://github.com/yaronn/wopr)

[leni536]

Nice, looks nice in w3m an lynx too (I wonder if it's possible to enable colors though). I have new alias:

   alias weather="w3m -dump wttr.in/budapest"

Edit: I just found in the comments that it works with plain curl too with color. Nice.

[hammerha]

Really good! Now I can see the weather on the command line in addition to a calendar and a clock.

I think It'd be better to show the weather of yesterday instead of showing the weather of the day after tomorrow so that I can compare the sensory temperature.

[tptacek]

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