Ventusky! Yet another 'take' on the weather....

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Mike Walsh
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Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
Location: King's Lynn, UK.

Ventusky! Yet another 'take' on the weather....

#1 Post by Mike Walsh »

Afternoon, all.

I was having a browse, as you do, and came across a rather neat new weather website. I use the 'Temps' Electron weather app which I wrote about here:-

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=112131

.....in most Puppies. However, I can't use it in Racy 5.5, because the glibc (and other stuff) is just too old. Until fairly recently, I've had an icon in the notification area, which when I click on it opens a window of QTWeb displaying my local weather from accuweather.com.

This has now quit working, because accuweather have re-vamped the website to need TLS 1.2.....which QTWeb is incapable of satisfying. So, I get a 'You don't have permission to access this URL' error instead.

Anyways; I started looking around for another weather site which would work with this setup. I found this really neat one:-

https://www.ventusky.com/

....which is beautifully interactive. It auto-displays your own 'local' geographical area, coloured appropriately for temperature (as shown on the scale to the right. As you move the cursor around, the temperature changes from location to location. Wind speeds and directions are graphically displayed on an ongoing basis, and you can set your favourite locations, which will then give detailed information as and when you click on them. All very nifty....as you can see below. (Courtesy of Will McEwan's WeX screencaster & Fredx181's GIF-creator.)


Image


Only trouble is, this interactive stuff doesn't show up in QTWeb..! Rats.....

So, I've modified my 'modus operandi'. I use watchdog's build of Palemoon_SSE-27.9.4 in Racy, which I modified to the 'portable'-build format pioneered by Fred. Very lightweight, and extremely snappy. I created a second profile (profile2) called by a second, modified 'launcher' (plmn2). This starts another instance of PM_SSE-27.9.4, which I've simply set to start with ventusky.com as my home page....and called by the same tray icon.

Works for me.


Mike. :wink:

musher0
Posts: 14629
Joined: Mon 05 Jan 2009, 00:54
Location: Gatineau (Qc), Canada

#2 Post by musher0 »

Interactive weather? Yay!

Something like:
"Dear Weather Website,

Please make the sun shine so it can evaporate the extra water in the river.
The Ottawa River is flooding us again.

TIA."
;)
musher0
~~~~~~~~~~
"You want it darker? We kill the flame." (L. Cohen)

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rockedge
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Location: Connecticut, United States
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#3 Post by rockedge »

Hello Mike!!

wonderful tip with the weather map.....works well and I shared it and they like the map as well.......

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Mike Walsh
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Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
Location: King's Lynn, UK.

#4 Post by Mike Walsh »

Hi, guys.

@ rockedge:- Glad ya like it. It's a wee bit 'different' to your average static weather maps; since it's kind of 'on the move', it captures your attention more, I think. This is more like what you see on the TV weather reports.

I like it, I must admit. And it doesn't matter what you check; precipitation, wind-speed, wind gusts, pressure charts.....it's all 'alive', and on the move.

@ musher:-
musher0 wrote:"Dear Weather Website,

Please make the sun shine so it can evaporate the extra water in the river.
The Ottawa River is flooding us again.

TIA."
Yes, indeedy! Now that would be a neat trick, wouldn't it? Makes those predictions of weather satellites in the sci-fi media seem not so far away..... :D


Mike. :wink:

Terry H
Posts: 708
Joined: Sun 29 Mar 2009, 16:48
Location: The Heart of Muskoka, ON Canada

#5 Post by Terry H »

Well Mike, my initial thoughts were that this was the best weather site ever! Then on further playing I found I am not able to get it to save my settings for Metric / C or my location. I added a bookmark, to my Start.me homepage, but on every view the initial display is Imperial / F and a general area map without my saved place as you have in your added gif. I'll keep the link i have created, it now makes 4 links I have to weather sites: wunderground; openweater; the start.me widget; ventusky. If I don't like the weather one site gives, I'm sure to get something else from the others.

As an aside, I downloaded the Android App ( i am aware of your views on mobile phones ;) ) on u which does seem to function as expected.

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Moat
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Joined: Tue 16 Jul 2013, 06:04
Location: Mid-mitten

#6 Post by Moat »

Very cool weather site! Huge CPU/GPU overhead, tho. If you have Google Chrome installed, you can use the "create shortcut" feature to run it as a web app, separate from the main browser - off in some corner of the desktop.

Bob

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tallboy
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Joined: Tue 21 Sep 2010, 21:56
Location: Drøbak, Norway

#7 Post by tallboy »

Mike, you can take a look at the link below, and after clicking the buttons to find new surprises, go to Maps. There are some amazing animations there, but you can choose wind, start the animation, and have some patience while a few supercomputers calculate the wind pattern for the next days, in northern Europe or the world. I attended a course where we calculated the movement around only one of those arrows, using triple-integration formulas, and it took a long time, and filled several blackboards. There is some heeeaavy calculations behind those animations!
BTW, the lines on the animation field on the right side, are borders for the northern european map. You're just within our zone, mate!
https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/ ... ings_Lynn/

Oh, BTW, the VENTUSKY site is not bad at all, the animations are very good, but for just a quick glance at the weather for the next days, I think yr is better.
True freedom is a live Puppy on a multisession CD/DVD.

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Mike Walsh
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Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
Location: King's Lynn, UK.

#8 Post by Mike Walsh »

@ tallboy:-

Not bad, Olaf, not at all bad. That's another bookmark for me! :lol:

--------------------------------------------
@ Moat:-

Bob, thank you so much for reminding me about the 'Create shortcuts' and desktop 'apps' thing...

Y'all may or may not recall that I detailed how to run NetFlix on the desktop, without firing up the browser itself.....something like 18 months ago:-

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=112072

At the time I was still using the last 32-bit Linux Chrome, Chrome 48, as I had been for a long while. I've finally given 48 the elbow, because it was starting to have problems with some of my regular sites, and have now settled down with version 69 of SRWare's Iron as my go-to browser.

At that time, the 'desktop app' system worked perfectly, and the main gist of the post was detailing how to create a 'launcher' script so that a Menu entry could be created. Recent releases of Chrome no longer work the way they used to, however; when attempting to start a NetFlix 'app' via the Menu entry script, you don't get just a separate window any longer.....you now get a second instance of the entire browser firing up. Which is not what I want at all. So I basically gave up on the desktop 'app' system, and for at least the last year have put it on the back burner.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to dust the cobwebs off and try things out with the 'app' system again. And whaddya know?

'Desktop apps' work perfectly with Iron 69. (This is the 32-bit version, running with the '--no-sandbox' flag for the app launcher script.) So I made up a MenuEntry for Ventusky..... (and yes, you're right about the 'overhead'; watch gKrellM go nuts when Ventusky fires up...!)


Image


Chuffed to bits, I then modified the original NetFlix MenuEntry for Iron. And here it is:-


Image


And the nice thing is that once you have a Menu entry, you can then add it to the 'launcher' area to the right of the Menu, too.

(Apologies for the somewhat jerky, 'grainy' GIF reproduction. I had to use the 'Low-quality' option in Fred's gifenc-sel GIF creator, in order to keep the sizes under the individual upload limits for PostImage.org...)

-----------------------------------------

I've done a bit of research into this. In Xenialpup64 (Chrome being 64-bit only these days, of course), I had a sneaking suspicion that the browser running as spot might be throwing the 'app' system out. So I moved the launcher script into the /home/spot directory, re-jigged it, reset permissions, and tried again.

Still no joy.

Bloody Google! I'm getting sick of their 'Big Brother knows better than you what you want to do with your browser' attitude. Smacks of MyCrudSoft, doesn't it? :lol: :roll:

I was convinced, what with Google being the driving force (and main 'sponsor') behind the Chromium Project, that they must have re-written the code-base to remove the feature, but.....I'm very glad to say that it seems to be alive & kicking in all the 'clones' except for Chrome itself.

All of this has simply confirmed my long-held belief that Iron is in fact a far superior implementation of the Chromium code-base. I'll still keep up with the new releases of Chrome, but will be doing so with somewhat less enthusiasm than before...

Don't worry, Chrome fans. You'll still get your 'fix'!! :lol: :lol:


Mike. :wink:

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