Re: [MLUG] getting the current temperature

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Jonathan King wrote:

> On 11/1/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Jonathan King wrote:
> >
> > > The truly geeky thing to do would be to ignore the weather because
> > > you'rer too busy coding.
> >
> > Well, I did write a little script that tells me the temperature from my 
> > computer so that I don't have to get up and walk to the door or look 
> > out the window!  Recent result:
>
> Not bad. This reminds me of some early webcam (ab)uses, and the coke 
> machine they rigged in CS at CMU that you could ping for availability of 
> your preferred beverage so that you didn't have to walk down the hall to 
> check it...

Don't forget the Trojan Room Coffee Pot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot

Wikipedia tells the funny ending to that story that I didn't know until 
now.  I saw that web page back in early 1995.  In the early days of the 
web it kinda jumped out at you somehow, even though it was someone else's 
coffee pot!



> > > Barring that, a reasonable alternative would be to convert NOAA 
> > > weather maps to ASCII art and transmit them to your Atari 2600 through 
> > > a hacked up game port. Any takers?
> >
> > Awesome, dude!
>
> I don't have time at the moment, but I'm pretty sure you could hack one 
> up in perl really easily using any number of web libraries, the ascii 
> art library and a presumed perl module for Atari 2600, at which point 
> the only challenge would be to reduce it to a single line.  In the mean 
> time, I did find mention of this:
>
> http://brainwagon.org/?page_id=2001
>
> I think this takes the notion of geeky pointed pointlessness in the 
> direction of a new largest eigenvector. :-)

He was so embarrassed that he had to write an entire article to justify 
how he'd spent his time!

Mike

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