Weather and Stuff

2021-11-08

Weather

I know, the weather, how exciting right? The weather around here has been extremely nice the last handful of days. So nice that I've been able to keep the air conditioner off day and night while also not needing the heat. This is what we call chilly around these parts, HA! Chilly. When on occasion a cold front from way up north just barely reaches down this far and gives us turn the AC off for once weather.

Continuing on with the weather theme I have broken my terminal dashboard out into two windows. One is the main dashboard and now there is a second screen I can switch to that gives me a pretty detailed breakdown on the current and near future weather conditions. I used to have a small current conditions pane on the main dashboard but I think having this dedicated second screen is a lot more useful and doesn't need to take up space on the main dashboard. Just recently wttr.in, which is what I use to pull in and display this weather info, added imperial units to the detailed weather graph that you can query and display in your terminal. That is the really cool part of this weather dashboard screen. I have made a number of changes to my terminal dashboard since I wrote that page detailing it in the Terminal section of my capsule. I will probably update that eventually but not until I'm actually done making changes for a while.

Weather Dashboard

Main Dashboard

Stuff

Been on another kick playing intensely with my Pinephone. I finally managed to get swmo running and I really like it overall. Swmo is sxmo only with Xorg and the corresponding X only software swapped out for wayland alternatives. Functionally almost identical to the standard sxmo but somehow to me feels prettier and smoother. There are still bugs and rough edges but I like the concept. It fits well with the hackery DIY nature of the Pinephone. It really is just a big collection of clever scripts built on top of postmarketOS but it still manages to provide nearly all the basic functonality you'd need from the hardware. The whole system and UI is much more lightweight than any of the other available options. It is a lot different and pretty strange in a number of ways compared to the typical smartphone but at least you get some real performance benefits from that. It is growing on me. It's silly but I like that it makes terminal software on a touchscreen actually useable. There are gestures for scrolling by swiping up and down along the right side of the screen so I've been able to browse gemini with amfora and it's not too bad of an experience. Some things are a little clunky to do in the terminal on a touchscreen but I think why I still like it is related to why I also like Palm PDA. Terminal software, like Palm OS software, generally is very clearly designed, behaves predicatably, is reliably and fast. I've decided I don't really mind a little clunkiness due to the touchscreen when the alternative is often painfully slow, unpredictable and buggy GUI software.

Stay tuned for these opinions to go out the window when the keyboard attachment arrives X-).

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