German Weather Service regional weather report from the command line

As a cyclist who prefers to ride during nice weather, I like to check the weather every so often. In Germany, the German Weather Service (DWD) provides freely accessible and up-to-date weather reports. However, since I do not like having to navigate a bunch of sub-menus on a website, I thought this might be an interesting small weekend programming project. So, in my long-running journey of creating overly complicated Bash scripts that make my life easier, I added this new contraption. The code can be found below and an up-to-date version will be available in my dotfiles repo over on GitHub. ...

May 23, 2021

R PDF documentation from the desktop

As of 2021, the internet might be the single greatest source of knowledge that ever existed, especially for programming. Via any web search engine it is possible to find an answer to most of the questions one could come across when working on an R script. Good ol' copy and paste from StackOverflow. However, there are times when you just want to RTFM – read the freaking manual. Be it for really understanding what this one obscure parameter really does or for understanding the return value of a function. ...

March 28, 2021

An automatic wallpaper setter for monthly ESA Copernicus satellite calendars

It is no secret that satellite images allow us to see the full beauty of the Earth's surface from a birds-eye view. Especially with modern high resolution satellite imagery such as from the Sentinel sensors, the diversity of landscapes can be experienced by everybody. This is why, in my opinion, satellite images make for awesome immersive wallpapers. One perfect example is set by the ESA Copernicus Sentinels calendars collection. In 2021, the focus of these well curated monthly satellite image wallpapers be on the megacities of the world, home to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And even more awesome is that they are provided freely available to everybody. ...

February 8, 2021