Doing everything in Linux console / terminal is a question perhaps every Linux / BSD hacker wants to do as Graphical user interface and using web search or using Graphical Environment plugins is an unneded complexity + googling or duckduckgoing for weather to check your next vacation destination city has been more and more of a terrible experience (for me) as I'm not a big fan of using the OS in a GUI.
In that manner of thoughts, as a Linux console geek and hard core ASCII art fan. I was recently happy to find that possible to check weather forecast in tty console or Linux terminal in a beautiful ascii art way easily through a Web wttr.in service – a web application weather forecast service that supports displaying the current and few days in future, weather forecast either in browser as a plain text or from the command line by simply accessing it with your favourite web access / transfer tool such as;
wget / curl or any of your favourite text browser elinks / lynx / w3m or if on *BSDs use fetch command.
Install Curl data transfer tool if it is not already
Wget is installed by default across most Linux distributions and fetch is present by default on BSDs, displaying it in text browser would perhaps be never used but if you decide to give it a try maybe try with elinks (to get colorful output), w3m and lynx will display a black and white results.
In case if you miss curl, install it:
On Debian distro
aptitude install -y curl
or Fedora
yum install -y curl
…
Of course to use wttr.in as it is Internet based Weather Forecast service the minimum you need to have is to have Internet connection to your Linux / BSD desktop computer.
Text based Weather Forecast Web App currently supports:
display the current weather as well as a 3-day weather forecast, split into morning, noon, evening and night
- Temperature is displayed for morning, noon, evening and night (includes temperature range, wind speed and direction, viewing distance, precipitation amount and probability)
- Provide results for Weather based on City / town / village location
- Supports display of Moon Phases Forecast in calendar days
- Supports multilingual names (Bulgarian Phonetic cyrillic / Russian and other exotic UTF-8 encodings such as Chineese and Japanese), 50+ languages are currently supported
- Has ability for prognosis for hostname (domain) location based on an its IP GeoIP location on the Globe
- Geographical locations / landmarks such as Lakes / Mountains etc. can be easily queried
- Query results metrics could be configured, e.g. USCS units or EU and rest of world accepted ones (SI) metric
- Displayed result could be either in ANSI (if from terminal / console / HTML if queried from browser or in PNG – if needed)
Where wttr.in could be useful ?
The best applications use, I can think of are for server (shell) / perl scripting automation purposes, it could be useful especially in TOO HOT, TOO, COLD, TOO WET location in Small and Middle sized Data Centers Green Energy (Sun Panel) Parks / Wind Energy situated Linux monitoring hosts to track possible problems of overheats or overcolding of servers due to abnormal excessive temperatures such as the ones we experienced this summer here All across in Europe or in too Cold DC locations such as heat locations Deserts in African Countries, Saudi Arabia or Chukotka or Siberia in Russia.
Other application is as a backup option to other normal Weather report services by PHP or Python scripts that fetch data, from multiple places.
Of course since this is a third party controlled service, the downtime is due to excessive connection requests, the service could get flooded and stopped working, but I guess for any Commercial use, wttr.in creator Igor Chubin would be happy to sell a specific crafted service for any end user candidates.
Here is few examples of the beautiful returned ASCII art formatted output of wttr.in.
1. Getting a three days Weather Forecast prognosis for city / town location
To get what is current weather in my current city of Living, Sofia Bulgaria just pass the city to the URL address
curl http://wttr.in/Sofia
links http://wttr.in/Dobrich
Default links (Linux) www text browser produces ugly black and white
2. Displaying Weather forecast with wget
wget -O- -q http://wttr.in
If you're lazy you can even omit the http:// as wget will look for HyperText Transmission Protocol by itself
wget -O- -q wttr.in
3. Getting Forecast results for a Tourist Destination
Lets get the weather forecast for the popular tourist Bulgarian destination of the Seven Rila Lakes (near Rila Monastery), situated in the Rila Mountain BG.
curl http://wttr.in/Seven+Rila+Lakes
4. Display Forecast for a specific server IP
Displaying information on specific server IP address current situated in GeoIP database, of course could be not really true, as the IP could be just a Load Balancer a router that does NAT to some internal DMZ-ed location server, but anyways it is a cool feature.
Lets get information on what is the weather on Google Global's Public DNS server IP 8.8.8.8 so commonly used to guarantee a Windows and Linux Desktop client machines Internet connectivity.
curl wttr.in/@8.8.8.8
5. Download PNG image picture from wttr.in service
Lets say you want to get a 3 days standard Weather forecast for the popular Black Sea Resort town in Bulgaria Pomorie (a beautiful sea city which has even a functioning 5 Monks Monastery Pomorie Monastery situated near sea coast)
curl http://wttr.in/Pomorie.png
–2019-08-22 20:15:51– http://wttr.in/Pomorie.png
Resolving wttr.in (wttr.in)… 5.9.243.187
Connecting to wttr.in (wttr.in)|5.9.243.187|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 42617 (42K) [image/png]
Saving to: ‘Pomorie.png’Pomorie.png 100%[=======================================================================================================>] 41.62K –.-KB/s in 0.07s
2019-08-22 20:15:52 (586 KB/s) – ‘Pomorie.png’ saved [42617/42617]
Note: The generated .png is again the ASCII art produced by a direct text fetch bug in pic format
6. Displaying Current Moon Phase
If you want to enjoy a text based Moon phase picture through wttr.in 🙂
wget -O- -q wttr.in/Moon
You can also get a Moon Phase prognosis for a current future date or get a previous date phase
curl wttr.in/moon@2019-09-15
Full Moon Madness !! – Vampires are out beaware and Enjoy the ultra kewl ASCII Colorful Art 🙂
7. Getting help for wttr.in terminal Waether Forecast results
$ curl wttr.in/:help
Usage:
$ curl wttr.in # current location
$ curl wttr.in/muc # weather in the Munich airportSupported location types:
/paris # city name
/~Eiffel+tower # any location
/Москва # Unicode name of any location in any language
/muc # airport code (3 letters)
/@stackoverflow.com # domain name
/94107 # area codes
/-78.46,106.79 # GPS coordinatesSpecial locations:
/moon # Moon phase (add ,+US or ,+France for these cities)
/moon@2016-10-25 # Moon phase for the date (@2016-10-25)Units:
m # metric (SI) (used by default everywhere except US)
u # USCS (used by default in US)
M # show wind speed in m/sView options:
0 # only current weather
1 # current weather + 1 day
2 # current weather + 2 days
A # ignore User-Agent and force ANSI output format (terminal)
F # do not show the "Follow" line
n # narrow version (only day and night)
q # quiet version (no "Weather report" text)
Q # superquiet version (no "Weather report", no city name)
T # switch terminal sequences off (no colors)PNG options:
/paris.png # generate a PNG file
p # add frame around the output
t # transparency 150
transparency=… # transparency from 0 to 255 (255 = not transparent)Options can be combined:
/Paris?0pq
/Paris?0pq&lang=fr
/Paris_0pq.png # in PNG the file mode are specified after _
/Rome_0pq_lang=it.png # long options are separated with underscoreLocalization:
$ curl fr.wttr.in/Paris
$ curl wttr.in/paris?lang=fr
$ curl -H "Accept-Language: fr" wttr.in/parisSupported languages:
af da de el et fr fa hu id it nb nl pl pt-br ro ru tr uk vi (supported)
az be bg bs ca cy cs eo es fi ga hi hr hy is ja jv ka kk ko ky lt lv mk ml nl fy nn pt pt-br sk sl sr sr-lat sv sw th te uz zh zu he (in progress)Special URLs:
/:help # show this page
/:bash.function # show recommended bash function wttr()
/:translation # show the information about the translators
8. Comparing two cities weather from command line
One useful use of wttr.in if you plan to travel from Location city A to Location city B is to compare the temperatures with a simple bash one liner script:
diff -Naur <(curl -s http://wttr.in/Sofia ) <(curl -s http://wttr.in/Beograd )
9. Using ansiweather command to get Weather Temperature / Wind / Humidity in one line beuatiful text
If you go and install answeather Linux package
apt-get install –yes ansiweather
You will get a shell script wrapper with ANSI colors and Unicode symbols support. Weather data comes from OpenWeatherMap, this is useful if wttr.in is not working due to some URL malfunction (due to service is DoS-ed) etc.
ansiweather -l Atina
Lets use ansiweather to print the weather prognosis for upcoming 5 days for near port of Burgas, BG
ansiweather -F -l Burgas
10. Get all Weather current forecast for each Capital in the world
You can download and use this simple plain text file list of All Country Capitals in the World (country-capitals-all-world.txt) with ansiweather and a bash loop to get displayed each and every current day Weather Forecast in the World, here is how:
while read line; do ansiweather -l $line; sleep 3; done < country-capitals-all-world.txt
As you can see some of the very exotic third world capitals does not return data so 'ERROR: Cannot fetch weather data' is returned.
You can also substitute ansiweather with curl wttr.in/$line to do get the beautiful ASCII art 3 days weather forecast via wttr.in
while read line; do curl http://wttr.in/$line; sleep 3; done < country-capitals-all-world.txt
I'll be happy to know other nice ASCII Art supporting Web service to enjoy from text terminal on Linux (nomatter useful or) just funny joyful prank maniacal pranks such as Watching text ASCII version remake of Star Wars Classic Movie by simply telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl (if you haven't so just telnet and enjoy the streamed ASCIIs ! 🙂
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Talking about fun and ASCII, its worthy to mention hollywood Linux package
hipo@jeremiah:~/Desktop$ apt-cache show hollywood|grep -i desc -A 3
Description-en: fill your console with Hollywood melodrama technobabble
This utility will split your console into a multiple panes of genuine
technobabble, perfectly suitable for any Hollywood geek melodrama.
It is particularly suitable on any number of computer consoles in the
—
Description-md5: 768f44c76220ea2b35f855ea34c8bc35
Homepage: http://launchpad.net/hollywood
Section: games
Priority: optional
Once installed on Debian with:
aptitude install -y hollywood
…
You can get in a rapid manner plenty of tmux (screen like – virtual console emulator) split screen statistics about your notebook / workstation / server CPU usage, mlocate.db status, info about plugged in machine voltage, Speedometer (statistics about Network bandwidth usage), System load avarage (CPU Count, Memory Utilization) and some other random info coming out of dmesg kernel log and more. The information displayed in splitted windows changes rapidly and (assuming you run it at home Desktop with a soundblaster) and not remotely, a james bond Agent 007 soundtrack is played on the back, that brings up one's adrenaline and makes it look even cooler.
To give you an idea what to expect, here is shot of /usr/games/hollywood (the program start binary location) on Debian GNU / Linux running, Enjoy! 🙂
Baby boomers and Generation X, Y, Z – Generational Marketing and 4 Common personality stereotype traits of people born over the last 60 years
Saturday, August 18th, 2018Those who are employed in the realm of Social or Internet Marketing definitely have to know the existence of at least 4 different conditional stereotypes, these are Baby Boomers and Generation X, Generation Y and Generation Z (Millenials).
According to Socielogist Karl Mannheim (who is among the founding fathers of classical socielogy) – "All members of a generation share a similar collective experience" or in other words people are categorized in generations depending on when they were born.
As stereotypes they're generalization of people born in different periods of time and sharing same or similar traits.
Because of the age and the conditions they grew up and as they share those general spirit of time and age, they tend to be more or less behaving in a similar ways in how they think save / spend money or share some common approach to life choices and attitude towards life and worldview.
But before proceeding to the 4 main cohert provisional stereotypes, its worthy to mention how these four common trait generations came to existence with a little bit of pre-history.
The pre WW I and WW II world situation and the First and Second World War played a pivotal role in forming the social conditions necessery for the development of the baby boomers.
* The depression Era people
Born in period: 1912 – 1921 who came at full maturity around 1930-1939 right in the beginning of WW I (all of whom are already deceased) as of 2018 as a cause of the war uncertainty and the havoc and the war conditions were very conservative, compulsive savers, tried their best to maintain a low debt. They had the mindset (responsibility) to leave some kind of legacy to their children. They were very patriotic, oriented towards work before pleasure, had a great respect for authority and had a strong sense of moral obligation. For all this character traits of this people undoubtfully a key role played the strong belief in God mostly all people had at the time.
The next in line conditional stereotype of people that came to earth are the:
* The World War II Generation
Born in year period: 1922 to 1927 who came to a mature age exactly at the terrible years of Second World War.
People of that time were either fighters for or against the Axis Powers or the Central Powers with the common shared goal to fight against the enemy (of course there are multiple of people who were just trying to survive and not taking a side in this meaningless war).
The current amount of people living are estimated to few million of deathbed elders worldwide.
As above conditional generations types mentioned are of importance for historical reasons and most of the people belonging to those depression pre WWI and WW II era are dead or just a few millions an overall in un less-consuming age (excluding the medicine consumption which is higher compared to youngsters).
I'll further proceed further with the Baby Boomers, GEN X, Y, Zs who are de-facto the still active members participating to society and economy more or less.
So what are these 4 Stereotypes of Generations that and why are so important for the modern marketers or business manager?
1. BABY BOOMERS also called for a short (Boomers)
These are people who have been defined by a birth year range (period) from early to mid 1940s until 1960 and 1964.
In Europe and North America, boomers are widely identified with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.
As a group, baby boomers were considered the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to the era in which they arrived, and were amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive (and that's for a good reason).
One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before or that has come afterward. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the changes they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and with a methapors such as as "the pig in the python".
2. Generation X / GEN X
Generation X is considered the people born in the following birth year period 1960 forward in time until 1980s. A specific feature in the 60s-80s period was the shifting societal values, perhaps the spring of this generation was also connected to the increasing role and spread of communism in the world.
Sometimes this generation was referred as the "latchkey generation".
The term generation X itself was popularized largely by Douglas Coupland in his novel 1991 novel Generation X Tales for an Accelerated Culture
A very common trait for Generation X was the reduced adult supervision over kids when compared to previous generations a result of increasing divorce rates and the increased role of one parent children upbringing (in most cases that was the mother) which had to be actively involved as a workforce and lacked physically the time to spend enough time with its children and the increased use of childcare options in one parent families.
They were dubbed the "MTV" (Music Television) generation – that was a hit and most popular music TV in the early 1990s.
The kids representing generation X were described as slackers, cynical and disaffected.
The cultural influences dominating the tastes and feelings of the teen masses of that generation was musical genres such as punk music, heavy metal music, grunge and hip-hop and indie films (independent films) produced outside of the major film studio system.
According to many researches in midtime those generation are described as active, happy and achieving a work-life balance kind of lifestyle.
People belonging to Generation X are described as people with Enterpreneural tendencies.
Just to name a few of the celebrities and successful people who belong to this generation, that's Google's founder Sergey Brinn & Larry Page (born in 1973), Richard Stallman (founder of Free Software movement) as well movie and film producer celebrities such as Georgi Clooney, Lenny Kravitz, Quantin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, David Fincher etc.
According to United Kingdom survey study of 2500+ workers conducted by Workfront, GEN X are found to be among the hardest working employees in today's workforce. They are also ranked high by fellow workers for having a strong work ethics (about 59.5%), being helpful (55.4%) and very skilled (54.5%) of respondents as well marked as the best troubleshooters / problem solvers (41.6%) claimed so.
According to research conducted by Viacom, gen x they have a high desire for flexibility and fulfillment at work.
3. Generation Y (Millenials) – GEN Y
Following Generation X came on earth Genreation Y the birth period dated for this kids were years are stretchy year period that this generation is described are years 1980s – 1990s to yearly 2000s where birth period range of those ppl ends.
This kids are descendants of the GEN X and second wave Baby Boomers.
In the public this generation is referred as "echo boomers".
The Millenials characteristics are different based on the region of birth, they're famous for the increased familiarity with communication, media and digital technologies.
There upbringing was marked by increase in liberal approach to politics.
The Great recession crisis of the 2000s played a major impact on this generation because it has caused historical high levels of un-employment among youngsters and led to a possible long term economic and social damage to this generation.
Gen Y according are less brand loyal and the speed of the Internet has led the cohort to be similarly flexible and changing in its fashion, style consciousness and where
and how it is communicated with.
As I am born in 1983 me and my generation belongs to Generation Y and even though Bulgaria before 1991 was a Communist regime country, I should agree that I and many of my friends share a very similar behavior and way of thinking to the GEN Y stereotype described, but as I was born in a times of transition and Bulgaria as a Soviet Union Satellite at the time has been lacking behind in fashion and international culture due to the communist regime, me and my generation seem to be sharing a lot of common stereotype characteristics with Generation X such as the punk-rock, metal, hip-hop culture MTV culture and partly because of the GEN X like overall view on life.
Among most famous representative successful people of the Millenials generation are Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Prince William (the second in line to the British throne), Kim Jong Un (the leader dictator of North Korea) etc.
4. Generation Z ( GEN Z) / iGeneration / Generation Sensible (Post Millenials)
Following Millenials generation is GEN Z, demographers and researchers typically set as a starting birth date period of those generation 1990s and mid 2000s. As of time of writting there is still no clear consensus regarding ending birth years.
This is the so called Internet Generation because this generation used the internet and Smart Mobile Phone technology since a very young age, they are very confortable with technology (kinda of wired) and addicted to social media such as Facebook / Twitter / Instagram etc. Because of the level of digital communication, many people of this generation are more introvert oriented and often have problems expressing themselves freely in groups. Also they tend to lack the physical communication and more digitally community oriented, even though this depends much also on the specific personality and in some cases it is exactly the opposite.
* Summary
As a Marketer, Human Resources hiring personal specialist, a CEO or some kind of project / business manager it is a good idea to be aware of these 4 common stereotypes. However as this are stereotypes (and a theory) as everything theoritized the data is slighly biased and untrue. The marketer practice shows that whoever conducts a marketing and bases his sales on this theoritizing should consider this to be just one aspect of the marketing campaign those who are trying to sell, stuff ideas or ideology to any of those generation should be careful not to count 100% on the common traits found among the above 4 major groups and consider the individuality of person everyone has and just experiment a little bit to see what works and what doesn't.
Also it should be mentioned these diversification of stereotypes are mostly valid for the US citizens and Westerners but doesn't fully fit to ex-communist countries or countries of the Soviet union, those countries have a slightly different personality traits of person born in any of the year periods defined, same is more or less true for the poor parts of Africa and India, Vietnam, China and mostly all of the coomunist countries ex and current. It should be said that countries who belonged to the Soviet Union many of which are current Russian Federation Republics have a personality traits that are often mixture of the 4 stereotypes and even have a lot of the traits that were typical for the WW I and WW II generations, which makes dealing with this people a very weird experience.
Nomatter the standard error that should always considered when basing a marketing research hypothesis on Generational Marketing (using generational segmentation in marketing best potential customer targets), having a general insight and taking in consideration those stereotypes could seriously help in both marketing as well as HR specific fields like Change Management.
If you're a marketer, I recommend you take a quick look also on following very educative article Generational Makarketing and how to target each of the GEN X, Y, Z and Baby Boomers and what works best for each of them.
Nomatter what just like all Theories, the theory of Boomers and the Generation segmantation is not completely true, but it gives a good soil for reasoning as well definitely helps for people involved in sociology and business.
Comments and feedback on the article are mostly welcome as the topic is very broad and there is much more to be said …
Hope the article was interesting to you ….
What was your Generation like?
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