Record a ShoutCast Stream
In my hometown of Eau Claire, WI, there is a very cool community radio station called WHYS 96.3 FM. Since I don’t live there anymore, I was pleased to see that they are streaming their programming using ShoutCast. There is a radio show on Monday evenings that I want to listen to, but I have other obligations scheduled during that time, so I had to come up with a way to record the stream to disk, and listen to it later. I created a short script that can be run from cron to record an audio stream for a set duration to an mp3 file on disk. Click through for more details:
Save an Audio Stream to Disk (mbeckler.org)
Weather Radar Desktop Background
Sample image from NOAA radar weather image
The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides high quality weather forecasts and current weather condition information online. One of their features is a complete ground-based radar map of the entire lower 48 states, in a single, very large image file. I decided that it would be useful and pretty cool to have this large radar weather map as my dual-monitor desktop background. It would only be useful and cool if it updated itself automatically every few minutes, so I could quickly see what the weather was going to be.
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