University of Kwazulu-Natal

Web Site Page 2 Net By Matt

Bonisiwe Shabane
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web site page 2 net by matt

Google has an entire office suite online called Google Docs. You can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations completely within your web browser. I find this great for stuff that I need to have access to from many computers. All of the apps have nearly all of the features that you’ve come to expect from a desktop application, and a few that you just can’t get. For example, there’s a widget in the spreadsheet app that will mark up a Google map with a list of location’s that’s in your spreadsheet. This is a fun little toy to play with in my spreadsheet that tracks all of the traveling that I’ve done for work.

Bonus Tip: You can use Google Docs from your phone. Any phone can view documents, and some higher end phones can even make edits to documents. Google Traffic isn’t the official name for it, but I think it should be. Head over to Google Maps find a major city and then click the traffic button in the upper right corner. All of the major routes through the city will be color coded according to how quickly traffic is moving. You also have the option of looking at how traffic will be at a different time of the day.

Click on “change” next to “Live Traffic” and adjust the slider to the time of day that you’ll be traveling. Traffic is also figured into driving directions. You’ll now see an estimated time for your directions, and a new up to … in traffic estimate. From what I can tell the real-time data seems to be rather accurate. Except that by the time your on the road for 15 minutes, everything could have changed. Audible is the internet re-incarnation of books on tape.

They have over 50,000 books to choose from. Once you’ve selected your book, you download it and sync it to nearly any portable audio player, or one of thousands of PDAs, smart phones, GPS and other devices that support Audible. Books typically run about $10 to $25 and you can usually get your first one or two for free if you do a quick search for a coupon code. They also offer a subscription plan where books cost around $10-$12 depending on the plan. Even with a subscription, once you buy the book, it’s yours to keep, even if you cancel the subscription. Between audio books and podcasts I always have something to listen to during my commute.

Some of my recent reads include: Google Reader is a great way to aggregate all of your RSS feeds and view them from anywhere. I use it in combination with Yahoo Pipes (see yesterday’s post) to keep tabs on news, tech and some of my favorite comics. There’s also a mobile interface for Google reader for your phone. The two keep in perfect sync, so you never end up reading the same things twice. I also find the add star feature especially useful from my phone.

For example, I usually browse my feeds during lunch, and mark several as starred that I don’t need to read immediately. Then when I get home in the evening I’ll pull up the starred items on either my phone or desktop and read them from there. In addition to the free forecast and observation data that powers Temperature.Express, the National Weather Service also makes available live and archive data from their NEXRAD weather radar network. This data dates back to 1991. I have created npm packages for parsing and plotting this data. [Jump to packages]

Level 2 data is what you’re used to seeing in your weather or radar app. It’s the “how hard is it raining” graphics typically in green, yellow and red with red being the heaviest or most severe precipitation. More advanced users will also recognize the red and green velocity plot that shows wind direction and intensity. In 2019 I found nexrad-radar-data on Github. It worked, but needed some updating to to modernize the code and deal with the new compressed formats that were being stored to the archive. I then added plotting capabilities in a separate package.

The results can be seen below. A commercial tool exists for viewing this data, as does a set of libraries for Python. Neither of these options lent themselves to the environment where I was looking to deploy them. So I went ahead and began improving what was available to suit my needs. nexrad-level-2-data is the direct descendant of nexrad-radar-data mentioned above and outputs a JSON object containing all of the data from one level 2 scan. An excerpt from this data is below.

Additional information on how to make sense of this information including links to formal specifications from NWS are available in the Github repo. In addition to the free forecast and observation data that powers Temperature.Express, the National Weather Service also makes available live and archive data from their NEXRAD weather radar network. This data dates back to 1991. I have created npm packages for parsing and plotting this data. [Jump to packages] Level 2 data is what you’re used to seeing in your weather or radar app.

It’s the “how hard is it raining” graphics typically in green, yellow and red with red being the heaviest or most severe precipitation. More advanced users will also recognize the red and green velocity plot that shows wind direction and intensity. In 2019 I found nexrad-radar-data on Github. It worked, but needed some updating to to modernize the code and deal with the new compressed formats that were being stored to the archive. I then added plotting capabilities in a separate package. The results can be seen below.

A commercial tool exists for viewing this data, as does a set of libraries for Python. Neither of these options lent themselves to the environment where I was looking to deploy them. So I went ahead and began improving what was available to suit my needs. nexrad-level-2-data is the direct descendant of nexrad-radar-data mentioned above and outputs a JSON object containing all of the data from one level 2 scan. An excerpt from this data is below. Additional information on how to make sense of this information including links to formal specifications from NWS are available in the Github repo.

The Weatherstar 4000+ project has been a lot of fun to work on. And it received a huge boost the week of May 26, 2025 when it made the front page of Hacker News, and then to other social media sites. The outpouring of nostalgia for these forecasts and visuals has been incredible to follow along with. There were so many people sharing memories of vacations, childhood, parents and grandparents and many other great things. Thank you to everyone who has become a fan of this project. Just a few weeks prior to the huge bump in traffic I added a new screen to the Weatherstar, similar to the Hourly Graph and Hourly Forecast I previously added.

This time I took the original air quality report, which is not in the Weatherstar 4000+ because the data for it is not available in the APIs I use for weather data, and re-worked... It shows the likelihood of severe weather over the next three days. The design of this new screen follows very closely with the design of the air quality display from the original Weatherstar hardware. The number of categories have been increased to match the SPC’s categories, and the color coding comes directly from the SPC generated maps which look authentic in the context of the Weatherstar. Three days are shown which takes the place of up to three cities that the air quality report would include. Some slight visualization adjustments were also added to help make the category and color linking easier to follow.

You can see the similarities and differences between the new screen and the screen capture of the original air quality display below. Please join the discussion at GitHub if you have questions or comments on the new screen. The Weatherstar 4000+ project has been a lot of fun to work on. And it received a huge boost the week of May 26, 2025 when it made the front page of Hacker News, and then to other social media sites. The outpouring of nostalgia for these forecasts and visuals has been incredible to follow along with. There were so many people sharing memories of vacations, childhood, parents and grandparents and many other great things.

Thank you to everyone who has become a fan of this project. Just a few weeks prior to the huge bump in traffic I added a new screen to the Weatherstar, similar to the Hourly Graph and Hourly Forecast I previously added. This time I took the original air quality report, which is not in the Weatherstar 4000+ because the data for it is not available in the APIs I use for weather data, and re-worked... It shows the likelihood of severe weather over the next three days. The design of this new screen follows very closely with the design of the air quality display from the original Weatherstar hardware. The number of categories have been increased to match the SPC’s categories, and the color coding comes directly from the SPC generated maps which look authentic in the context of the Weatherstar.

Three days are shown which takes the place of up to three cities that the air quality report would include. Some slight visualization adjustments were also added to help make the category and color linking easier to follow. You can see the similarities and differences between the new screen and the screen capture of the original air quality display below. Please join the discussion at GitHub if you have questions or comments on the new screen. The NEXRAD Tools for Javascript released earlier this year now have a demo available! As discussed in the history of the libraries it would be cost prohibitive for me to make nationwide radar images available.

But I’ve found an effective way to make some of the images I use every day available. The demo shows level 2 plots for reflectivity and velocity and level 3 data for the hybrid hydrometer classification. It also includes a timestamp and road/county overlay on the radar image for reference, but those items are not part of the actual plotting libraries. The plots shown on the demo web site are updated in real-time, but a page refresh is required to load the latest image. The complete set of tools is available on GitHub. I’m excited to announce I am releasing a long-running side project of mine https://temperature.express.

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