The United Kingdom's Met Office recently released temperature data for about 1700 weather stations across the globe from 1701 to 2009.

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".

Times are generated by running shell commands like

env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"

every 20 seconds

The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

Flashbake automatically embeds ambient information in each version of those files—like the weather, your Twitter status, the last track you listened to—by including it all in each version's commit message.

With a few simple steps and the following code, you can have weather information for where you live automatically updated to your twitter account. The following steps and python program are for a Unix/Linux/Mac environment. I am sure they can easily be adapted to Windows.

MONTREAL/PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU INTL A * QUEBEC