layout: post title: Weather Block created: 1047572160 categories:

• BMC
• Ottawa
• PHP

As you can see, I’ve added a weather block, showing everyone how cold it really is here in Ottawa. It’s actually written from scratch by me, which I’m rather proud of.

Basically, it checks a local cache to see if the weather has been updated in the last hour. If not, it downloads the appropriate Environment Canada webpage and parses it for information (right now, just the current conditions).

These items are wrapped in just two functions — getWeather and displayWeather. I really should have written it in OO PHP, as I’ve been doing for lots of stuff lately, but it started as just a quick hack.

If you want a little PHP function to display weather on your site, contact me and I can send you a copy of the source.

layout: post title: New bloggers on the block created: 1083833153 categories:

• Vancouver
• Personal Publishing

I wanted to point out two colleagues of mine that recently started blogging. Actually, they started today, with a little help from the company I work for, Streamline Web Co.

So, say hello to Stewart Marshall and Troy Angrignon. We hooked both of them up with personal Blogware blogs (you can have your own free 30-day trial). Read on for a little more about these two.

I met Stewart (in person) at the Vancouver portion of the Canadian Ecademy Roadshow. By the time myself and Roland had met with Stewart a second time, we had him drinking the blogging Kool-Aid. He’s heading back to England for now, but he and his wife Jessica are going to be back as permanent Vancouver-area residents (it looks like North Vancouver is the first choice right now).

Next up is Troy. Now I can stop having my inbox clogged up with cool links and ideas and just go read about them on his blog instead. His first post is entitled Big Questions, Long Views, and the Intersection of Technology and Society and serves as an intro to the kind of things Troy will be writing about. I actually think that that title would actually make a good tagline for his blog.

Here’s the last paragraph from his post:

Finally! I now have somewhere to put all of my random thoughts in order to cross-link some more synaptic connections. That’s one of the great joys of reflection and writing. I wish I could remember the author who said, “I do not write what I know, I write so that I may know myself.” That was very wise. That is also a goal of this blog. Thanks for reading. (Hello? Hello?)

Now go leave Stewart and Troy a comment.

• [[tanepiper@tane.codes]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109449908172779049 pull

• [[jonny]] https://social.coop/@jonny/109352724687772556 pull

• [[sab]] https://social.kalecream.com/@sab/109320208938076129 pull

• [[2022-11-20 23:06:12]] [[@nicksellen:matrix.org]] (link):
  • #fediblock is already working this way

org-timeblock§

Found at : https://github.com/ichernyshovvv/org-timeblock

• [[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/113538969404674598 pull

• [[2024-11-24T16:54:30.459Z]] @[[flancia.org]]: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xu4fhdxwmrptiwfvq5ymbkxx/post/3lbphw5rsn623 pull

• [[2024-11-24 16:53:04+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] (link):

  • TIL that the English [[scandal]] and Spanish [[escándalo]] come from Greek [[skándalon]], which means roughly [[stumbling block]], meaning of something that leads you into sin:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stumbling_block

trying out org-timeblock§

Issues§

Not necessarily with org-timeblock itself - might just be my setup.

• requires SVG support - termux emacs doesn’t seem to have svg support compiled in
  • org-timeblock gives message image-type: Invalid image type 'svg'
  • maybe I could try Emacs Android build specifically for this?
  • I think it’s for actual display in Emacs, not just for export. So a hard dependency.
  • (image-type-available-p 'svg) returns nil, so it’s not present.
• doesn’t seem to work at all in emacs -nw
  • fails because face-font doesn’t return as expected in no window mode
• doesn’t seem to play nicely with evil mode
  • I disabled it temporarliy in the buffer by toggling evil-local-mode, and the bindings work again.
  • So could turn it off with a hook e.g. https://github.com/ichernyshovvv/org-timeblock/pull/51/files
  • But would be nice if it worked. When it’s off, shortcuts like SPC SPC don’t work, which is a pain.
  • someone here has a useful config: https://github.com/ichernyshovvv/org-timeblock/issues/21
  • Must be some way to have an evil transient mode like e.g. magit does.
• various warnings at installation
• changing the timerange of a task doesn’t seem to work

Thoughts§

Looks very nice, but some showstoppers for me.

Might try calfw-blocks instead - is that text only?