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Using mutt & cron To Text Yourself The Weather
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<h1>
Using mutt & cron To Text Yourself The Weather
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<p>
I have a flip phone (it’s much less distracting than a smartphone), so I cannot use an app or a browser to check the weather when getting dressed in the morning. I tried NOAA’s dial-a-forecast, but the number for my state is out of service.
</p>
<p>
So, I decided to make a script that texts me the weather. This was surprisingly simple. It broke down into three steps:
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<ol>
<li>Get the weather
</li>
<li>Text it to myself
</li>
<li>Automate that
</li>
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<p>
This post assumes that you have email working on a system-level. Since setting that up is out-of-scope for this post, you can either do it yourself or get an account on a <a href="https://tildeverse.org/">pubnix</a>.
</p>
<h2>
Step one: getting the weather
</h2>
<p>
There are two ways I went about this. At first, I just used wttr.in in image-mode (to avoid text-wrapping issues). This worked well but I generally prefer NOAA’s forecast, so I eventually switched to the weather.gov API. <a href="https://wttr.in/:help">wttr.in</a> <a href="https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api">weather.gov API</a>
</p>
<p>
The wttr-version of the script looks like this:
</p>
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
# POSIX sh lacks mktemp
umask -S u=rw,g=,o= > /dev/null
unset WEATHER
trap 'rm -f "$WEATHER"' INT TERM HUP EXIT
WEATHER="/tmp/$.$USER.$(awk 'BEGIN{srand(); print rand()}').png"
:> "$WEATHER"
curl --silent https://wttr.in/LOCATION.png?1Fqn > "$WEATHER"
</pre>
<p>
Replace <em>LOCATION</em> with your location / zip-code.
</p>
<h2>
Step two: texting it to myself
</h2>
<p>
Now that we have the weather, it’s time to text it. I thought this part would be challenging, but it turned out to be very simple. I found out that most US carriers provide an email-to-MMS gateway, which meant that I could just send myself an email and it would show up as a text.
</p>
<p>
I chose mutt instead of something POSIXly correct because attachments are really simple with mutt, and this is just a hack.
</p>
<p>
The full script now looks like this:
</p>
<pre>
#!/bin/sh
# POSIX sh lacks mktemp
umask -S u=rw,g=,o= > /dev/null
unset WEATHER
trap 'rm -f "$WEATHER"' INT TERM HUP EXIT
WEATHER="/tmp/$.$USER.$(awk 'BEGIN{srand(); print rand()}').png"
:> "$WEATHER"
curl --silent https://wttr.in/LOCATION.png?1Fqn > "$WEATHER"
mutt -a "$WEATHER" -- 8005551234@mms-gateway.example
</pre>
<h2>
Step three: automating it
</h2>
<p>
I then had a script that texted me the weather when run, but I wanted to get the weather every morning. To do this, I just made a simple cronjob (<code>run crontab -e</code>):
</p>
<pre>
# minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week command
0 10 * * * /home/u9000/bin/pushweather.sh
</pre>
<p>
That’s it. This project was surprisingly simple but very fun, and I use it daily.
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Questions, comments, or wrote a reply? <a href="mailto:u9000@posteo.mx">Email me</a>.
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© DJ Chase 2022-06-10. Licensed under the Academic Free License (AFL 3.0).
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