💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › whole-earth-terminal captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:17:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
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Near-real-time ASCII and ANSII visualisation of dear Mother Earth, right in your terminal!
Whole Earth Terminal is a simple technohippy art project for the Gemini- and Gopherspaces. A cron job runs each hour to fetch the latst colour image of Earth published by EUMETSAT. The `chafa` software is then used to convert this JPG image into character art form. The fanciest outputs use various unicode symbol characters and ANSI colour codes to provide a surprisingly realistic rendering! However, these might not look good everywhere, due to wide variation in the capabilities of terminal emulators, availability of fonts, etc. If you're using a graphical Gemini client, all bets are likely off. Therefore also published are increasingly less fancy renderings, all the way down to monochrome plain old ASCII which should provide an optimal whole Earth experience on your genuine DEC VT-100.
The images are taken by Meteosat 11, a geostationary weather satellite orbiting 36,000 km above the Earth, specifically at 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude. This provides a view of Africa and Europe, plus parts of the Middle East and South America. You cannot see North America, Asia or Oceania. You won't see much of anything at all around midnight UTC. Whole Earth Terminal may improve its coverage in future.
I am still experimenting with the various chafa options to find the best looking and most reliably rendering outputs. The number of outputs below and the corresponding URLs may therefore change. These will stablise in time, but for now, bookmark with caution!
Whole Earth Terminal is powered by the incredible Chafa software