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Using mutt & cron To Text Yourself The Weather
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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.

So, I decided to make a script that texts me the weather. This was surprisingly simple. It broke down into three steps:

+ Get the weather
+ Text it to myself
+ Automate that


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 [pubnix https://tildeverse.org/].


== Step one: getting the weather ==

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.
[wttr.in https://wttr.in/:help]
[weather.gov API https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api]

The wttr-version of the script looks like this:

!/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"


Replace //LOCATION// with your location / zip-code.


== Step two: texting it to myself ==

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.

I chose mutt instead of something POSIXly correct because attachments are really simple with mutt, and this is just a hack.

The full script now looks like this: