Ambient Bus Times

December 4th, 2014
bus, tech, transit
My commute home consists of a subway and a bus. The subway is frequent enough that I don't worry about it, but the bus runs every 20 minutes at best, sometimes longer. Plus there are sometimes delays, and it's good to know about these before I leave work. I can check the online bus predictions, but this takes some overhead. What if I could have an ambient reminder of this?

I made a little script that pulls down the realtime predictions for when my bus will leave the station, parses out the "minutes" field, color codes it by whether I probably have time to catch it, and prints it to my terminal. I leave it running on a terminal in the corner of my desktop and it looks like:
Thursday 2014-12-04 06:06 pm   23   29   47   70   90
The color coding is so buses I can probably catch are yellow, buses I can very likely catch are green, and buses I don't need to leave for yet are blue.

I haven't used this yet, but I think it will be helpful and make me more relaxed around leaving.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Starting With Chords

A lot of people play fiddle. Basically nobody starts by learning chords before learning melodies. But that's actually how I learned. I started with chords. One of the nice things about learning to play violin this way is that you can go busking even…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts November 15, 2024

Stuffies

I have some stuffies and I just have a bunny. Bunny is a rabbit. Woof is a seal. My favorite stuffie is bun bun. I play with my stuffies. Sometimes I jump up with them and I roll them. I can just throw them in the air when I want to play bthululubp wi…

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts November 15, 2024

You Can Buy A Malaria Net

2024 election takes

via Thing of Things November 6, 2024

more     (via openring)