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.

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