The Surfing Linux User… or the Linux Surfer
There are two things you don’t see everyday… A surfer (rider of waves, dancing with the Ocean, long salty hair, lives by the tide) and a Linux user (Linux everywhere, free and open source software)… as the same person. Well, that’s me. And I love it.
Like many Linux users, customizing the desktop experience is fun. So I took the surf approach to that. As a surfer, I’m always keeping an eye on what the Ocean is doing. And I’m awake and programming on my Linux machine really early. Long before the sun is up. Before first light, you have nothing to look at but buoy readings and swell charts.
So I put that info on my desktop!
What are we looking at here? First, the machine…
- Arch Linux
- i3 tiling window manager (no desktop environment)
- Compton compositor
- i3blocks status bar
The Desktop Background
As you can see, the background is a swell chart…
But this is not a static image. I wrote a Python script (GitHub) that downloads a surf chart (the current chart) to a specific directory. Then I make a call to feh to update the background. i3blocks handles all of this scheduling and execution. And as you can see from the first screenshot, I prefer my terminals to have transparency, which is where the compositor comes into play.
Detailed Buoy Data
You may have missed this from the above screenshots, but if you look closer at the i3 bar, there is a plethora of information (system and surf)…
Much like the dynamic background, this data is being refreshed on an interval. I wrote a Python script (GitHub), pywave, that takes a buoy identifier and then does some web scraping and outputs the data that us surfers really care about: swell height, swell period, and swell direction. Much like the background, i3blocks is running and refreshing this. That date/time stamp right next to the swell data is to let me know the last timestamp on the background change. It seemed like the most elegant way of showing the successful background change, otherwise I’d be none-the-wiser staring at an old surf chart if the script failed silently (and maybe missing waves!).
This was fun. A huge mixture of things I really love: the Ocean, Linux, and Python. If you’re interested to see some of the other finer details, here are my dotfiles.
And on that note, first light is here and… as you can so awesomely see from my screenshot… there’s serious swell out in the water (6.5+ ft with a decent period). I’m out!
Surf’s up!
