boston winter 2015: it snowed a lot.

snopocalypse? snowmaggedon?

Jan 27 2015 snow
Jan 27 2015 snow

Here in Boston, it didn’t snow at all the last few months, and then suddenly it snowed a lot (90” over the last 30 days).

Here are some sweet graphs from http://weather.ou.edu/~splillo/misc.html

http://weather.ou.edu/~splillo/misc.html Samuel Lillo
Source: http://weather.ou.edu/~splillo/misc.html Samuel Lillo
BOS30snowp
Source: http://weather.ou.edu/~splillo/misc.html Samuel Lillo

On the plus side, I’ve now met my neighbors (since they’re outside shoveling for hours). At this point, we just throw the snow up as high as we can onto piles of snow. There’s nowhere to shovel to snow to…

20150211_030924
when the snowbanks are higher than you, where do you shovel snow to?

I’ve also made new friends and spent quality time with my roommates. We all co-work, since everyone is working from home because our city cannot handle the snow. *

20150209_185702

* I come from Georgia. My Boston friends were laughing last year about Atlanta shutting down due to a few inches of snow. WHO’S LAUGHING NOW HUH? 😛 My Alaskan friends tell me our Boston snowfall is normal for them, but their cities are built to handle it.

Here is a large icicle.

20150210_151307

It later fell and broke the railing/steps on our side-access porch. o__o Apparently, falling icicles do kill people. I’m glad no one died from our icicles.

Here are some more pictures of my poor bike. <3 bike, I will spend $$ and give you a professional tune-up after winter is over.

20150215_004425

Biking in boston is a struggle right now. The major streets are passable, but all the bike racks are very buried. For instance, at wework south station, they admonished me for locking to the railing I didn’t need to step in chest-high snow to reach. To add insult to injury, when I got out of work the railing was blocked anyway by trash bags. :/

bike at work on top of bike racks
bike at work on top of bike racks that are buried in snow

Here is my bike after the valentine’s weekend snowstorm. i left it overnight on top of a snowpile in order to lock it to something. When I left, I had a “where did I lock up?” moment. It was well-camouflaged.

20150216_202551

here are some pictures from my friends

mt. albany street snow farm

mt. mit, mt. simmons, mt. albany
back when it was “just” 3.5 stories tall.

mt. mit, mt. simmons, mt. albany, mt. cambridge, who knows

view from the top
view from the top

miters

There were some silly snow vehicles: fansled aka meloncraft, ebike-ski, and scooter-ski

For technical details / build reports, see

around the web

our mayor is flummoxed

Walsh: “I don’t know what to say to anybody anymore. Hopefully it will stop eventually”

Turns out the National Weather Service meteorologists are humans and not computers

“NEXT CHANCE OF WARMTH: SOMETIME SPRING INTO SUMMER:

Source: https://twitter.com/stannenb/status/566975835316690947/photo/1
Source: https://twitter.com/stannenb/status/566975835316690947/photo/1

“SADLY JUST CONTINUED EXCEPTIONALLY COLD WEATHER … NO END APPEARS IN SIGHT”

Source: https://twitter.com/BostInnoCity/status/567379898059485184
Source: https://twitter.com/BostInnoCity/status/567379898059485184

(i wonder why they have ellipses… AND ALL CAPS… is it for maritime radio, which I’ve now spent hours listening to … for their text-to-speech synthesizer… trivia, maritime radio weather reports have three voices since 2002… here are some voice samples via NOAA “Voice Improvement Processor” … listening to it brings up salty memories for me)

weather is happening

https://www.facebook.com/weatherishappening
https://www.facebook.com/weatherishappening

He just appeared on WMBR too. http://wmbr.org/m3u/Brainworms_Radio_20150213_1900.m3u at 24 mins in. If you want your daily dose of Angry Boston Weather Preacher Dude.

train through snow

https://vine.co/v/OP9YFebzX27

everyday i’m shovelling

MBTA quick reference map

Source: https://twitter.com/SaraMorrison/status/567111295552335873/photo/1
Source: https://twitter.com/SaraMorrison/status/567111295552335873/photo/1

Note: I dug out some of this from https://twitter.com/hashtag/BOSnow

highway signs with a boston accent

Source: 5wcvb ABS news? http://www.plengegen.com/blog/genetic-forecasting-cell-biology-experimentally-validates-functional-mutations-complex-disease-sequencing-studies/
Source: 5wcvb ABS news?

build a snow igloo, then rent it out on airbnb?

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/5195545

Screenshot from 2015-02-17 00:54:51

PSA: Be careful. Turns out collapsing snow caves can kill you by asphyxiation. This happens when snow plows don’t realize it’s a snow cave instead of a snow bank and dump tons of snow on top of your cave. Then you die. So make sure to stick a flag with a picture of a human on top of your snow cave, and don’t make it on the side of the street.

weather forecasts

predicting the future is hard. here are some good websites to help you

howmuchwillitsnow.com

howmuchwillitsnow.com
howmuchwillitsnow.com

wunderground.com (great UI, graphs temperature forecast for you and you can hover over it for instance to check out the likelihood it will be raining at 1pm on Tuesday)

wunderground.com
wunderground.com

Add Media

weather.gov (links to the national weather forecast broadcasts)

Screenshot from 2015-02-16 23:37:42

sailing.mit.edu/weather/ (comes with webcams! very clean and detailed)

sailing.mit.edu/weather
sailing.mit.edu/weather

weatherishappening.com (if you like a dose of snarky with your forecast)

weatherishappening.com SNOBLOBS
weatherishappening.com
SNOBLOBS

here is a narwhal on a narwhal

to end on a happier note, here is some cuteness for you

narwhals on narwhals
narwhals on narwhals

step-by-step: greasemonkey script to remove UI elements for screenshots

Motivation

I wanted to consistently remove the top navbar (here in purple) on a website for some GUI documentation I’m working on (yep, for Arvados). Basically, the purple navbar doesn’t add any useful info and takes up limited real-estate in my screenshots.

Screenshot from 2015-02-06 21:30:51

My initial method was to delete it using chrome / firefox’s powerful built-in inspector tools. ctrl-shift-c brings them up.

Screenshot from 2015-02-06 21:31:49

After selecting the correct div, I can just hit del and it will delete that section of code, thus removing the navbar. (control-z to undo if you delete the wrong section). However, this doesn’t persist across refreshes/clicks to other pages.

enter greasemonkey

Firefox > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

Restart firefox.

Now, we just write two lines of javascript to remove the navbar (you can also test this javascript out in the ctrl-shift-c Firefox Developer Tools by going to “Console” and then “JS” and entering in lines of code there). I used this script as a template. Simply specify where the script should apply & then which div to remove.

// ==UserScript==
// @name Arvados: Remove Top Navbar
// @namespace nouyang
// @description Removes the div in front of the image
// @include https://workbench.qr1hi.arvadosapi.com/*
// @version 0.0.1
// ==/UserScript==

document.getElementsByClassName('navbar-fixed-top')[0].remove()

Save as “removenav.user.js

UPDATE 31 July 2015: To explain a bit further, the extension “.user.js” is special to Greasemonkey. Also, the “@include”  line indicates what domain / URLs / pages this particular script should be active on.

According to their manual, I just need to visit any “.user.js” file in my browser and Greasemonkey will offer to install it. Sure enough, drag-and-drop the file into Firefox or enter it into your Firefox location bar

file:///home/nrw/Desktop/work/removenav.user.js

and greasemonkey offers to install it. Bam! Done. Make sure greasemonkey is enabled and that you haven’t made typos (for instance, http vs https) and then if you visit your website, the div should be gone.

greasemonkey

taking fixed size screenshots / cropping to a fixed size for documentation (ubuntu, shutter, gthumb, gimp)

Okay, for whatever reason you want to take a bunch of screenshots all of the exact same dimensions. 

In my case, it was because I wanted to have an image carousel of some “key features” of this open source software project I’m contributing to called Arvados.

mmm, such bouncing on the image carousel. :/

Well, it’d be nice to visually select what area to screenshot, while keeping the dimensions constant. The default Gnome / Ubuntu screenshot tool, while versatile, does not enable this.

quick tangent: screencast gif

how did I make that gif? very fast:

https://gist.github.com/paulirish/b6cf161009af0708315c

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:fossfreedom/byzanzs
udo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y byzanz
byzanz-record --duration=5 --x=318 --y=205 --width=650 --height=450 filename.gif

drag-and-drop into gfycat, done. (ubuntu 14.04)

I wish this byzanz thing had a visual interface to select the area you want to screencast, but failing that, you can use shutter to pick out the start x, y coordinates as well as the width and height by using shutter’s visual interface:

Screenshot from 2015-02-06 18:14:52
Image 1. BTW, speaking of screenshots of screenshots, I took this [screenshot of (shutter taking a screenshot)]  using “gnome-screenshot –interactive”  (of the whole screen, and cropped it with gThumb) + a delay of 5 seconds

back to screenshots: taking them properly the first time

Alright, let’s fix this bouncing-image-size problem.

$ sudo apt-get install shutter

Then, simply go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced and enter the size of the screenshots you want to take. As to how to find the appropriate x, y pixels, I trial-error’d it / used shutter’s interface itself (as shown above, where it shows you the x,y coordinates of your mouse) in order to find the correct starting point. I believe it marks the top left edge of the selection box, with the origin starting at the top left of the monitor, but who knows.

Screenshot from 2015-02-06 18:14:06
Image 2

Voila, as shown in Image 1 above, when you hit “selection” it auto-starts the rectangle selection box at the correct place and with the correct dimensions. You can click-drag the box around to fine-tune the placement. Sadly, you can’t “click under” the selection box to interact with the window below, so if you need to adjust anything, “esc” key out of the selection interface.

Done!

but what about re-cropping a ton of images

There’s easy was to automatically resize images down to a certain size, but I wanted to do more of a manual re-cropping process, since most of the images were “pretty-close” to the correct size. I found a decently streamlined way to do this.

I settled on using GIMP. First, start GIMP. ( optional: make a first layer bigger than all pictures). Then, File > Open as Layers… and select all the images you want to crop.

Then, edit the crop tool options. Fixed “Size”, Current layer only, Allow growing. Click-drag-release, you’ll get a selection box you can move around or even off the page.

Screenshot from 2015-02-06 21:08:54

 

Crop as desired. Pro-tip: You can shift-click the “eye” column to view a single layer. Make sure to also click on that layer, or else  you’ll crop the active layer which is not visible.

gimp screenshot cropping

$ gimp --new-instance

then drag-and-drop each layer into the main window of the new GIMP instance, which will auto-create a new image. Right-click > Remove alpha channel if you want to fill transparent spaces with white. Then,

Ctrl-E (export), select the file you wish to replace, enter-enter-enter (accept default PNG options), ctrl-w (close image), ctrl-d (confirm closing image).

Drag the next image over, rinse and repeat.

tangent

there was a sweet “export layers as individual images” python plugin, and it seemed like all you need to do was download the zip, copy the folder  and .py script inside to ~/gimp-2.9/plugins, and restart GIMP. Unfortunately I could not get it to work.

Failed to execute child process "/home/nrw/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins/export_layers" (Permission denied)

Oh well. As described above, I found a workaround. Slightly more tedious, but fine for the two dozen images I had.

tangent: sweet bash one-liner: list image sizes in directory

say you want to quickly check how many different file sizes you have in a directory

$ identify -format "%f: %wx%h\n" *.jpg *.gif *.png | cut -d: -f2 | sort -u | sed 's/x/\t/g'

You need imagemagick and sed installed. Thanks to stackoverflow for the identify line.

This outputs a width, height tab-delimited list of filesizes in the current directory (I’m trying to see how many different sizes of images I have in my directory)

   909    503
 924    503

notes

Example output, first part:


jobs8.png: 909x503
jobs.png: 909x503
lobstr.png: 924x503

Second part, cut out filename:

 909x503
 909x503
 924x503

Remove duplicates:

 909x503
 924x503

Make pretty with tabs:

 909    503
 924    503

or use gThumb

gThumb quickly shows you in a GUI the sizes of your images

gThumb

 

(no, I don’t know why all my GUI buttons are on the top of my windows :/ it’s really disorienting to hit “cancel” on your titlebar…)

btw, failed methods

Alt-printscreen (screenshot of active window) to take a screenshot of a firefox window tiled using cinnamon’s window tiling features, so theoretically always of the same size (1/4 of the screen) as long as I’m using the same monitor. But I didn’t want to keep cropping the firefox tabs and stuff out of the picture.

FireShot: I used these for the original screenshots. But the screenshots vary in size depending on whether there are horizontal scrollbars / vertical scrollbars present, which led me to my bouncing-carousel predicament when I thought all the pictures were the same size. A pretty sweet tool, though.