From the Just-Showing-Off Department:
I'm just about as blind as a bat without my glasses. I had a thought that I could use an old LCD monitor to act as clock in the bedroom and could also show various statuses. In thinking more about it, I decided that it would need to two primary requirements:
- That I could see the time without feeling around in the dark for my glasses
- That it would meet the minimum spouse-acceptance rating (or at least not violate it)
In experimenting over a weekend, I came up with this:
It's actually four separate frames, running in the Midori browser, which is set to display in full-screen mode. Frame #1 is a simple Javascript clock. Frame #2 contains the free weather status/forecast from Forecast.io and updates every 15 minutes. It looks nicer live because the graphics are animated. Frame #3 contains the status of various virtual machines running on my lab's ESXi box. Frame #4 reports the song currently playing on the Jukebox VM.
As is usual, I'm still tweaking the backend to this. I'm not sure that I like the colored status as it looked vary nice as just a 2-color page. I'm also in the process of learning a bit of Ajax and CSS, to improve the page. Currently the weather forecast disappears for a few seconds every time it updates (every 15 minutes).
Anyone have thoughts on how this can be improved?