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Category Archives: Apple

An Alfred (OS X) Workflow for Weather Underground Personal Weather Station (PWS) Data

I’ve operated a [Weather Underground](http://www.wunderground.com/) [Personal Weather Station](http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/about.asp) (PWS) [[KMEBERWI7](http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KMEBERWI7#history)] off-and-on (hardware issues notwithstanding) for as long as I can remember, and I thought it was about time to finally do an Alfred↔PWS mashup. My personal requirements were quite modest:

– 5 reading history (including most current)
– Ability to copy all the current day’s readings as CSV
– Quickly get to my PWS data w/o a bookmark

[Alfred](http://www.alfredapp.com/) makes all this possible via customized workflows that support many scripting environments, including Python. Here’s a quick preview before going into the details:

pws-alfred-results

It’s a fairly simple workflow:

– Grab today’s “raw” data (and clean it up)
– Select the last 5 entries
– Connect a URL action and use the full CSV as clipboard contents for any copy action

The full Python code is below and [on github](https://github.com/hrbrmstr/alfred-pws), and you can hit that github link or [Packal](http://www.packal.org/workflow/pws-history) for the compiled workflow. It’s been tested on Mavericks, but more eyes are always welcome.

Customizing the workflow for your own/favorite PWS is as simple as changing the `station` variable.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, including

– performing a background download of the PWS data
– using a sparkline graph as the icon
– customizing which data fields are returned
– providing commands to get/set your/favorite PWS
– providing options for the “copy” return type (currently CSV, but potentially XML or JSON)

Don’t hesitate to post issues or pull requests and check back for updates (as I’m sure some of those improvements will be making their way into the workflow).

import re
import csv
import sys
import datetime
from lib import requests
from workflow import Workflow, web
from StringIO import StringIO
 
# retrieve today's history for station "X"
 
def get_wx_data(station):
 
  tdy = datetime.datetime.today()
 
  # construct the URL for "today"
  url = 'http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=%s&day=%d&month=%d&year=%d&graphspan=day&format=1' % (station, tdy.day, tdy.month, tdy.year)
 
  r = web.get(url) # get the data
 
  r.raise_for_status() # report any errors
 
  return(re.sub("\n\n", "\n", re.sub("^\n|<br>", "", r.text))) # clean up the output & pass it back to main control
 
 
# main workflow control
 
def main(wf):
 
  station = "KMEBERWI7" # change to use your own/favorite station
 
  resp = get_wx_data(station)
 
  # only want last 5 readings, change this to whatever you want
  max = 5
 
  i=0
  for row in reversed(list(csv.reader(StringIO(resp)))):
    wf.add_item(title=row[0] + " | " + row[1] + "F | " + row[3] + "in | " + row[8] + "%", 
                subtitle=station, # so you know where you're getting data from
                arg=station, # passed as query to URL action - http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID={query}#history
                valid=True, # it can be opened in the browser
                icon="/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ToolbarInfo.icns", # info icon
                copytext=resp) # get the whole CSV file in a copy
    if (i==max): break
    i += 1
 
  # output to alfred
 
  wf.send_feedback()
 
if __name__ == u"__main__":
  wf = Workflow()
  sys.exit(wf.run(main))

Change The Default “Shell…” Action In RStudio for OS X

RStudio is my R development environment of choice and I work primarily on/in Mac OS X. While it’s great that Apple provides a built-in Terminal application, I prefer to use [iTerm 2](http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home) when I need to do work at a shell. The fine folks at RStudio provide a handy `Shell`… menu item off the `Tools` menu, but it (rightly) defaults to using Apple’s Terminal.app for functionality since they can’t assume what terminal application you are using.

To change it to iTerm (or whatever your favorite terminal application is) you need to fire up a text editor and change (make a backup first!) `/Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/mac-terminal` to contain the following modified AppleScript:

#!/usr/bin/osascript
on run argv
  set dir to quoted form of (first item of argv)
  tell app "iTerm"
    activate
    tell the first terminal
      launch session "Default Session"
      tell the last session
        set name to "RStudio Session"
        write text "cd " & dir
      end tell
    end tell
  end tell
end run

That will open a new tab in iTerm, set the session (tab) name to “RStudio Session” and change the directory to the current working directory in RStudio.

More often than not, I’m just using [Alfred](http://www.alfredapp.com/) to kick up iTerm and doing the `cd` myself, but this added tweak (which you have to do **every** time you upgrade RStudio) reduces the churn when I do end up using the feature within RStudio.

Show Mac App Store Downloads Folder (and more!)

@mroesch asked how to find the “Downloads” folder for the Mac App Store. Apple changed this from the time I posted the one and only app I ever did to MAS (a while ago). So, here’s how to do it now.

First, open up iTerm or Terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.appstore ShowDebugMenu -bool true

(don’t forget to hit return)

[Re]Start the MAS app and you should now see a Debug menu with the option to show the MAS Downloads folder. There are many other interesting actions/options there as well.

Security & Privacy Of Mountain Lion’s Dictation Feature

With Gizmodo doing a post hyping Mountain Lion’s new dictation feature it’s probably a good time to note that folks in regulated environments or who just care about security & privacy a bit more than others should not enable or use this feature for the dictation of sensitive information.

From Apple’s own warning on the matter:

When you use the keyboard dictation feature on your computer, the things you dictate will be recorded and sent to Apple to convert what you say into text. Your computer will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; and the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (for example, “my dad”) of your address book contacts. All of this data is used to help the dictation feature understand you better and recognize what you say. Your User Data is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.

It’s much like what happens with Siri, Dragon Dictation or a myriad of other iOS and modern desktop apps/browser extensions. Thankfully, it performs the transfers over SSL, but that still won’t help you if your dictating health, financial or other regulated/NPPI/PII data.

While the feature is cool and does work pretty well, it’s important to make sure you and your users know what it does, how it works and where they can/cannot use it.

Tweet From Mountain Lion Notification Center

If this feature was in Mountain Lion Developer Previews prior to revision 4, I didn’t notice it, but you can now tweet directly from the Notification Center “pane”.

You first need to make sure said feature is enabled in System Preferences (note the use of the “old” Notification Center icon in the preference pane icon set…perhaps Apple will change that prior to the final Mountain Lion build):

If it is enabled, you now have a Twitter – er – “button” [?] in the Notification Center pane, and clicking it gives you a tweet box where you can drop your 140 from all your connected Twitter accounts.

I suspect there will be similar Facebook posting features integrated, but I’m not part of the Facebook zombie horde and have no way of testing it.

I also noticed that Chrome now has tighter integration with the Notification Center than it did before (as in, I actually saw notifications pop up from Google Mail) and both the Beta channel and Canary builds have integrated the functionality: