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.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Contra Scott Alexander On Apologies

I really need a short word for "complicatedly in favor of"

via Thing of Things September 12, 2024

Don't Help Kids With Contra Dancing If They Don't Need Help

If you're a kid like me, most kids have probably never heard of contra dancing before. You're probably wondering: contra dance -- what's that? Contra dancing is in some ways similar to square dancing. It's a group dance with a caller and…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts September 9, 2024

Two 19th-century missionary memoirs in China

Life for an American family in 1860s China The post Two 19th-century missionary memoirs in China appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise August 24, 2024

more     (via openring)