Post about NDBC

feed.xml

@@ -2384,8 +2384,8 @@ $ printf hunter2 | md5sum
       <description><![CDATA[
         <p>In 2008, while I was in <em>collège</em> (the French middle school) and before I even knew about the concept of open source software, I discovered Sweet Home 3D on a laptop that my cousins had recovered from a nearby dump.</p>
         <p>That laptop was running Windows XP Pro. My cousins knew about the trick where you can reboot into Safe Mode and get access to a usually passwordless <em>Administrator</em> account, but they were only used to the Home Edition login screen where you can just click into the account, not to the Pro login screen where you have to type the username and password. I tried typing in <kbd>Administrator</kbd> without a password, and did get into the laptop, so we could play games on that laptop during our holidays.</p>
-        <p>I brought that laptop to a skate park and drew a scooter on Paint, then put it into an <abbr title="Rich Text Format">RTF</abbr> documentation next to a cookie recipe, making this the oldest document that I created and still have in my archives.</p>
-        <p>A few months later, I stumbled upon it again, during a time where I was playing the Sims 2 and 3 with a classmate, and played with it and other 3D software to design random homes. I say design homes, but really I was just creating a new plan, drawing a house, and giving up halfway through or just making Sweet Home 3D render complete nonsense. I think more houses should have all of their furniture upside down, that sounds much more practical.</p>
+        <p>I brought that laptop to a skate park and drew a scooter on Paint, then put it into an <abbr title="Rich Text Format">RTF</abbr> document next to a cookie recipe, making this the oldest document that I created and still have in my archives.</p>
+        <p>A few months later, I stumbled upon Sweet Home 3D again, during a time where I was playing the Sims 2 and 3 with a classmate, and played with it and other 3D software to design random homes. I say design homes, but really I was just creating a new plan, drawing a house, and giving up halfway through or just making Sweet Home 3D render complete nonsense. I think more houses should have all of their furniture upside down, that sounds much more practical.</p>
         <p>Anyway, I still do occasionally play with it nowadays. I found out that it was made by a French developer, and that the French forensics service got them to add more models, so you can now put shotguns in your houses! And most importantly of course, it has a blog with an <a href="https://www.sweethome3d.com/blog/rss.xml" target="_blank">RSS feed</a> and an <a href="https://www.sweethome3d.com/blog/atom.xml" target="_blank">Atom feed</a>.</p>
       ]]></description>
     </item>
@@ -2489,6 +2489,24 @@ $ printf hunter2 | md5sum
         <p>EnviroFlash has made me discover CAP, the Common Alerting Protocol, a standard that I will look into in more detail in the future and that is designed to make emergency alerts more interoperable. I have already started to look into other sources of CAP alerts to learn by example.</p>
       ]]></description>
     </item>
+
+    <item>
+      <title>National Data Buoy Center</title>
+      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:02:04 +0200</pubDate>
+      <guid isPermaLink="false">noaa-ndbc</guid>
+      <category domain="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/">OPML</category>
+      <link>https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/opml/noaa/ndbc.opml</link>
+      <description><![CDATA[
+        <p>Just like on airplanes, the computers on ships are unlikely to be as modern as what you would expect elsewhere, and they also need high reliability, a goal that is both at odds with most innovations in the tech industry and with changes in general. This is probably one of the reasons why websites that cater to seafarers, or try to provide some form of automation for ships, are so <em>good</em>.</p>
+        <p>Did you know that you can send FTP commands by e-mail to the <abbr title="National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration">NOAA</abbr>'s Ocean Prediction Center to retrieve their data? You'll get an email back with whatever your FTP commands resulted in. There are other similar e-mail based services, because e-mail happens to be quite resilient and lightweight, so it's a great thing to send over satellite. Here's <a href="https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/fax/robots.txt" target="_blank">a text file</a> describing a few services, including the <abbr title="Ocean Prediction Center">OPC</abbr>'s own.</p>
+        <p>Another of those cool services is the National Data Buoy Center, or NDBC for short. There are over a thousand buoys all over the oceans, both near the coasts and really far away from them, that send back weather or tsunami reports to various agencies, and the NDBC aggregates data from its own buoys and those of its international partners, as well as reports sent by ships. It provides the reports in various formats; text files, <abbr title="JavaScript Object Notation">JSON</abbr>, <abbr title="Keyhole Markup Language">KML</abbr>, etc., but most importantly of course, RSS.</p>
+        <p>I <a href="https://tildegit.org/lucidiot/rsrsss/src/commit/a2ed54a98efe2235326a725f0222a493598a9020/xquery/opml/noaa/ndbc.xqy" target="_blank">slapped some XQuery</a> onto those RSS feeds to create yet another excessively large OPML file with over eight hundred feeds. You can get one feed for each buoy, but I found a way to get a feed of every observation at once.</p>
+        <p>From <a href="https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=61001" target="_blank">any station's page</a>, you can find a link to all the observations in the area, either as <a href="https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/radial_search.php?lat1=43.400N&lon1=7.800E&uom=E&dist=250">a webpage</a> or <a href="https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/rss/ndbc_obs_search.php?lat=43.400N&lon=7.800E" target="_blank">an RSS feed</a>.</p>
+        <p>I found that the RSS feed version lets you change the default radius of 100 nautical miles to any other value using the <code>&radius=</code> URL parameter followed by a number of miles. The maximum range is 10820 nautical miles, corresponding to half of the Earth's circumference. Since this is a radius, this means you can indeed select everything!</p>
+        <p>Also note that this magical <em>everything</em> feed includes observations from ships, not just buoys, just so you can some extra spam.</p>
+        <p>I don't know that much about the maritime industry, but from my understanding from reading accident reports and other weird technical documents, large ships pay to get weather reports tailed to their needs from private companies, and smol ships rely on the weather information of the local coast guard, broadcasted regularly over radio. I don't know if any of those feeds are used by anyone, or what they would be used for, but boy am I glad that that's a thing! There is something really cool about getting RSS items that come from random chunks of metal floating around the oceans.</p>
+      ]]></description>
+    </item>
   </channel>
   <access:restriction relationship="allow" />
 </rss>