Month: December 2016

Quick Rainmeter Snow Skins

I’m a minor nerd about fresh snow, so I have these Rainmeter skins running on my monitor right now (really just two versions of the same skin). I thought I had them in GitHub or GitLab, but apparently not yet. If you use them, enjoy!

Two snowfall maps in two different Rainmeter skins.

Snow.ini

;Shows the 48-hour snowfall map from Intellicast.
;To customize, go to http://www.intellicast.com/Travel/Weather/Snow/Forecast.aspx?region=brd, navigate to the right region, and get the url of the image.
;Paste that as URL, below.
;
;Help from http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20018 and http://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/getting-started/creating-skins

[Rainmeter]
Update=3600
;To make this to immediately show up, change value to 0 and refresh.

[MeasureImage]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=WebParser
URL=http://images.intellicast.com/WxImages/48hrSnowForecast/brd.jpg
Download=1

[MeterImage]
Meter=Image
MeasureName=MeasureImage
H=375
W=500

snow_noaa.ini

;Shows the 3-day snow probability from NOAA.
;To customize, go to http://www.weather.gov/crh/outlooks?sid=fgf#.WF2NTdUrJaR
;Paste that as URL, below.
;
;Help from http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20018 and http://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/getting-started/creating-skins

[Rainmeter]
Update=3600
;To make this to immediately show up, change value to 0 and refresh.

[MeasureImage]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=WebParser
URL=http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wwd/day3_psnow_gt_04.gif
Download=1

[MeterImage]
Meter=Image
MeasureName=MeasureImage
H=375
W=500

Bakken Citation

This is essentially an internal citation, but exciting to see, nonetheless. The SPE conference paper referenced has passed peer review and should be out soon. Trying to make time for more Bakken CO2 extraction statistics at the moment.

Jin, L., Sorensen, J. A., Hawthorne, S. B., Smith, S. A., Bosshart, N. W., Burton-Kelly, M. E., … Harju, J. A. (2016, February 24). Improving Oil Transportability Using CO2 in the Bakken System – A Laboratory Investigation. Society of Petroleum Engineers. doi:10.2118/178948-MS

cited in

Jin, L., Hawthorne, S., Sorensen, J., Kurz, B., Pekot, L., Smith, S., … Harju, J. (2016, August 1). A Systematic Investigation of Gas-Based Improved Oil Recovery Technologies for the Bakken Tight Oil Formation. Unconventional Resources Technology Conference.

We’re Green

In a good way. I was thinking tonight that in addition to helping people drive less and supporting local races, I could throw some extra money towards carbon credits or similar offsets for this website. Websites use energy, even the good ones, and we can’t just sweep that under the rug. Then I remembered who the host is: GreenGeeks. Green is in the name, and that was one of the reasons I chose them a few years back. From the horse’s mouth:

In order to compensate for the polluting power we pull from the grid we purchase wind energy credits for the energy we consume from the grid. In fact we replace, with wind power, 3 times the amount of energy used by our servers, so if we pull 1X of power from the grid we purchase enough wind energy credits to put back into the grid 3X of power having been produced by wind power. Your website hosted with GreenGeeks will be powered by 300% wind energy, making your website’s carbon footprint negative!

You can read more here.

Well, that was an easy way to make some small difference in the world! If you’d like to contribute to keeping the site alive (and buying that wind energy), drop some coins in the jar weekly at Gratipay.

Matt