Live pictures of our blue marble written in Rust
2019-10-18
https://github.com/Kethku/RustyMarble
What
I noticed that the color satellite images published by NOAA from the GOES satellites is highly processed and has overlays of state bounds and things making them inconvenient for desktop backgrounds. This is the first test of my attempt to fix that!
Why
I've always been fascinated with the idea of making my computer adapt to the world around me. I love the idea of my editor and syntax colors matching the sky outside, or having my computer let me know when I should be going to bed. Similarly I recently saw a mac app which sets the desktop background to a render of the planet. This lead me down a crazy rabbit hole ending with me learning about satellite imagery, cloud data management, and scientific data formats. I hope to make something useful while still satisfying the core goal of getting a live picture of our blue marble on my desktop.
How
The current code can be found here. Unfortunately the data provided by NOAA from the GOES satellites is too big to realistically download under the tyrannical rule of our ISPs. Luckily since I currently am a full time employee at Microsoft, I get some Azure credit and downloads don't cost anything to Azure servers. So I am building an app which I will run on a cheap Azure server which will download the imager data from AWS where NOAA hosts it, process it into a true color approximation, and rehost them in a Dat archive to ease traffic costs.
Dev Log
Rusty Marble is a part of my push to make tangible and documented progress on a project every day.