If you're interested in this, someone on YouTube got a WeatherStar 4000 (device that sat at cable headends and generated the local weather report graphics) and wrote all new firmware to make 90's style weather reports on the real hardware. This was necessary because the original firmware was downloaded over satellite so it's now lost. It looks basically identical to the real Weather Channel from the 90s, except it doesn't have their logo in the corner (I guess for trademark reasons). Here's a stream of his WeatherStar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66mSjXpfD2c
Thanks for mentioning that, had me digging around for where I can find the music. The youtube link lead me to the project's hackaday log, which is extremely detailed but lacks any mention of music [0]
The submission link's github page [1] links to a website listing all the tracks that ever played [2], explaining they dropped the music from the project so as not to deal with copyright claims. too bad fair use isn't clear enough to apply here, I think its a relatively transformative use and doesn't compete with the original.
why would fair use be at play here? TWC would have paid a license fee through ASCAP or whomever for the rights to broadcast that music. They didn't just download a bunch of mp3 files from Napster and try to disrupt broadcasting.
You're right, of course. I guess I just put a lot of weight on the charm of keeping old things running, and think there's value to the public in allowing free use of music, particularly for non-commercial/educational purposes.
If it's the same one that brings the equipment to Retro Computing events. He sadly has declined to publish any kind of archive of the software for other hobbyists :(
I understand that he's under no obligation to do so. But a lot of us worry that if the hard disks die or if he loses interest in the hobby, that software will be irrevocably lost for all of us
I refuse to be nerd sniped; do you know what the input to the SGI is and what it outputs? looking at the video it seems that most of that is done "in hardware", the SGI could just be providing the actual updated information, and it could just be for nostalgia or "if it is not broke..."
I've casually tried to track down a voice in weather from that time with no luck, but this project scratches the itch somewhat. When I was younger (late 90s-early 00's) I spent a fair amount of my summers fishing with my father and brother on Lake Ontario. We would occasionally turn on the radio and catch a weather report from the coast guard/noaa. There was something about that then out-dated computer generated voice delivering the weather succinctly and to the point.
It was actually a project I used to evaluate coding done by an LLM. It was mediocre and took way too many iterations. But I now have a keyboard shortcut that will fetch KML/XML from noaa, parse out my important details, and read it back to me. The voice isn't quite right. But the morning I spent working on that was a good distraction at the time.
It seems if you left click "Copy Permalink" that the site will generate a massive URL with all of your options. One of them is "settings-kiosk-checkbox". Change it to "true" in your copied URL and that should work.
Indeed, though significant work has been done on this one, detailed in the readme. On the other hand, the one you’ve linked has since the fork added a “custom RSS feed in the scroller” feature.
Same here. I’ve been doing web design and development for 24 years now so I’ve witnessed the full pivot towards homogenization of interfaces; it’s necessary for commerce and usability at this point. But once in a while I’ll throw together a microsite like this to return to my roots a bit. This is my latest (a basic Trump presidency countdown clock): https://timeleft.now/
Love the WS4000. I've been meaning to make a WS4000 like application I can throw on my firestick and just have it play all day on my TV as a side project. As someone without any GUI or graphics programming knowledge, it's definitely been a nice learning experience.
I run one of these on my desk 24x7 with a raspberry pi and a 3D printed monitor that simulates a CRT. I tried with a real CRT TV but the frequency and having it at the side of my main monitor started to make me sick.
What do you mean by "sick"? Headaches from coil/flyback transformer whine? Perceptible flicker due to the CRT being in the corner of your peripheral vision?
I have a version (probably not exactly the same software for the head unit) of this on an SGI O2 sitting around including all the environment scripts and the HTML manuals. I have a tar.gz of it that I should upload to an archive location.
Not knowing what WeatherStar 4000+ was, I was expecting "Weather Channel Simulator" to use AI to generate live video of a weather reporter describing the weather.
I was thinking the same thing! I've been working with some TTS applications, such as real-time commentary for Pong and personalized radio stations. I might give this a try, it sounds fun.
Honestly, give it a year or two and someone will have a fine-tuned LLM generating endless 90s-style weather banter with a deepfaked Jim Cantore pointing at AI-generated radar maps.
Yeah! There's nothing quite like watching fake people on fake weather broadcasts presenting weather just for me. One day we'll wonder why we ever used humans for anything.
Yes! Add &mediaPlaying=true to the url. You might also need to allow audio autoplaying for the website first in the non-kiosk version or launch the browser allowing it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndaMC-Ug4Jg
The submission link's github page [1] links to a website listing all the tracks that ever played [2], explaining they dropped the music from the project so as not to deal with copyright claims. too bad fair use isn't clear enough to apply here, I think its a relatively transformative use and doesn't compete with the original.
[0] https://hackaday.io/project/178144-reverse-engineering-the-w...
[1] https://github.com/netbymatt/ws4kp
[2] https://twcclassics.com/audio/artists.html
https://archive.org/details/WeatherChannelMusic
https://archive.org/details/weatherscancompletecollection
https://archive.org/details/lfset1
https://archive.org/details/the-weather-channel-presents-the...
https://archive.org/details/the-weather-channel-presents-smo...
https://archive.org/details/weatherscanlocalmusic
YouTube has a few TWC playlists:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMUZjd023YBtp0iB962Uz...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyTo0ex76Q&list=PL2UoJXK3rr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmGd-cx-dXc
It’s on Twitch:
https://m.twitch.tv/retroweatherchannel?desktop-redirect=tru...
There’s a nice Spotify playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0WEViIh23PGbLqGbjYNAZz
And the site dedicated to it mentioned earlier in the thread has some recordings:
https://twcclassics.com/
Which has its own sort of funny subculture. One is Phish fans unexpectedly hearing what was decidedly not publicly common music being aired on the Weather Channel: https://jambands.com/features/2002/07/24/guyute-and-your-loc...
Fast forward 20ish years and a similar thing happened with Fox Sports interludes: https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/12/17/fox-producer-who-got-the-n...
I understand that he's under no obligation to do so. But a lot of us worry that if the hard disks die or if he loses interest in the hobby, that software will be irrevocably lost for all of us
Modified SGI O2 in a rackable form-factor
I've casually tried to track down a voice in weather from that time with no luck, but this project scratches the itch somewhat. When I was younger (late 90s-early 00's) I spent a fair amount of my summers fishing with my father and brother on Lake Ontario. We would occasionally turn on the radio and catch a weather report from the coast guard/noaa. There was something about that then out-dated computer generated voice delivering the weather succinctly and to the point.
It was actually a project I used to evaluate coding done by an LLM. It was mediocre and took way too many iterations. But I now have a keyboard shortcut that will fetch KML/XML from noaa, parse out my important details, and read it back to me. The voice isn't quite right. But the morning I spent working on that was a good distraction at the time.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JGpf6B8EvVY
Music is a bit too fast, I miss the sleepy jazz feel from the 90s. (=
It'd be helpful to have the options stored in the URL, especially the kiosk mode, so it can be bookmarked.
And allow <esc> to exit kiosk mode.
https://imgur.com/a/wD2EINO
https://github.com/vbguyny/ws4kp
I'm a bit susceptible to noises myself.
Music is a bit too high fidelity ;)
Can't be too far off.
Absolute perfection!