As many people in the NG know, I enjoy analysing the weather charts and
make animations.

I have made an animation covering next weeks weather as forecast by GFS

http://www.djmurphy.demon.co.uk/gfs_slow.gif
(beware, its 3 Meg)

Forget about Christmas, What kind of weather do you think we'll get on
Wednesday morning?

Brendan

"Brendan DJ Murphy" wrote in message
...
Forget about Christmas, What kind of weather do you think we'll get on
Wednesday morning?

Brendan


Is "we" the UK as a whole, or the royal "we"?
If it's the former, then I'm certainly more interested in Tuesday night
rather than the improving situation on Wednesday morning.
Location is everything when asking for a forecast.
;-)
Alex.

Brendan ,how do you do that animation ? fascinating stuff to us old ones

RonB
"Brendan DJ Murphy" wrote in message
...
As many people in the NG know, I enjoy analysing the weather charts and
make animations.

I have made an animation covering next weeks weather as forecast by GFS

http://www.djmurphy.demon.co.uk/gfs_slow.gif
(beware, its 3 Meg)

Forget about Christmas, What kind of weather do you think we'll get on
Wednesday morning?

Brendan

Brendan ,how do you do that animation ? fascinating stuff to us old ones

Ron, I created a small MSDOS batch file. Remember those?
My batch-file uses two small DOS utilities... "sget" to actually grab the
images automatically from the web, and "gifsicle" which does the animation.

"sget.exe" is a dos utility which simply copies a file on the internet and
stores it on your local machine. It came with a Sophos Antivirus CD. I've
tried searching for it on the web but am having little joy.

"gifsicle.exe" puts static GIF images together to create an animated GIF
file. There is a load of command-line switches and options which determine
the length of each frame, whether a frame should replace the previous one
(or drawn on top); the size of colour pallete and so on. It is available
from http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/gifsicle/man.html

Once you have these utilities, put them together in the same folder as your
msdos.bat file.

Here is a smaple of my ".BAT" file
(create using NOTEPAD, but save with a BAT extension which makes it
executable)


sget -q http://64.246.48.81/wz/pics/Rtavn063.gif
sget -q http://64.246.48.81/wz/pics/Rtavn123.gif
# and so on adding 60 to the Rtavn filename each time
sget -q http://64.246.48.81/wz/pics/Rtavn1803.gif


gifsicle -k 50 --loop=0 -D 2 -d 100 Rtavn063.gif
-D 2 -d 20 Rtavn123.gif
-D 2 -d 20 Rtavn183.gif
(...and so on for each frame)
-D 2 -d 20 Rtavn1743.gif
-D 2 -d 200 Rtavn1803.gif gfs_fast.gif

# The gifsicle command all fits on one dos command line.


Once you have your .BAT file, you can use Windows scheduler to
automatically run your file every 6 hours (when GFS updates)


I hope this helps.

Brendan

Brendan DJ Murphy wrote:

"sget.exe" is a dos utility which simply copies a file on the internet and
stores it on your local machine. It came with a Sophos Antivirus CD. I've
tried searching for it on the web but am having little joy.

I'm sure you could achieve the same with wget:
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/index.html#downloading

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact