The Weather Widget

[Greta]

I have the little weather widget thingie on my computer desktop. It amuses me, what can I say? :crazy:

So here is what mine said at 4:27 PM yesterday, April 21, 2009...

Anyone else use this amusing little utility? What does yours say?

 

[DaFABRICATA]

I like that one!!

I have a bar at the top my my screen that shows the current temp/ an icon to show if it is sunny, cloudy, rainy/ todays high temp & conditions/ and tomarrows high & conditions.
There is also a "10-Day" icon that I can click on.

During the summer, I have the weather channel on my TV 24/7.

I don't drive, so knowing what the weather is going to be like is a must for me.

Where can I get a "widget" like yours?

 

[Tekno_Cowboy]

Google has a nice widget for windows. Several Linux Distributions have them included.
Weatherbug is available for quite a few different platforms.

 

[Phaserburn]

Greta, that just sucks; you have twice as many degrees outside as I do currently!

:shakehead

 

[Greta]

Vista comes with all these different "widgets" that you can put on your desktop. I have the moon phases, a little daisy clock, postit notes and a calendar that I can put in appts. or reminders or whatever. There are a bunch of other different "widgets" as well but those are the only ones I like/want/use.

Weatherbug is nice... but it is EXTREMELY invasive!! Once you get it on your machine, it invades every single other program and the adware/dataminers are out of control! Trying to get rid of it is an exercise in futility and the frustration. Not worth it as far as I'm concerned. My little "widget" gives me all I need to know without all of the extra garbage.

 

[TigerhawkT3]

Use a Weather Widget! It will amuse you.


(Family Guy, ep. 410)

I hear you on WeatherBug. It was amazingly difficult to pry it out of my computer and incinerate all its little roots. The Weather Channel website where it comes from, though, is useful without (as far as I can tell, of course) harming your computer.

It suddenly turned into summer around here a couple weeks ago. It was all windy and brisk, and then :poof:, heat wave. Ick. Fortunately, it's closer to 80° than 100°.

 

[Mike Painter]

I've been happy with NOAA set to my home town. It frequently and accurately will show diffrences in as little as ten miles.

 

[raggie33]

u live in nebraska the weather will be hot and dry every day .) i live in ga it will be hot and humid the weather folks lie to me

 

[bitslammer]

I have the little weather widget thingie on my computer desktop. It amuses me, what can I say? :crazy:

So here is what mine said at 4:27 PM yesterday, April 21, 2009...

Anyone else use this amusing little utility? What does yours say?

CRAP!!! The wife and I are planning a Scottsdale/Sedona/Grand Canyon trip in mid May!!!! We assumed it would be "pleasantly" warm then and not 100*F! I'm hoping this is jut a "blip" in the weather pattern.

 

[TigerhawkT3]

CRAP!!! The wife and I are planning a Scottsdale/Sedona/Grand Canyon trip in mid May!!!! We assumed it would be "pleasantly" warm then and not 100*F! I'm hoping this is jut a "blip" in the weather pattern.

My parents adored Sedona on their trip to the Grand Canyon. They hadn't even heard of it before, so it was a nice surprise.

 

[Greta]

HA! "Pleasant" in mid-May?! Your travel agent seriously lied to you! Sedona and the Canyon might be nice... highs in the 80's-90's... nice at night... but Scottsdale? The heart of the city! It will be up in the 110's! :D

 

[csshih]

it's getting seriously hot in here.

pps: if you haven't seen.. phunny kid got his icon.

 

[Beamhead]

We hit 100F yesterday so I put in a pool today, and its going to be a chilly 70F for the next week.:crazy:

 

[chmsam]

I don't have widgets but since I am a very minor league weather geek, I have quite a few weather sites bookmarked and I use them on a number of available menu bars.

Try looking at WeatherUnderground (wunderground.com). Since they have a network of local personal weather stations and some of those are APRSWXNET (Automatic Position Reporting System WX Network - a "citizen weather observer program"), you can have current weather conditions and forecasting from very near your location. These are amateur computerized stations for the most part but they provide a lot of information. You can easily save multiple favorite areas too. These are good for current conditions especially.

Now, one really cool thing they are working on is incorporating StrikeStar into some of their radar maps. That is a system of lightning detectors. There are some stations in the system already that let you view lightning in the area overlaid on a NEXRAD radar map. You can also watch loops of the weather radar to see what the weather looks like as it develops. Helps to plan your outings as well as to tell when to gear up for potential power outages. Also, for lightning info, Google "lightning detectors" and your area to see if there are any other sites available.

NWS (National Weather Service) is of course part of NOAA and their weather data collection sites are often located at airports. There are usually a few Forecast Offices in any state that coordinate data and issue forecasts. They're the official government forecasters and you can target small areas for weather. However, they don't have data collected as close to home as you'll find on the WeatherUndergound. NWS current condition reports are a little more general but their forecasting is sometimes a bit better than WeatherUnderground. YMMV.

Just my opinion but I have learned to never trust any weather forecast that is for more than maybe as little as 36 hours away, no matter who puts them out. The weather systems are still too complicated.

There are also websites that will let you track tropical storms, hurricanes, etc. There's a lot of information out there and most of it is easy to understand and to follow.

 

[PhotonBoy]

I use iGoogle as my home page and one of my home page links is for Environment Canada weather. I don't like to use intrusive, memory sapping widgets.

At about 8:25 am, it's 10.6C here close to Kentville, NS or about 51F. On Monday, it'll be 24C or 75F, which will be the warmest so far this year. We had a fair bit of snow about 2 weeks ago.

 

[WadeF]

I don't currently have any weather widgets on this computer. I just bookmark this page:

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=18944&wuSelect=WEATHER

All the weather info I need and then some. Pretty cool weather site BTW.

 

[bitslammer]

HA! "Pleasant" in mid-May?! Your travel agent seriously lied to you! Sedona and the Canyon might be nice... highs in the 80's-90's... nice at night... but Scottsdale? The heart of the city! It will be up in the 110's! :D

Whew! Didn't buy any tickets yet. We were just scouting around. Maybe we'll have to push this off until the fall. I'm not into heat, dry or otherwise, and I'm already going to be in Vegas at Defcon in the balzing heat so that's quite enough.

 

[brucec]

I'm using the one for the mac. The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't let me set the high and low temperatures for tomorrow. Maybe I need a quad-core for that...

 

[Tekno_Cowboy]

Vista comes with all these different "widgets" that you can put on your desktop. I have the moon phases, a little daisy clock, postit notes and a calendar that I can put in appts. or reminders or whatever. There are a bunch of other different "widgets" as well but those are the only ones I like/want/use.

Weatherbug is nice... but it is EXTREMELY invasive!! Once you get it on your machine, it invades every single other program and the adware/dataminers are out of control! Trying to get rid of it is an exercise in futility and the frustration. Not worth it as far as I'm concerned. My little "widget" gives me all I need to know without all of the extra garbage.

Vista...:eeew:

I suppose you're right about Weatherbug being invasive, I tend to forget about spyware, viruses and adware, as the vast majority of it doesn't work on Linux. :devil:

 

[LowBat]

I've been happy with NOAA set to my home town. It frequently and accurately will show diffrences in as little as ten miles.

That's what I have too. It's where the others get their information from but without their ads. For my bedroom I have an weather projection clock. The time along with alternating indoor/outdoor temp project on my ceiling. When is comes to moon tracking I use a program called QuickPhase Pro.