Bob said:
Can anyone recommend a program that will gave me the weather forecast for
the next few days on my desktop? (I have an okay version that is part of
Firefox but I don't have it running all the time), I hear a lot of these
type programs have spyware and other problems to be wary of.
Recommendations please.
Bob
Sure. Real easy.
If you're in the US, Just go to the US Weather Service and set up
bookmarks for any location you want. You've got a wonderful choice --
there are some web techniques that are under development. For example,
I've been able to get extrapolated multi-day capsule forecasts by the
geographical location of my house -- expressed as a compass direction
and distance from one of their referencec points. Or, I can load the
forecast for the city downhill from where I live.
Now, the bad part:
The system has fallen into a terrible state. The population of the
fields is hit-or-miss, as is the accuracy -- which has become pretty
wild. It's a shame -- they were going so nicely for the last few months.
This may be fallout from the extreme political trend of ripping apart
government departments that's recently come to the US Geological
Service. You can also get plain text forecasts. I hope that they haven't
gotten financially strangled by our President and his cronies -- they'd
been getting really good, forecasting the weather right on the nose for
some time -- and I'm in the San Francisco area where weather can turn on
a dime. I hope that the quality of this service returns, so I encourage
you to check back often.
You can also bookmark a multi-day forecast from your local newspaper,
provided by Weather Underground, or get the same forecast directly from
Weather Underground at their own site (which loads slower). For example,
even though I'm in California, I get the forecast for my city from a
newspaper in Stamford, Connecticut (2,500 miles away): it just loads
faster. I've used The Proxomitron to tame these commercial sites.
How's that?
Richard
