KD5NRH

Whatever the weather is, I commute in it. What I want to know is, if it's hot and dry 8AM, do I still need to take up half a pannier with rain gear, plastic wrap my work clothes and tablet just in case a pannier leaks, etc. for the homeward commute? If it's misty at 8, is it likely to be pouring before 8:30 when I get to work? If it just finished raining at 8, should I suffer the heat of the rain gear because another microcell is ten minutes behind that one, or just the shoe covers so I don't have wet socks after the first puddle?

RubeRad

I can't press the power button on my phone, so I guess there's no help for me. I have this problem with my smartphone, it doesn't have existence. I've tried to get my smartphone's provider to address this problem for me, but I can't figure out who that is.

Is it more or less amazing than the fact that someone would be willing to ride a bike to work instead of driving a car? Actually, I'm not willing to check my emails either -- before I ride to work. And even if I were to turn on the computer and check email, and have a browser right there, with the weather a few keystrokes away, I WOULD FORGET. I do forget. That's the point. Rain is such an infrequent occurrence, I can't force myself to remember to check for it.

I guess you never have lived in the climate that has made CA the most populous state in the nation.

Darth Lefty 

Haha, you're reminding me of the first number in "La La Land"

RubeRad

Sounds great. I'll hang one outside my garage door so when I leave in the morning I'll know whether to wear raingear or not. Can it also tell me whether I will need to bring rain gear to wear on the ride home?


See comments above, CA does not have warm rain. It basically only rains in Jan/Feb in the 40s/50s. If I was in FL, I probably wouldn't care about the warm rain.

I don't watch the news, especially in the morning

Oh hey, a smartphone app, why didn't I think of that? In fact, why didn't anybody else think of that and suggest that as an answer to my question? I'm gonna do that right now, lemme just search all my pockets and figure out which one has my smartphone in it. Wait just a sec, it's gotta be around here somewhere...

RubeRad

Exactly. This is what I want to know, and I ONLY want to be alerted when I need to take action.

RubeRad

I think it's hilarious too, which is why I'm being dramatic (king though, if you don't mind)

It's not that I'm too lazy, it's that even if I regularly got online in the mornings before riding to work, I wouldn't remember to also go check the weather. It's great that it takes you only 10 seconds, but that 10 seconds happens because you remember to check. Why? Because you probably live in an area where weather is an ever-present, ever-changing concern.

But what if, for 6 solid months, you checked the weather every single day, and every single day, the result is 'nope, don't need rain gear'. Do you think maybe you'd think about the weather less, and stop checking?

It's also like how Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs (and others) famously pare down their wardrobe to be able to wear the same thing every day. Eliminating many micro-decisions adds up, simplifies life, and frees brain/decision power for more productive purposes. That's also a large reason I choose not to have a smartphone, because it would be competing for my attention all the time.

Sorrynotsorry if that's not the flame you were trolling for...

RubeRad

Haven't seen it, but I was looking for the scene in LA Story where he's doing his forecast and he's like a clown and throwing sun-icons all over the place, every day it's 73 or something. Couldn't find it on utub as a clip, but it's gotta be in there somewhere in the full movie:

RubeRad

Yeah, that's one of those standard jokes that most places make about themselves "If you don't like the weather in ____, wait 15 minutes!" CA though doesn't have drastic changes day to day or even slow changes, except for temperature changes through the seasons. But when rain comes, it is always seen in the forecast at least a couple days out (I don't think CA's geography can allow a 'surprise shower'), and that's what I want to get as an alert.

Here's another analogy: consider the very important, but mind-numbingly boring job of being a train or subway driver. 99% of the time the job is "sit still while the train moves at a constant speed down fixed tracks". 1% of the time the job is "pay attention to that sign or junction or you might crash the train and people will die". What's more useful to support that job, an alert every 10 seconds "everything is fine. everything is fine. everything is fine. everything is fine...."? Or alerts only in exceptional situations that demand attention "junction coming up in 2 miles/1 minute" etc.

Darth Lefty 

The opening number is a large song and dance on the blistering gridlocked freeway, everyone gets out and dances on their cars... and at the end of the scene the title card says WINTER

ItsJustMe

I don't check the weather when it's over 50 either, because I don't care if it rains. Water doesn't hurt.

Leebo

So you only need this for like 2 months. Can turn on the computer but not look at one page? Hmmm. No smart phone. Hmmm. Tablet? Leave it on and plugged in. Have only one app/function. Wait, you would have to look at it, no good either. All is lost. Just take the car. Wait, you have to unlock it, turn the ignition on, look behind you and maybe use a turn signal. Yikes. Waaaay too much going on. Patagoinia houdini wind/rain shell is like 5 oz or so, packs up small. Just carry that. So many easy options available. That require a miniscule effort. Yikes.

RubeRad

More like 5-6, it is not unusual to get isolated rainy days in Oct--Apr. In Jan/Feb it rains often enough it may actually be worth monitoring the weather daily.
Most of the time if I turn on the computer I get distracted by new emails and would forget to go check a weather page. But more significantly most of the time I don't turn the computer on before I ride to work, so if I remember to check the weather when I check my email, I'm already at work, so no recourse if it starts raining during the day.

Disregarding the silliness, if I drive it is not possible to forget to unlock it or turn the ignition on. If I pull the door handle and the door doesn't open, that reminds me to go get my keys.

For the same reason, I carry a tiny garage door remote on my keychain because that way it is impossible for me to forget my bike lock key (because I can't leave the house without closing the garage door which I can't do unless I have my remote which is attached to my keys -- well, I guess I could forget to close the garage door, but that particular problem is not one I have)

My ikea poncho cost less than 10 bucks, packs into itself, I don't know how that compares in size to this jacket, but it's only 8oz so it can't be that much bigger, and already it annoys me to have it in the way of my other stuff all the time, plus rain paints. Besides, I'm not going to pay $60 for a raincoat that will get only 3-4 days of use per year, I'm way too cheap for that.

Miniscule effort every day is exactly what I want to avoid, because most days, that's wasted miniscule effort. Fortunately, IFTTT is an option that is available that I have already set up for myself, so problem solved ZERO effort required going forward. Zero is better than miniscule.

wphamilton

I get it, and if it didn't rain here 80 days of the year I probably wouldn't check every day either.

Your message filter can forward the email to your text number btw.

RubeRad

Thanks but text doesn't help me because I almost never turn on my flip phone to check for texts. My voice mail says "Hello, you have NOT reached <my name>. If you leave a message, I will never hear it. Send me an email"

noglider 

Good explanations, @RubeRad. I thought your request was silly, but now I get it. I look forward to hearing about your results, as it could prove useful for more than weather. I use google alerts for lots of different things.

RubeRad

I always liked you noglider!

As an experienced google alert user, do you think it could be used for this purpose? IFTTT meets the need, but it's kind of like hiring a (free) construction crew to pound in a nail. Technically it's IFTTT providing the infrastructure for their WeatherUnderground and Gmail 'services' to interact in a recipe and send the alerts I'm interested in. Signing up for this, I had to agree to let this system have access to my email in a very (potentially) invasive way. It would be better to have a solution that didn't need access to the inside of my email at all, but would just send me a regular email.

ItsJustMe

Perfect job for an IoT device. Check WUnderground for rain in the next 10 hours, light up a big red light by the door if true.

noglider 

I barely know how to use IFFTT. I used to use procmail on a UNIX system and knew more about that. I'm not so good at the newer programming techniques. I need to learn.

noglider 

My local weather forecast page is here. (I live in the 10014 zip code.) I just downloaded it using "curl" and you could use that or "wget" if you have a Mac or Linux system. I notice the page has the strings "chance of precipitation" and today, that value is 0% here. So if you can parse your local page, you can send an alert from the results.

RubeRad

Yes, that's an interesting possibility, although to be financially feasible it would probably have to be a fairly flexible device that's programmable for lots of similar tasks. If it's built solely for the purpose of alerting to precipitation within N hours, apparently I would be the only person in the world who would consider buying it (based on the sample of people in this thread)

RubeRad

That's a neat idea too, and I actually have enough perl-fu to be able to make that happen. The ***** [EDIT: not a chinese-american] in the armor there is that I don't have any kind of 24/7 server for it to run on. (The wife insists on shutting down the family computer when not in use, which is a big reason I don't turn it on first thing in the morning. It annoys me, but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on)

I could probably get it going as a cron job that would automatically run in the background whenever the computer is on, which would be daily. And if it kept a log of when it sent alerts, it could avoid sending more than once per day/rain-event.

noglider 

I have plenty of 24-hour servers and could run this for you.

RubeRad

Wow, that's cool. I'll email you to take this part of the discussion offline...

canklecat

Speaking of Siri speaking, I just remembered that Amazon finally added their version -- Alexa -- to many Kindle Fire tablets. Works great for quick stuff like "How's the weather today/this weekend?"

I recently bought a larger upgraded Fire HD 8" for my mom when the price dropped, in part for the Alexa voice control. She has tremors and occasionally struggles with touch sensitive tablets, but could manage the simpler voice command interface. At the time Amazon said Alexa would not be available for her older 2014 Fire HD. But within a week they'd upgraded the OS and added Alexa to the 2014 (but not 2012) Fire tablet. It's pretty handy for her.

Gresp15C

More than a year ago, I began writing a JavaScript app that would give me all of the pertinent weather information that I care about for cycling, on a single screen, on my phone. Sadly, I just tried it out, and it no longer works, meaning that it was probably using some weather data service that no longer exists. But this shouldn't be hard for someone to do, and can run directly on the phone without having to create a server.