A little toy for your computer

[Ken Garlock]

For the past 5 or so years I have been using a small software package called Weather Bug. It resides on your task bar, giving the current temp, next to your time of day clock. There are 2 versions of it, a free one with ads, and an ad free version that cost around $17/year.

When there is a weather alert, Weather Bug will blink the temp icon on the task bar, or will beep you through your sound card.

Another nice feature is that you can define a set of interesting locations and with one click call up the current weather at all those locations. Click on one location, and you get the detailed weather info. This not NOAA data, but rather reports from live weather stations located around the country. For example, I have 4 locations in my group, DFW airport, Dallas children's hospital, Juniper elementary school in Bend Oregon, and the county library in Akron Ohio, (my original home town.) In each case there is a set of weather instruments at the designated site along with a connection to the internet.

For more info, go to the Weather Bug (http://weather.weatherbug.com/) home page.

I have no connection to the weather bug company, I just like the product and thought that I would share it with you.

[Chuck Stewart]

Ken, My wife also loves weather bug (free version) and I have to admit it's handy and she also is big on yahoo and their messenger. I on the other hand stay away from both just because both seem to have so much going on in the background I swear it sucks the life out of my computer aka..."Why is this thing taking so long"? A computer tech at work told me they don't allow it on company computers just for that reason. Maybe the paid version is entirely different but in any case she won't part with her beloved weather bug no matter what I say....so my comeback to her is "Running like a champ over here darling"

[Dennis Peacock]

Yup, we've been using WeatherBug for about 3 years now. We really like it. We have the pay verson and really like all it provides us.

[Ken Garlock]

Hi Chuck. I would bet that the problem on your wifes system is messenger. Run task manager, and check to see who is the culprit. On my home brew system I can't detect any unreasonable cpu usage. My system has been up for about 8 hours and WB has done less than 1100 I/O operations total.

Weather Bug is not a M/S product. It stands a chance of being tight code.

Additionally, I run a GPS based time of day clock that has done over 300,000 I/Os today. I can't tell it is running, system wise.

My computer is a 3.2 GHz cpu with 1 GB memory.

[Tom Wilson66]

We've been using Weatherbug for several years now, and wouldn't be without it. At work, the survey crews use it to see when to expect rain to start or quit during the day. Seems to take a little while to load, but then so do a lot of other programs.

[Dave Lehnert]

I also use weather bug. The weather station just happens to be about a 1/2 mile from the house. Shows wind speed in real time.

[Don Bullock]

I had WB on my computer at work. The IT guys "hunted me down" and made me remove it. According to them my computer was using far too much bandwidth on the network or something like that.:eek: