[kwlug-disc] cli weather

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 1:32 PM Chris Frey <cdfrey at foursquare.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 10:03:04AM -0500, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> > Using the above, I was able to make an astronomy oriented forecast
> > that would email me when there are several hours of clear sky in the
> > forecast, along with other stuff such as when dusk is over (so sky is
> > dark), when the moon rises, and how much illumination it has, and so
> > on ...
> >
> > Here is a screenshot of how it looks like.
> >
> > https://imgur.com/5ao1AWv.png
>
> Cool stuff! :-)

Yes, it is cool indeed what you can do with data with that degree of
granularity.

And that is point that I want to get across: you can write you own
weather app, and have it as an Android, X11, HTML, CLI, or whatever
you want, using these two free services.

The OpenWeather service requires a free API key. I think it is done so
they can limit the number of calls per hour/day, so that they can sell the
service to high volume applications via higher tiers.

The met.no service is completely free, but if I recall correctly, they will
throttle or deny requests if you use it too much in an app (that does
not happen for normal personal use, may happen if you use it for say
a phone app, and the app gets very popular).

So we can thank the Norway tax payers for that.

Of note, there was a free service called Dark Sky, with a web site, an
app, and an API, but Apple bought them and shut them down

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/01/dark-sky-shuts-down-tomorrow/

There is also Wunderground, which asks people with personal weather
stations to feed them data, but they stopped their API several years ago.

https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview

Grab data from users for free, but give nothing in return ...

It was owned by IBM, and just a few weeks ago, they sold it to a private
equity company.

-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin