Asunder: isn't that a strange word? It's the first thing I thought of when I saw how this apple tree weathered the latest snow storm. If it ever produced edible apples it was long before we moved into the house. Nowadays it mostly sprouts sucker branches and pulls off baseball hats as we drive by on the mower.
I fixed the weather station. It's an older Oregon Scientific WMR-918 with wireless sensors and from time to time the sensors need new batteries. The outside sensors are solar powered but there's an auxiliary battery that sometimes needs to be replaced. I always dread that in the winter since they aren't easily field serviceable: there's a dozen micro screws and a couple delicate gaskets to keep track of while cracking it open. Something you don't want to do on a wintery roof-top.
This time there were conflicting signals. The software (currently running on an old PC) was saying the indoors sensors needed batteries. The WMR-918 base station was saying the outside sensor. I took the path of least wind chill and replaced the indoor batteries. Still not happy. Reboot everything and all was back to normal.
None of the technical advances in miniaturization, interoperability, and standardization have caught up with weather gear yet. They have their own wireless protocols and typically you need to buy special hardware and software to interface via a serial port on a PC. No USB, no web based services, no XML, no public SDK.
One of these days, when I have a little free time, I plan on writing a script to harvest the weather data directly and slap it into a mysql database. This way I can hook up the weather station to our Mac Mini and use the built in mysql and webserver to display the weather as well as uploading the data to the main Jer Zone server.
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email thisA nice ol' snow storm parked on top of us yesterday and this morning finds all of the trees, and pretty much everything else, heavy with snow. A foot or snow at the house. Meanwhile, six hundred feet lower a few miles away, the office only has a few inches.
Looks like sometime during the storm our weather center took a nose-dive. I'll operate on it later today. Now would be a good time to re-visit Mathias' snow igloo page.
I think you should get right on that. Hurry up! Millions of screaming fans await!
THAT's what that sound is!
I thought it was the water softener regenerating the zeolite ions.
I think you're a technology addict!
This is a terrific photograph the sky look beautiful, nice blue tone to it!
That really is a good photo. Nice to see your writing, too.
Me? I'm off to Florida.
Heh.