Thursday, November 5, 2015

Still Standing or At Least Sitting Around in Fort Worth

There are multiple reports in the news about weather damage, tornadoes, floods, and maybe a plague of frogs in Fort Worth but I'm not sure about the latter as I haven't seen any of the little hoppers about but there's still time.

... and an aside:  sometime you must hear the frogs singing in the evening in Tennessee in the Summer time.  I have never heard anything like it anywhere and it's not only bullfrogs.  They're the really low voices but there are also sweet little squeakers too.


The worst of the storm has passed and I do take them seriously as downtown Fort Worth was gut-punched by a tornado one year and blowed it all up.

This is Forecast Bar, my weather reporter:


Screen shot from iMac by Forecast Bar, a free app from Apple's App Store

There's been a bit of pumping of software lately but it's not my huge interest, I just want the stuff to work.  Forecast Bar does a great job of weather as you see some of the pop-up produced by clicking the icon in the Apple menu bar at the top of the screen.

Forecast Bar also gives a snappy animated radar display which goes back about three days and then animates the radar image from that time through present and then to the next few days.  It's cool to watch even when there may be a tornado in it which can easily blow your ass to Kansas.

The reason for letting you know about the Forecast Bar is you may want it because free ain't bad and the notification aspect is good.  I get an immediate desktop alert as soon as the Weather Service issues one for Tarrant County (i.e. Fort Worth area).  If some bad weather is coming this way, I will almost certainly know about it and I don't have to hover over a weather channel to follow it.

Good service, good price (i.e. zero) - five stars


Note:  the German flag icon may seem unusual but this switches the keyboard software from English to German.  I stay mostly with German because it makes the umlaut much easier (e.g. รถ - the double dots tell you it's a hard O, all out Brit).  As a long-time touch-typist, it's murder moving the keys but I've been using it for a while now and the old dog at least has managed that trick.

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