Re: Weather or not issue

[Marilyn and Don Bilderback via Talk]

I love this explaination.  Perfect example of using an orange.  Changes in 
latitudes and changes in attitudes anyone?

-----Original Message----- 
From: David via Talk
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2019 10:33 AM
To: Window-Eyes Discussion List
Cc: David
Subject: Re: Weather or not issue
Larry and the resst,
I will spend a few minutes of your time, attempting to answer the
question of yours, the way I understood your asking.

How come, that every place on earth, can be refered to by a set of
coordinates?

First of all, we need to understand the terms Longitude, and Latitude.
Are you a former sighted person, or still have a certain amount of
eye-sight to lean on, this might be basic for you. For those of you who
grew up with no sight, geography might be one of the classes where
things sometimes got a bit too simplified. So let's take a moment to
explain the two terms.

Imagine the earth, being a fruit, like an orange. You know, if you peel
an orange, the inner fruit will consist of several wedges. Where all the
wedges meet, on top, and in the bottom of the fruit - is where the poles
are; North on top, South-pole (or Antartica) in the bottom. The lines
between the individual wedges, which runs from one pole to the other,
would now be your Longitudes. The fruit only holds a few longitudes,
whereas the Earth has been divided into 360 longitudes. To make things
easier for all who navigate, the longitude that runs through Greenwich -
which I do hold is located in the UK - has been defined as Longitude 0.
Any longitudes to the West (or left on the map), will have a negative
longitude value. Any longitude to the East (or right) of the Greenwich,
will be a positive longitude. When you, at the strict opposite side of
the globe, have the positives and negatives meet, you are standing on
the 180th longitude. By the way, that particular longitude - 180 - will
also be known as the Date-line. This due to the fact, that is where the
24-hour day has been defined by human wisdom, to wrap. You will very
likely be quite familiar with time-zones, and know that at given times
throughout the day, you are sleeping, while other locations on Earth
will be quite enjoying their lunch.

OK, so that all took care of the longitudes. But what are latitudes?
Get back to your orange. Place it so that the southern pole rests on the
table, and the North-Pole is located on the very top point of the fruit.
Take a pkiece of rope, and wrap it around the very belly of the fruit -
that is, where the fruit is at its very thickest. This belt, is the
Equator, running exactly mid-way between the two poles, and all around
the globe. It is Latitude 0. Go ahead, and stretch new belts around your
fruit, at exact intervals, until you reach the North-pole, or top of the
fruit. You now should hav 180 such belts, and they are all positively
numbered. Repeat the action, stretching belts around the southern
hemosphere of your globe, again equally intervalling them, till you
reach 180, which will be encircling the Southern Pole. All the southern
latitude belts, will have negative numbers.

Now that we have divided our globe into longitude lines, and latitude
belts, it all forms a coordinate system. Easily understood, is the fact
that we could refer to any place, which happen to be located at the very
crossing point of any of these lines. But what about the places, which
happen to be located anywhere in the areas BETWEEN the grid lines? How
can we best refer to them?

In the class of navigation, you would be talking about minutes, degrees
and seconds. They are not completely linked to the time you can read on
a clock, and I won't claim to understand these calculations too well.
What's more, we do not need to fully understand. But let me tell you
that modern technology has made it all a bit easier for us humans.

How about we tell that you need to move a certain amount of steps, to
get from one longitude to the next. And likewise, you need a given
number of steps, to get from latitude A, to latitude B. (please note, I
am not here refering to a walking step, but rather any predefined
stretch we have to move in our coordinate system.) If now, we could have
a way to tell which longitude and latitude to start from, and how many
steps into the grid square between our coordinate lines we are actually
positioned, it would make our location quite much more accurate. So how
do we do that?

If you noticed, when we were to fill in our Location coordinates, in the
WeatherOrNot ini file, we used some decimal values. The main part of the
value, the digits to the left of the decimal point, is the number that
directly refers to the line number in our coordinate. A latitude value
of 63.49420, will then refer to the latitude number 63 - counted from
the Equator and to the North. The minor part of the decimal number - in
our example 49420, will be how far - how many steps - further north of
the 63rd latitude our position is.

Again, a Longitude value of -59.12345, which is a negative number - will
refer us to the 59th longitude to the West of Greenwich; and further
12345 units into the west. If we now combine the latitude and longitude
numbers, we could get to a quite exact position on earth.

How exact positioning could we be?
Well, basically it all depends on how exact our measuring equipment is.
If you told the distance between two latitude belts to be something like
70 miles, or 112km, you could decide to only split that distance into 10
steps, and you only would need one decimal digit in your coordinat
values. The backside of such few steps between each major line, would of
course be a rather lacking accuracy in your telling where to find your
treasure. With modern GPS and other navigation equipment, we are able to
define even down to the ten thousandth step between each longitude as
well as between each latitude. With such keen accuracy, we are able to
get quite exactly to the point where we are located. With GPS - which
slightly differs in their values, you can even get to the very address
of any house or building on earth.

Comes to our craving to know the weather condition in a city, we might
not bother too much accuracy. As a matter of fact, I discovered that the
WeatherOrNot app originally only had four decimals in its value, whereas
the website I pointed you to, gives us values of 5 decimals. This
difference matters little, when all we want to know, is the weather
conditions in a given area. Simplifying it all, what if 4 decimals would
give us the outer boarders of our town, whereas the 5 decimals will
narrow it down to whether you are in the north, or in the western  part
of the town. For most villages and towns, it would have no impact on the
info we are looking for. Even for the biggest cities, it might not be
too much to bother, since the weather measurements we are receiving,
might have been taken a totally different place in town, from where you
sit at the moment. Weather conditions might be given specifically, or as
an average of all the measurements reported for that city. It all will
depend on exactly what weather service the app retrieves its info from.

Just to round it all up, As modern technology develops, more and more
decimals can be added to your positioning coordinate values - meaning
smaller and smaller steps can be measured. It is not unlikely that you
already would be able to give a quite accurate coordinate, for each room
of your house. Just imagine that your bedroom is one decimal place
closer to Equator, and that might be why you feel so warm and comfie in
bed. Hahaha. Might sound like a joke, but reality is that given the
right equipment, it is not totaly a dream to have such exact
measurements. OK then, to what extent it will affect the temperature of
your room, was a mere joke.

Larry, I hope this helped you a bit. On the website I refered you to,
they have a bit more info on the coordinates. And if you want even more
details, try looking up online dictionaries, on the terms of Longitudes
and Latitudes.

David

On 2/4/2019 4:11 PM, Larry Higgins via Talk wrote:
Butch,


I for one would appreciate seeing your weather.ini file.


Sorry David, I haven't yet had time to look at your instructions, but
plan to do so.


I find it kind of interesting  that if one fills in the zip code of a
particular location, that it equates to the longitude or latitude of a
particular city

. Any ideas as to how this works, or is this a big "duh" on my part
<smile? Who knows, maybe you covered this in your explanation already.

Thanks so much though for your help from I'm sure all of us who wish
to continue using this handy little app.


Larry

On 2/4/2019 7:48 AM, Butch Bussen via Talk wrote:
I could put up my weather ini file if that would help.  Mine has 3
cities in it, but you could likely edit it.
73
Butch
WA0VJR
Node 3148
Wallace, ks.


On Sun, 3 Feb 2019, Amanda Lee via Talk wrote:

Thanks for this.  I don't have a .ini from a prior installation just
yet.  I can follow this syntax just fine though and appreciate your
being so thoughtful as to how to code these entries.  I fortunately
do have some of the coordinates for the points of interest I want to
follow and thanks for sharing a more accessible site as well.

Kind regards,

Amanda Lee


-----Original Message-----
From: Talk
<talk-bounces+amandainparadise777=gmail....@lists.window-eyes.com>
On Behalf Of David via Talk
Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2019 5:58 PM
To: Window-Eyes Discussion List <talk@lists.window-eyes.com>
Cc: David <trailerda...@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Weather or not issue

OK, guys.
This, is going to be a rather long message, so work your way through.
I will try to share my findings on the issue you are having, with
the WeatherOrNot app. These are based on some fooling around, and
quick searchings on the net, so take them for what they are worth. I
do have no clue exactly where, how or what the Weather app extracts
its info, so you will have to do your own playing around. But when I
tried the following steps, it at least gave me some results. Smiles.

As someone suggested, please make it a habit of backing up any file
before you modify it at all.

OK, the first thing we need to know, is the Longitude and Latitude
coordinates, in a decimal format, for the city or place you are
trying to add. I did try a few webpages, and here is one that I
found to be fairly easy to operate with WinEyes:
https://www.latlong.net/

When opening the page, go to the first Edit box, and here enter your
city. Like:
    Toronto, On
for finding the city of Toronto in the province of Ontario, in Canada.
Once you have typed your info, hit the Enter key.
Please note, it seems that you will have to manually turn back on
Browse Mode here.

The page will now come up with its results. If it found the exact
city or place, it will give you two edit boxes, right beneath the
Find-button on the page. They will hold the necessary numbers, for
the  Longitude and Latitude. Copy and paste them into your ini file,
as will be described below.

In a few cases, I noticed the page came up with more than one choice
for the city. They then were presented in a table, with a link for
each city. You would simply choose the wanted link, hit Enter, and
go to the text line, that gives you the coordinates. Copy and paste
the given info into your ini file.

How To Modify The Ini File?
Now that we have found the needed info to direct the app, let's get
to the real job. And, yes, it is a bit of typing to be done. We will
go by it, step by step.

First, open your WE control panel, and hit Alt-F, followed by the
letter E. The user profile folder will open.

Keep pressing the W, til you get to the file named:
    WeatherOrNot.ini
, and hit Enter on it. It should open in something like Notepad.
Please note, from here, it will be good to have your synth spell out
all punctuations, and even Upper- and Lower-cased characters, as
they are all important.

In the ini file, scroll down to the line that reads
    [Locations]
. Do NOT modify this line.

Hit the End-key, to go to the end of the line, and then Hit Enter.
You now have a blank line for entering your personalized info.
What the app wants here, is a section name, for your new location.
To keep our above example rolling, enter the following line. Or,
modify it to your personal location:
    Toronto, Ontario=43.651890, -79.381710 . To break this line
down, please note:
To the left of the Equals sign, we give the app the name of the
location we are entering. It doesn't really matter what name you
give it, long as you keep track of the exact name and spelling - as
we will be using it in a moment.
Behind the Equal sign, we give the two coordinates, as copied from
the website. First the Latitude, followed by a Comma, A space
character, and then the Longitude value. No other info, no other
punctuation. The coordinates should be given in positive or negative
values, exactly copied from the website.

Once this Location line has been established, we are ready to move
on to the next modification of the ini file.
Move yourself to the bottom of the file, by hitting Ctrl-end.

You now will have to enter a section, holding the actual settings
for your new location. this section, it is, that controls how and
what info the app will read to you.

A section, always starts out with a header. That is, a line enclosed
in brackets. The header, should be an exact copy of the info you
entered to the left of the Equal sign, in your location line. It is
case, and character sensitive, so make sure you get an one-by-one
copy of your location line. In our example, it will look like this:
    [Toronto, ontario]
. Press Enter when you are done.

Now that we have established the section, it is time to set it all up.
The section should hold four fields. They are placed on individual
lines, their name spelled all in lower-cases, and ends with an Equal
sign, and your wanted setting. Lets get to them one by one.

name=
Here enter the name of the location, that you want read out to you,
whenever you press the hotkey. It could be the city name, or some
kind of an alias - like home, work, grandma's place, or whatever.
Our example line could be:
    name=Toronto
or,
    Name=Big city of Canada.
Please note, that you can use a mix of upper- and lower-cased
characters, along with normal punctuation (except from the Equal
sign), or even numbers - in your string here.

temp=
Behind the Equal sign, enter a lower-cased c, for Celcius; or a
lowercased f, for having the temperature read in degrees Fahrenheit.
Obviously, it seems there should be a way to have the app read both
formats, and my guess is that you simply enter either cf, or fc, in
this field.

wind=
Here enter ms, for meter-per-second; or mph, to have the app giving
you the windspeed in miles-per-hour. A couple more measurements
should be available, far as I can see, but you will do your own
playing.

status=OK
Huh? Don't ask me what this means. But apparently the app wants you
to tell it that you, your old auntie, or the pizza you had for
dinner last night was OK. Give it what it wants, and hope for the
best. Smiles. If you decide to fool with this line, and feel you can
make any sense of it, get back and enlighten us all. Hit Enter when
you are all done.

You know what?
You now are almost done. Only two very important steps are left. But
before we take care of them, let me just sum up the lines we entered
in our example.

[Locations]
Toronto, Ontario=43.651890, -79.381710
[Toronto, Ontario]
name=A Fun Place To Visit
temp=c
wind=mph
status=OK

Yep. And now to the final steps.
First one, surprisingly enough, will be to hit the Alt-F4, and
choosing to save our updates to the file.

Second step, is to restart the app.
Go to the WE control panel, and hit the Alt-A.
Hit the Right-Arrow, to expand the App managing.
Scroll down to App Managing, and hit Enter.
here, press the W, till you get to the WeatherOrNot app.
Either hit the Alt-R to reload, or hit the Alt-E twice to turn it
off and back on.

Boys and Girls, job should be done. though a rather long
description, your new location now should be ready to be announced,
whenever you hit the app hotkey. Anything not working? Well, let the
list know, and see if there might be a workaround.

Oh, and let me add one extra goodie to it all. If you have more than
one location, you can add them on to your ini file. The steps will
be all the same. You need one location line, and a whole section for
each location. When the read-aloud is taking place, the app will
read to you the locations and their info, consequtively. That is, it
will read the locations, in the order they are listed in the
[Locations] part of the ini file. So make sure you organize the
lines in the order you want things read out.

To have a small break between each location, you could try to enter
a period-sign, and a space character as the beginning of each
name-string.
Like:
name=. My Home Place

Enjoy your playing.

David

On 2/3/2019 6:12 AM, Rod Hutton via Talk wrote:
Hi Larry,

I have the current versions of GW Toolkit, 8.6.8, as well as
Weather or Not, 4.0.0.
The app is working fine for me, giving me my current weather
conditions.
I tried adding your city, but I get the same error as you.
I have tried looking at the code of the app, in the hope of
determining and possibly changing the weather information server it
uses.
Unfortunately, the app is encrypted, making it impossible to do
anything with it.
Given that I can confirm that the app works, I can only suggest
that if you ever used the app to get your local weather, see if you
can find an old backup copy of the Weather Or Not ini file, and
paste it into the Profile folder.
The file you need is named weatherornot.ini, and, before pasting it
into the Profiles folder, you should probably rename the current
one to something like weatherornot.ini.current.
Sorry I can't be of more help.

Good luck,

Rod

Sent from Outlook for Windows

-----Original Message-----
From: Talk <talk-bounces+rod_hutton=hotmail....@lists.window-eyes.com>
On Behalf Of Larry Higgins via Talk
Sent: February 2, 2019 1:44 PM
To: 'Window-Eyes Discussion List' <talk@lists.window-eyes.com>
Cc: Larry Higgins <larryhiggin...@comcast.net>
Subject: Weather or not issue

OK, I'm probably not ging to get any good news regarding a solution
for my problem, but here goes anyway.


Just yesterday, I decided I would like to add Albuquerque, NM to my
list of weather conditions around the country, but when either
entering the city, state, and country, or zip code, I get a message
saying something along the lines of "can't  fine the city," or
something of that nature.
It doesn't matter just what city or zip code I type in, I get the same
error message.


Is this a permanent issue,  or might there be a solution.


Hopefully,


Larry

_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of
the author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists.window-eyes.com%2Foptions.cgi%2Ftalk-window-eyes.com%2Frod_hutton%2540hotmail.com&amp;data=02%7C01%7C%7C71041e6ad77e4111c5ad08d6893e7bae%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636847298787631875&amp;sdata=bICvgRHnaJFu%2FH6DUBkcNRraoT8b5zaeAfecihFTFEw%3D&amp;reserved=0.
For subscription options, visit
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists
.window-eyes.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Ftalk-window-eyes.com&amp;data=02%7C0
1%7C%7C71041e6ad77e4111c5ad08d6893e7bae%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaa
aaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636847298787631875&amp;sdata=x92J0tQFKhlKbw2FH4H777fSYi
BV%2BrFmjO%2BTPZ67vyI%3D&amp;reserved=0
List archives can be found at
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists
.window-eyes.com%2Fprivate.cgi%2Ftalk-window-eyes.com&amp;data=02%7C01
%7C%7C71041e6ad77e4111c5ad08d6893e7bae%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaa
aaa%7C1%7C0%7C636847298787641892&amp;sdata=bBXdEIV1UafpS53E0vFNw9cdVg2
A79QgniQwBPkDpko%3D&amp;reserved=0
_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of
the author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/trailerdavid%40hotmail.com.
For subscription options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of
the author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/amandainparadise777%40gmail.com.
For subscription options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com

_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of
the author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/butchb%40shellworld.net.
For subscription options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com


_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/larryhiggins22%40comcast.net.
For subscription options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/trailerdavid%40hotmail.com.
For subscription options, visit
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author 
and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit 
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/djbilderback%40cox.net.
For subscription options, visit 
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at 
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com 

_______________________________________________
Any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author 
and do not necessarily represent those of Ai Squared.

For membership options, visit 
http://lists.window-eyes.com/options.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com/archive%40mail-archive.com.
For subscription options, visit 
http://lists.window-eyes.com/listinfo.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com
List archives can be found at 
http://lists.window-eyes.com/private.cgi/talk-window-eyes.com