Dave,
Thanks very much for your detailed explanation, as well as ideas. At first I thought there might just be TMI, but nevertheless, I found it quite eye opening. I'll look forward to visiting the sites and doing some experimenting with coordinates. Always fun to tackle something new.
On 2/4/2019 12:25 PM, David via Talk wrote:
OK, perhaps I did not deal with one question, so let me just add on the following. How Will A Website Know The Coordinates Of Your Town? Could be many ways. Maybe they have collected some coordinates from mapping services in different countries. Or, they could ask their users to provide coordinates. Say you are out driving. When you stop at a local restaurant, you enjoy the food very much. You then would go to some kind of rating website. Here you enter the coordinates for the city, and you have added to a database of coordinates for that city. Likewise, probably you found the small village really cozy and beautiful. You now would log on to a mapping service, like the one I pointed you to, and make sure the coordinates from your GPS, or other services on your cellphone, will be registered for that nice place. If thousands, millions or even a couple of billion people do this, and given the website provider has a big enough server, in time the database will grow into most places on earth. At least the populated, and traficated parts of the globe. Even when you participate in different services, like weather measurement, you might be asked your positioning coordinates. Who knows, maybe some of the different service providers exchange coordinate databases, thereby increasing the total amount of places registered. And the accuracy of coordinates for each town. Google, for one, will have collected millions of coordinates. A guess could be, that you might be able to buy databases from them, to get the charts for given areas. Guess and fantasize as you want. Smiles. If you do a web search for a term like: New York USA longitude latitude , or replace the city with your own, you will find yourself presented with numerous services providing you the coordinates. Some of the services might be paid-for, others are free for private usage. And still others, will provide what is name an API, which is an interface for you to implement into your own service. The WeatherOrNot app, will from originally, have taken your city name, and gone to such an API service, retrieving the coordinates. It then will have stored them in the ini file. For who knows what reason, the communication between the app and the API, seem to have been halted or even discontinued. Was it because a subscription was not renewed, the API changed the way it should be accessed, or simply an agreement that came to its final - well why bother speculating. Next, the Weather app, will take these coordinates, and bring them to some API for retrieving weather info for that specific place. A quick search for such an API, in case you could build a "new" version of the WeatherOrNot app, gave me the info that wunderground does offer such an API. I do not know what the license for such a service includes, nor to what extent it will be a matter of economic funding. And likely you can get some other services from other providers. Any programmer that wants something to fill his day, there you have a project for your enjoyment. Smiles. David On 2/4/2019 6:33 PM, David via Talk wrote: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. 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