Global Warming Update (11/13/14): -14°F in Denver, snow in Arkansas, 32°F in Florida,

YouTube ^ | 11/13/14 | Adam Taxin

[TigersEye]

I had forgotten but now that you mention it there was an upslope wind the other night. Good guess! A friend of mine in NM put together a weather station after saving up and collecting the hardware piece by piece over several years. Did a top notch job of it. He loves it and I bet you would too from the sounds of it. He was going to hook it up to an old computer, now too slow for internet use, to keep an ongoing log of all of his data. I’ll have to ask him if he ever did that.

[familyop]

Yes, I can install NetBSD in a tiny box with components that don't use much power (only PV solar here for electricity with the nearest power lines miles away)...pretty good device drivers available or the NetBSD kernel for one-wire devices like some of the newer, inexpensive weather sensors. Very solid operating system for odd devices.

[familyop]

...for the NetBSD kernel, even.

[TigersEye]

That's all Greek to me but my friend would know exactly what you're talking about. I understood that his old box was too slow and too low powered to deal with today's internet load but thousands of times more powerful than necessary to track anything you could imagine putting together for the weather station data.

Quite an age when our junk computers could out compute the machines they used to put a man on the moon.

[familyop]

That’s a good point and very true. Much can be done quickly with old and/or slow computers for controlling machines. Most of the device drivers are written in C or C++, and much of the front end software, C, C++, Python etc.

And yes, most commercial Web site owners tend to hire developers who use bloated scripts and mis-applied languages (PHP, JAVA, Flash, etc.).

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