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Apple, ever heard of Europe???

Posted by Wilmer van der Gaast on
Last week, when I finished adding this cool weather applet on the right, I was afraid it was broken. It didn't give me the same temperatures as I saw in my Dashboard weather applet (Mac OS X). However, the GNOME weather applet on my own Ubuntu laptop agreed completely with what's on my blog ... The difference was more than just 1/2 centigrades, so I figured that there's probably something wrong with the OSX applet. And yes, I did set it to show centigrades, not that Fahrenheit crap. (Which it insists to use, even when you made it clear everywhere that you want to use the Metric system.)

So after using my common sense a little bit more I realized that indeed the Apple applet was broken. It predicted temperatures like -18 degrees during the night. In Dublin? Not the Irish Dublin! Turns out it selected a random city in America called Dublin (there are many of them, BTW!). Very helpful, Apple. Especially because it probably guessed the city name from my timezone setting: EUROPE/Dublin.

So anyway, if anyone else has this problem, here's the solution. Go to AccuWeather, find your city (the real one, not a random American city which happens to have the same name) and copy a part of the raw URL to your WeatherWidget settings. Apple doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that they have customers outside America...

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Tony Perrie on :

My wife Rachel, a Briton, recently inherited my Powerbook after I got an MBP. She wanted to enter Lincoln, UK into Dashboard's weather applet. Of course, entering "Lincoln" give you weather for the capital of Nebraska, USA. So, I figured out that if you type Lincoln, and then Enter, the weather applet will disambiguate the place name from a drop down list. On a side note, my college roommate live in Dublin, Ohio for a while. Also, Dublin is the largest capital in the world, because every second of the day its Dublin! GET IT!? HAHAHAHAHAHA

Wilmer on :

Err, yes, that's what I found out a little bit later too. Just that it takes more like 20 seconds on my laptop (slow DNS lookups for some reason) so I probably wasn't patient enough. ;-)

And sorry, I don't get the joke. :-(

Danny on :

Hmm... I thought the yahoo widgets had the same base as the osx widgets? But maybe my widget's just been lucky telling the right info until now. I must admit I don't check it that regularly. About once every three days. It did seem to be giving correct information though.

Wilmer on :

Hmm, maybe that's because there's no Enschede in the US... ;-)

I'm not sure if they're completely the same BTW. Where did you read that?

Danny on :

Hmm.. apparently it is different (src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Widget_Engine) ^^;

btw, I don't use Enschede, I use Twente, Netherlands - so I guess it's in the Netherlands ^_~

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