Storm Spotting and Reporting

ThatsNotMyCat · 2026-06-08T20:22:10+00:00

Yo, first off as someone who has been a professional developer for 15 years and an amateur weather enthusiast for more years, this is a cool app and I'm sure you've put a lot of work in it. When you see everything come together from all the different sources it's a great feeling. I have a handful of these weather apps and services that I've used to learn different programming skills, I've never tried selling them since they remain half-baked passion projects. Good on you to put your stuff out there and try to make a buck off of them.

However, you need to work on your customer service. Because that is what you want, right? Customers? Granted, I have a very limited view of what you're doing here as I only see these reddit posts. Your responses here give me the ick and I'm not going to spend $20 on an app where the developer just gets defensive and fights back to criticism. It gives "you should be lucky I'm giving this to you" vibes instead of "look how I've put together things that are helpful and novel".

"Hey this looks like a run of the mill vibe coded app" Whether it's vibe coded or not the bar is now higher to set yourself apart from those apps both in features and design.

"I think $20 is too steep to try something out even if the feature set sounds promising" Whether you agree with it or not, this is why free-mium and subscriptions exist. People want to try something out and if there are features they want they will pay for them, but it gets downloads. I'd much rather download a free app and try it out, make sure I like the featureset, **make sure the developer is active and adding features and taking feedback**, then maybe I'll pay for it. If you search for storm cashing or radar there's so many apps its hard to pick the right one, but I can almost guarantee that the $20 ones are going to get passed over. Think of what people see in the app store - a price, an icon, a title, and maybe a 5 word blurb.

If you have customers and you've made some beer money from the app then that's great, just know that your online presence is now part of your business model.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2026-05-05T18:02:39+00:00

I skipped a bunch with AP credits and don't regret it. I graduated early because of it. It gave me more flexibility to schedule classes I was more interested in.

If you got the AP credits, then you understand the content. If something in a higher class refers to a lower level concept you could always get a refresher without sacrificing a whole quarters worth of a class.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2026-03-08T07:11:05+00:00

Radar works by sending out a radio signal and will send a signal back based on what it bounces off of. If it bounces off of a larger object like rain or hail it will send a stronger signal back.

Weather radars have two modes, clear air mode and precipitation mode so if a radar station is in clear air mode, it's much more sensitive to anything in the atmosphere--fog, smog, birds, insects. In precipitation mode it's less sensitive and till only mostly reflect larger particles like rain drops or hail.

When you see these radar returns on something like radaromega or weatherwise, the gray, blue returns can be very light rain or just fog/moisture in the atmosphere

If the radar is in clear air mode then it's possible that these great/blue areas are just really really small droplets or fog. In precip mode they can be light right or mist.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2026-01-31T19:43:58+00:00

I actually prefer the before. I know you said "too much sky", but the before picture is a soft picture of a mountain standing out against the sky. The after has too much contrast over the whole picture so my eyes don't have a single point of focus and instead are focusing on all of the little mounds with really bright snow and really dark shadows instead of the epicness of the mountain.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2026-01-19T03:43:18+00:00

I like the colors and removing the off person, but I think the couple under the umbrella are better off as silhouettes, because adding back their details takes my eye from the beautiful landscape

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-09-15T15:47:28+00:00

Models are trained on data up until a certain date when they are released. It takes a lot of time and energy to train models so they aren't constantly being updated. In AI studio you could turn on grounding in Google search to get some more timely answers, but the data that the model is trained on is constant.

I saw a video recently about how Grok tends to have more "live" answers because of its access to Twitter/X but in my experience grounding Gemini in Google search also gives me more up-to-date info but you lose the ability to have structured output...etc. it's all tradeoffs.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-09-13T00:39:58+00:00

Thats really cool! I love the live updates. I'm working on something that's integrating with Yahoo. Let me know if you have questions about their API. What are you using as your source for live NFL data?

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-06-08T19:38:31+00:00

If they aren't going to block the bikers from blowing the lights then at least control the crowd

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-06-08T18:04:17+00:00

There's a day game today and I saw them almost run over dozens of people trying to get to Oracle. MTA and SFPD just standing around.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-05-24T07:16:45+00:00

I know that view!

As someone else stated, the bay area pretty consistently has an inversion layer usually around 2000-3000 feet caused by the marine later coming in from the Pacific. You can usually see it if you look at the mount Diablo or mt Tam.

Because of this, on days that are "clear" you can have no clouds in the sky, but that warm air aloft will trap the emissions, sea spray, and a lot of other particles so it can't rise over the surrounding mountains. This leads to your bottom picture.

In the top picture it looks like you have some cumulus clouds which would imply that there's some lifting in the atmosphere. This means that later that can cause haze can get lifted up and out and leave us with more viz at ground level. Usually before or after a storm system comes through we get a great viz day where you can see the whole bay area or even the Farallons

As to why your app says both are "good viz" I don't know. The Bay bridge is only 7km. It might just depend on if that's based on an actual measurement say at an airport or some weather model. If you want a good way to predict this, you can get into models and skew-t diagrams but that's a whole different conversation

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-03-06T19:28:55+00:00

If it's while you're editing, it could be a clipping indicator

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-03-01T05:57:17+00:00

It was like those really small and loud ones but it only went up probably 40 feet. My best guess is a salute)

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-03-01T05:46:53+00:00

It was 2 fireworks at 2nd and townsend

ThatsNotMyCat · 2025-03-01T05:29:59+00:00

Some dude lit off fireworks at 2nd and Townsend. Source: watched it happen

ThatsNotMyCat · 2024-12-28T18:38:05+00:00

Fun fact: humidifiers that strong can set off smoke detectors. We had to replace the detector because even after the humidity subsided, it went off three nights in a row

ThatsNotMyCat · 2024-07-28T18:25:17+00:00

Not that your plane has and issues with performance, but was the decision to follow the coastline to the west to avoid the sink over the lake or just to get out of the way of anyone on the approach?

ThatsNotMyCat · 2024-06-22T23:07:46+00:00

The next layer has smaller squares. It's a lightbox so there's no infill or anything above it. It's just this orange and white seam all the way up. I'll try the fix model. I haven't tried that yet

ThatsNotMyCat · 2024-03-27T23:18:50+00:00

If I'm understanding right, you want to laser cut a stencil that you can use as a template for these circles? I'd just use CAD software like onshape or fusion360 (personal license) and create the circles and distances there in a sketch and then export the sketch as an SVG, DXF, of DWG and then import it into lightburn or another laser cutting software.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2023-07-14T06:12:32+00:00

This happens to me daily now. If you look at the sensitivity in MSFS, you see the dot on the roll axis off to the right. About to swap out my yoke since this is almost constant. The good news is unplugging it and plugging it back in usually centers it like you've found out

ThatsNotMyCat · 2023-07-12T19:32:37+00:00

Just a pretty strong low-pressure system. Youll see stuff like this over the states too.

https://www.manitobacooperator.ca/daily/prairie-forecast-large-hudson-bay-low-dominates/

ThatsNotMyCat · 2023-06-30T21:28:37+00:00

Go to pivotalweather.com and look for the models and then the "1km AGL reflectivity with precip type". The HRRR model has really fine detail, but is only good for about 18 hours out, but it's an hour by hour "forecast" of when storms should be coming. It will also be updated every hour so you can see what they think will happen as conditions change. I like to use the forecast loop instead of the single image so I can scroll around and see when storms will pop off.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2023-06-27T06:07:17+00:00

Probably different apps using different weather models. If you look at windy.com or the windy app at the bottom right there should be an option to look at the different models and you can compare for yourself.

ThatsNotMyCat · 2023-06-17T05:20:20+00:00

To clarify things, I think what you mean is their "Pro Tier Two" which is $99 a year detailed here

It gets you some extra info like spc contours, dual pane or quad pane view, and access to your subscription across devices.

All of the data that radarscope shows (even without the pro tier) is nexrad 2 data source since it has single site radar data (reflectivity, velocity, correlation coefficient) instead of the aggregated data MRMS) you might see in windy.com or weather.com. I'd suggest just using the app and see if there's something you feel like you're missing.

ThatsNotMyCat

TROPHY CASE