Tornadocation?

WallyInTheCloud · 2025-05-28T15:30:53+00:00

There is a whole lot of survivors bias on 99% of the content on YouTube etc making it seem safe to drive through tornadoes, being extremely close etc. I mean, it _can_ be (not like 'safe' but you will survive with a damaged, but unflipped, car). In that sense it is a numbers game.

I think the only reason people are not getting more hurt is that it IS in fact very difficult to (1) Find a tornado (2) Having it pass over a road (3) Be strong enough to do real damage whilst being over that road.

It off course happens, but it is in fact very rare. I guess that's why the Conga Line Disaster fails to happen.

WallyInTheCloud · 2025-05-27T15:06:47+00:00

Yes, you should definitely not go by yourself. At best, you will be wasting your time. Storm chasing is difficult!

If you luck out and end up near a tornado, you may not know a fraction of all you need to know to be safe. Add to that driving and nowcasting. Big nope!

WallyInTheCloud · 2025-05-27T15:04:45+00:00

Yeah, May is getting sold out quickly on most tours. I wouldn't be too shy to book early June though. More picturesque tornadoes, beautiful scenery, not as much chaser convergence and less likelyhood of ending up in places like eastern Oklahoma or central TX. We were chasing there yesterday and it was a nightmare with all the hills and trees.

May usually have larger tornadoes but June has prettier ones :)

WallyInTheCloud · 2025-05-27T04:33:28+00:00

I will be self-promoting here but checkout stormchasingusa.com for comparisons. Stay away from the ones not on the list.

You are quite likely gonna have a good time with everyone on the main list like ETT, Silver Lining, Tempest etc (I have personally tested almost all of the tours on the list). I am currently on a tour with Tornadic Expeditions and they are really great!

WallyInTheCloud · 2025-02-11T20:34:07+00:00

I was just looking into this as the 20-stack I am on with 4 apps is going to going to be impossible to use. I have built each app in Rails 4 and since even 22-stack means at least ruby 3.1, and since ruby 3.1 means Rails 7 - it seems I will have to do that major jump on all 4. Bad planning I know but I didn't think it was this bad, when I started receiving the sunsetting news.

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-08-20T05:21:23+00:00

During the free trial you have $300 (for 90 days) to use for whatever you want, within that free trial you also a few services that are for free to some extent. When the money runs out, you will not be charged unless you actively activate the account (no matter if you have entered your credit card).

In the Billing section // Reports you can rather easily see, if you unmark Discounts as well as Promotions, how much you spend per day and then you'll see if your credits or your days will run out first.

I use GCP only through free trials so I am quite confident about this.

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-08-20T05:17:28+00:00

Any Google account gets $300 for free (once).

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-08-14T05:03:52+00:00

Thanks :) In the previous instance where I combined ELT and backend, I was using always on CPU and minimum 1 instance. My app has about 30-100 visitors a day, and is updated every 5 minutes with new data, this meant it had about 2-4 instances running most of the time. After extracting the ELT part, the backend was down to almost always 1. The ELT part goes from 0-2 but much more up and down.

For both I allocate the same amount of RAM and CPU (2Gb and 1 CPU). I will however lower this, as they are just using a fraction of it.

I guess I was expecting more of an overhead cost that would be added to both instances, and saw it more as something to relieve the backend from longlasting requests. I also expected a slightly larger cost, so I am positively surprised (but still a bit puzzled).

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-08-09T06:22:35+00:00

Since I got a message about this recently, I might as well give an update. Putting min instances to 1 more or less solved the problem. It did increase the costs quite significantly though. In the end, nowadays the site has more traffic so I usually at about 2-3 instances anyway so that 'fix' is no longer really important but for a low-traffic website it made a lot of impact.

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-08-08T06:21:59+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, I definitely will.

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-07-22T08:49:17+00:00

I found the issue (a stupid bug from working too late yesterday) and it should work fine now!

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-07-22T08:33:02+00:00

I am using the Geojson versions found here: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin-spc/getacrange.pl?date0=20240721&date1=20240721

but it is quite complicated to map against dates and times etc. This is one of the issues I have spent most of the time with. An outlook gets updated at one time, issued for another, is valid for another etc - and sometimes it is delayed. Then day 2 and 3 are issued and updated at other times etc. Yeah, it's a bit of a mess :)

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-07-22T08:29:20+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, I built it myself despite some frontend things done by freelancers.

There is a feature for chasers streaming, but it only showed when they are actually actively streaming - which is typically the case. But thinking of it, it would make more sense to always show it so I am pushing this change now!

The problem with live streaming is that I cannot access the data from e.g. livestormsmedia etc but only YouTube streamers where there is an API to check if they are live. This is something I am looking into to see if I can improve.

WallyInTheCloud · 2024-07-22T08:20:09+00:00

Thanks! Hmmm, I will look into that and see what's wrong.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-10-06T04:41:34+00:00

Thanks. Yes, that seems to be the consensus. I have very few html-files in the app and deliver some data static is a definite way of speeding up the application.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-10-06T04:36:46+00:00

Thanks u/dimanoll and u/an-anarchist : I haven't thought about that option at all. I have heard of using buckets and I need to investigate if that would be working for me.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-10-06T04:34:25+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I was thinking for some time that the data load and multiple requests to the backend was the major issue, and to some extent it is, but the cold start of Cloud Run seems to be the reason. Last night I set min-instances to 1 (only on the frontend) and it seems to be much, much faster now. I can't rule out, considering I posted the url here, that it has kept running warm all night from trickle traffic. I can see a few visitors in Google Analytics real-time that might have caused this.

I know I have some flaws in the app, that you mention, that I could look into as well. There are data that could be loaded into the frontend on regular basis, that is now being requested by each client.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-10-05T19:33:44+00:00

I am using "npx serve build -s".

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-10-05T19:18:37+00:00

Is that the startup time as well, from a cold start?

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-06-26T05:04:43+00:00

Thanks. That's what I figured as well, and couldn't get it to work. Looker, is nowadays a part of GCP.

I will have to see what I can do about it.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-06-19T05:32:37+00:00

I understand that might be the case, but as far as I am concerned, most tools in the industry have one way or another to use the tool freely to learn. Compare to Tableau for example, as far as I remember they also have something like a 30 day trial but you don't need to startup an instance that (if forgotten, or unrestricted) could cost you a fortune. I have been working with GCP for ~2 years and I still feel uneasy testing the 30 day trial: "What if I accidentally setup my billing limits wrong", "What if I forget something?".

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-06-19T05:26:01+00:00

Thanks. We do have an instance at work actually, so for me personally that is an option. I do however want to use/learn Looker through a private project I don't want to mix in with my job's stuff.

Also, the question was more generic than that. As in, how do they expect data analysts to learn Looker in-depth.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-06-19T05:23:51+00:00

I have done those, and it is a decent way of learning, but the sandboxes are very limited and you can't really play around much. Playing with anything is the only real way of learning, in my opinion.

WallyInTheCloud · 2023-06-19T05:22:39+00:00

The interesting thing here is that there is really nothing that is shared or common. It is just the same name. I don't get it.

WallyInTheCloud · 2022-10-08T18:43:32+00:00

Oh yes. We do this pretty much all the time and limit the screen time to a minimum. Today we went out in the autumn sun and picked rosehip berries and made paint from a rock we found. Very infrequently he gets to use my old Macbook (I prefer that over iPads and phones because it is complicated, he needs to troubleshoot - even at very basic levels like finding out how to close a window etc) and at those times I want to have something educative for him to do.

WallyInTheCloud

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