Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« X.5 Time MachineMainGood Bye »

× 10

226 words

Using the sloppy language that is common these days, you can detect a difference of a ‘factor of ten’ in the weather reports below.

Dashboard weather widgets for Göttingen (3°) and Stellenbosch (30°)

And then you’ll sigh and wonder whether the difference would be a ‘factor of minus ten’ if I lived in a place like Berlin which was more chilly today. Or you’d just settle for thinking of it as a difference of 27°. Which is much more useful information anyway. It’s a distance which can be covered in less than half a day.


Obligatory Mac OS X bitching: The localised version of the weather widget you see in the screenshot above is still the one I patched myself well over two years ago. Of course Apple didn’t manage to find the 30 minutes per localisation to add the few missing strings in the meantime. I guess they were busy ‘designing’ jerkily animated stars for the Time Machine background. Naturally opening their weather widget on my machine in the Berlin time zone and with metric units still defaults to using the Fahrenheit temperature scale and displaying the temperature for some place called Berlin in the US. I won’t even need to mention their incapability in dealing with umlauts. Three obvious problems, one trivially fixable, one easy to fix and only one of them requiring a little effort. They just don’t give a shit.

March 6, 2008, 22:50

Comments

Comment by Wes: User icon

Don’t assume that if you live in the US, you get any more love. If you set OS X up with your location as “Washington, D.C.”, the widget gives you no forecast at all. It chokes on the periods in D.C.! Truly, the concern they give is inversely proportional from your distance from Cupertino.

March 9, 2008, 17:18

Add your comment

« X.5 Time MachineMainGood Bye »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking