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Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

brolly.sh

31–40 of 91 posts

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#31
post #9

Very interesting. The past few days' trend is so common in small talk and general weather discourse ("it was warmer last week") but underrated in weather apps. It's helpful that Open-Meteo provides that data This output is incidentally perfectly context engineered for LLMs too; I pasted the Delhi page contents into Arena .ai and asked "what's the gist" and qwen3.6-plus said (among other things) " A hot, humid day wit…

Yes, I'm very annoyed that I cannot look at historical data (even from the past couple of days) in weather websites!

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#32

Oh god I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates the new Met Office website/app, but their forecasts and radar maps are the best. Where do you get the data from?

It uses open-meteo.com. Their forecast API returns data from around 30 different models depending on location, and typically uses Met Office data in the UK. I don’t force to only Met Office though, as they don’t give data for everything shown (such as the pollen count per species).

Open-meteo has a very generous free tier, and reasonable pricing. It also lets you fetch weather from previous days, which I’ve included so you can see if it’s relatively hotter/colder etc. than yesterday.

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#34
post #32

Oh god I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates the new Met Office website/app, but their forecasts and radar maps are the best. Where do you get the data from?

It uses open-meteo.com. Their forecast API returns data from around 30 different models depending on location, and typically uses Met Office data in the UK. I don’t force to only Met Office though, as they don’t give data for everything shown (such as the pollen count per species). Open-meteo has a very generous free tier, and reasonable pricing. It also lets you fetch weather from previous days, which I’ve included…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#35
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great suggestion, thank you. I’ll definitely keep that in mind as an improvement. There’s been some other feedback that it’d be good if there was a ‘true’ plain text only mode, and this ties in well.

It's sort of okay (but not amazing) with w3m -4 -dump https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8 Ideally, you would let someone set an Accept: content type of text/plain, or else have an endpoint like brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8.txt

This is US only via the finger protocol (using netcat):

printf 'weather:85334\r\n' | nc bbs.airandwave.net 79

More info:

printf 'weather\r\n' | nc bbs.airandwave.net 79

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#36
post #15

would be great to show humidity %

I’ll definitely look at adding this in, along with potential the wet bulb temperature. Thanks for the feedback!

This is a terrific project, thank you!

Use-cases will vary widely. For example if I used Brolly for sailing, I'd want wind speed in kts and wind direction as well as dew point, and I'd want a recent timeseries of air pressure to give an idea of the synoptic-scale situation.

Of course these may be far outside your original use-cases. I think when people get a hold of Brolly, they're going to love it immediately, and there will be a flood of feature requests. If that happens, might be good to design the layers needed for diverse customization.

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of okay (but not amazing) with w3m -4 -dump https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8 Ideally, you would let someone set an Accept: content type of text/plain, or else have an endpoint like brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8.txt

This is US only via the finger protocol (using netcat): printf 'weather:85334\r\n' | nc bbs.airandwave.net 79 More info: printf 'weather\r\n' | nc bbs.airandwave.net 79

Disappointed you didn’t just say

  finger weather:85534@bbs.airandwave.net

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#38
Congrats!

Very small suggestion: it’d be cool if you used a service to geoip the incoming ip address - there’s also https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/ip-geolocation/ that will inject the lat lng directly into the request header to your server

It’d just help set a good enough starting location.

Cheers!

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