Bracken House weather site improvements

This week, the Bracken House website has seen some improvements, thanks to extra features added to the Weather Display software that drives the site.

The main improvement was extra coding added to the moviemaker program that creates the last hour, all day and yesterday videos. This extra coding is to enable the creation of mp4 format videos that will play on Apple devices like the iPad and the iPhone. Prior to this amendment to the coding, the site was only able to create flv (Flash) format files which are not compatible with these Apple devices.

The latest Weather Display screen

The Weather Display software can now record Soil Moisture Deficit (SMD). This is the amount of water needed to bring the soil moisture content back to field capacity, which is the amount of water the soil can hold against gravity. For example, say you have a pot plant. field capacity is the amount of water you can give the pot plant without it leaking out of the bottom. Too much water and you get a negative SMD (the pot plant leaks), too little and you have a positive SMD (the pot plant needs watering). Just enough and the SMD = 0. You can see this reading on the Bracken House weather home page under the heading ‘Irrigation Index’.

The last improvement was a fix to the bug that prevented the Moon Transit time from being displayed on the sun. moon and seasons page. This time has never been displayed since the page was amended in April 2012.

The Bracken House weather site can be found here, and you can follow Bracken House Weather on Facebook.

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