Right, that's just the point. So as long as users can enter the location coordinates manually that would be fine then.

Sounds interesting and good. There are also various free and open source weather feeds somewhere, as were used by some of my past Linux weather mods which unfortunately seem to have disappeared.

Ok, added the Open-Meteo weather feed. It is actually a really good feed. Feel almost tempted to make it the primary feed.

O-M looks real good - lots of stuff that could be added to the Weather mod! Certainly looks better than MSN feed - definitely would get my vote for primary feed Jorge. And it's open source too. Only leaves a question re: what exactly they'd define as commercial use.

There is a clause about attribution, but anyway, that is the main reason why the MSN feed will remain the primary feed. The Meteo feed will not be used at all unless the MSN feed goes down for some reason.

If only a very small percentage of the 450,000+ Chinese users using the free version of Nexus and consuming massive amounts of bandwidth actually updated to the paid versions, I would not hesitate one second to go for Meteo's paid plan and it would be well worth it, but as it is....

If I see no improvements by the end of May, I will be forced to conclude that Winstep software basically cannot be monetized in China and will have no choice but to block China again at the firewall level.

Would be nice if China Worked out anyway, but O-M would provide the "cherry on top" But, yeah, definitely would have to pay for itself.

After all the effort you put into the 'China project' and all the cost, it really would be a shame if it didn't work out Jorge. Still hoping for the best here, but then again, not holding my breath either, alas. And time is moving on - won't be long for the end of the month now.

Weather.com feed is also back, but like the Meteo feed, only as a backup in case the MSN feed fails.

This is a bit of a relief as until now if the MSN feed went down for whatever reason the weather module would be practically dead (unless you chose a location with a METAR code, but then you would get current weather conditions only)-

The Open-Meteo feed also works only with latitude and longitude coordinates.

After several hours working with ChatGPT and various online city/country location databases, I was able to update the internal database so that from the total 73,104 entries, 68,366 now have matching longitude and latitude coordinates.

When I started today, there were 39813 locations that had missing latitude and longitude coordinates, now only 4,738 locations are still missing those, but more than half (2,426) are locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (which, despite being a small country with only 3 million people, for some reason has thousands upon thousands of location entries). Most of the other remaining entries with missing coordinates are weather stations or deprecated locations, so we should be good.

In other news, China continues to bear no fruit.

Hmmm, Weather.com codes are no longer used anywhere anymore, not even by the Weather.com feed itself, so I think I will remove them entirely (which does mean some major changes to the code, however).

At this time we have three available feeds: MSN, Open-Meteo and Weather.com.

The MSN feed is the most versatile, it accepts Weather.com codes, Latitude and Longitude coordinates, and also Country, City and (for US only) State names.

Both the Weather.com and Open-Meteo feeds only accept latitude and longitude coordinates to retrieve weather conditions.

This said, if you have a country and a city name (plus state for US cities) but no latitude and longitude coordinates, you can retrieve those either via the MSN feed OR the geocoding feed of Open-Meteo. This is very useful for locations that do not exist in the internal database and the user types in manually, for instance.

As I said in my previous post, the internal database currently covers 73,104 cities, and, excluding the stupidly high number of unresolved Bosnia locations, this means 96.73% of the locations already have latitude and longitude coordinates.

When you first run the Winstep application, it uses a GeoIP service to try and get your location via your IP address. If successful, it gets a city, country and state (for US cities) as well as the all important latitude and longitude coordinates.

Previously these names were then matched against the internal database to get any existing METAR code as well as the- at the time - all important Weather.com code. This was not always as easy as it sounds, because some city names have different names in English and in the native language (e.g. Lisbon vs Lisboa).

Since we will no longer be using Weather.com codes, this initial matching will only be useful now to find locations that have an associated METAR code. Even if we do not find a match in the internal database, the data provided by the Geo Location service is now enough to get the correct weather data for that location.

So, I have removed all the weather.com codes from the internal database and am only keeping METAR codes plus the Latitude + Longitude coordinates. I also removed all city names that did not have associated METAR or Latitude + Longitude coordinates.

This resulted in a database of about 69,000 cities worldwide.

Bummer re: China not bearing fruit so far. All the same, still "banging on the metal" though, in a manner of speaking, or the server to be more accurate. :/

69K cities doesn't really seem all that much, but then again, when China could well come out of the equation, it should cover most of the rest of the planet I'd guess. More than enough.

Well, with the initial GeoIP query retrieving latitude and longitude coordinates, even if the user's city is not in the database the coordinates should be enough to get weather data for the user's location...

Since we no longer depend on Weather.com codes, this basically means that the internal database becomes mostly a "quality of life" feature rather than an essential requirement.

Of course, the initial GeoIP query will only work properly if the user is not behind a VPN.

If he is, then he will have to manually select a location from the internal database (or type in his city + country as well as figure out the lat + lon coordinates for his location if his city does not exist in the database).

Besides the existing "Get My Location" button, I might also add a "Get Coordinates" button, which would use the MSN/Meteo feeds to retrieve Latitude and Longitude coordinates for specific Country, City and State names.

Aren't you behind a VPN? If you add a "Lookup IP Address" internal command to the dock, what do you get in the balloon tooltip when you click on it?

Have been for yonks now. Most of the time, behind a "double VPN", that is, my connection goes to a very secure server and then a second one from where the connection to the destination is made. Or sometimes I might use a single VPN server that in turn connects to the TOR network. I tend to vary connections at random, which makes it most unlikely I could be tracked down. Using the "Lookup IP Address" IC resolves the name of my chosen exit node with double VPN, plus co-ordinates and sometimes a random fictitious ISP name. With TOR over VPN it resolves the details of the TOR exit node, which of course changes frequently. Plus when using just the double VPN, I do almost all web activity with the TOR browser, which gives the same result as TOR over VPN with a 'normal' browser. Sometimes I also use one of my Linux OSes that routes all connections through the TOR network. Proton are still trying to figure out a way to get the VPN into that mix. In any of the TOR configuration, your registration query reply could come from remotest Timbuktu, so to speak. (All other known nosy apps are disabled from making connections, as is almost all of Windows itself, when using Windows. ) Also, when using Windows I always have at least one Linux VM running and do all my web activity from that. And of course I have the VPN with both Windows and my main Linux OSes.

Spent quite a few hours updating the code to dump weather.com codes and use latitude + longitude coordinates instead. Removed the Weather.com field from the Weather Settings panel and added a new "Get Coordinates" button.

This button will use the MSN - and, as a backup, the Meteo - feed to retrieve latitude longitude coordinates based on a specific location (country + city name). So, even if the user's location is not found in the internal weather database, all he needs to do is type his city name (and optionally country, if not selected already) and then press the "Get Coordinates" button.

Also, on first run when GeoIP is used to try to determine the user's location, if the location is not found in the database, it is now automatically added to it (provided we were able to determine country and city name + coordinates from his IP address, of course).

For users of the current versions who are still dependent on weather.com codes, I will have to automatically determine latitude and longitude coordinates for their locations when they update to the new version.

As with anything that changes old stable code, the probability of introducing new bugs is unfortunately high.

Familiar old story, don't you think Jorge? Remember going back as far as NT4/Win9x the received wisdom concerning Windows updates used to be, MS fix one bug and introduce at least two new ones. So we waited for at least two updates to come along before allowing them. (In those days we still had a choice!)

Betas of v26.6 are out:

Winstep Xtreme beta:
https://www.winstep.net/xtreme-beta.zip

Nexus Ultimate beta:
https://www.winstep.net/ultimate-beta.zip

Nexus free beta:
https://www.winstep.net/nexus-beta.zip

This is a beta and MUST be installed ON TOP of a full v26.4 OR LATER installation. Do NOT uninstall anything first, just exit all running Winstep applications and run the beta setup file.

There is no need to backup your settings first, but it does not hurt if you do either.

####

I’ve added the extended‑width dock background option, but the main focus of this beta is the overhaul of the weather feeds.

We’ve transitioned from the old Weather.com location codes to a latitude/longitude system. The internal locations database has been updated accordingly, removing the legacy Weather.com codes and replacing them with coordinate‑based entries.

Because of this change, a large portion of the weather code has been rewritten. In theory, the migration should be seamless: your existing weather location should automatically resolve its correct latitude and longitude. This is the most important thing I need you to test - please confirm that your location picked up the proper coordinates, and report immediately if it didn’t.

To replace the now‑obsolete Weather.com field in the Weather Settings panel, there is a new “Get Coordinates” button.

If your location didn’t automatically acquire valid coordinates, this button may fix it. Note that the coordinates returned by the button may differ slightly from those stored in the internal database - this is normal, and the differences are too small to affect the actual weather data.

The button is also useful for locations not included in the internal database. Just type your city name (after selecting the correct country and state, if applicable) and click the button to retrieve its coordinates.

With this change, the internal database becomes more of a convenience feature rather than a strict requirement, since it no longer needs to store Weather.com codes.