Now that I've reached the s0-called 'twilight years,' (I'll be 68 next week! ), I'm returning to one of my favourite pastimes to, well, ... pass the time!
I've always loved programming, even in my school days, where we had a very basic machine built from relays and lights. Later on I 'progressed' to a shiny new ZX81 and taught myself BASIC and Z80 machine code and assembly language.
Nowadays though, there are a plethora of computer languages so it's a bit mind-boggling what to concentrate on, however they all do basically the same job, just with different syntax and methods.
So, I try to stick to PHP, plain old vanilla JavaScript and HTML to produce my wonderful? creations. This is the latest effort and is very much work-in-progress. It's a Weather Station which, when completed, will display the weather for any town or city in the world on a few nice gauges.
At the moment though, I've just got it pulling in weather data for a single location from the OpenWeatherMap API and displaying it on some gauges. Eventually, I'll have dropdowns to select the location and the page will be updated automatically every 10 minutes. I have it running on the web and it can be displayed in any computer browser, on a tablet or phone browser, or as an Android APK. I particularly like the APK (Android app) as I have made an app and installed it on my Amazon Firestick so that I can have a full screen display of the current weather on my TV set.
weather_station_scrn1.jpg
All of the gauge needles are fully animated and spring to life as soon as the page is loaded. The Wind Direction indicator has a static needle but the whole dial rotates like a compass. The gauge backgrounds were done in Photoshop, with a brushed aluminium texture and some icons for the barometer.
Obviously, there's alot more work to do yet, mainly cosmetic, but it's getting there.
What do any of you fellow wrinklies do to fill in your retirement? I bet there are some wonderful answers!