Many of the raw charts on which weather forecasters base their predictions are freely available on the internet, notably on German site www.wetterzentrale.de The site is badly formatted for iPhones, however, so I’ve written a free web app that provides easy access to some of the most prominent meteorological models for the UK. Five sections have the GFS ensembles, ECM charts, UKMO charts, the edited UKMO (so-called “fax”) charts and the GFS charts. The images follow on one from the other and automatically resize when you turn the screen to landscape.

Visit the link below in your iPhone – the app will run in your mobile Safari browser but, for the best experience, go to “add to homescreen” – this will add a nice little icon and run fullscreen.

As the app has to download lots of images it takes 10 seconds or so to load on a good wifi connection; more on 3G.

The app uses the excellent jQTouch, a jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone.

Let me know what you think (and if you have any good ideas for a name or further development) in the comments below.

An international collection of images for your screen backgrounds, enabling you to stare at a wall all day. To ward off boredom you can even change walls and have a different one every month. The thumbnails link to 1680×1100 pixel jpeg images, which should be big enough for most screens. The wallpapers, photos I took of walls in Morocco, Cuba, Croatia, Italy and Hungary, are free for personal use.

Outlook Image Preview

Most of the credit for this should go to P Lee for his original macro, which I have slightly tweaked here.

The image preview is a solution to a problem thrown up by Outlook, which makes it awkward to view attached images. Whereas Outlook Express automatically previews attached images in the message window, Outlook forces the user to open each image individually, or to go through the relatively laborious process of saving the images and then viewing them.

This macro solves that problem by launching a browser window (with one click on a toolbar button) showing all the attached images in an email. If more than one email is selected in Outlook it will show all attached images in all selected emails, with links back to the original emails.

Eric Legault has come up with an alternative solution here, (updated here and again here), but I prefer this one.

It initially scales large images to the width of the browser popup, but you can click on the image to toggle between full size and browser width. Hover over the image to see the original size/scaled size. Resize the browser window, right-click on the background, and choose ‘Refresh’ to resize all the images at once.

To install, right click here and choose ‘save target as…” (or ‘save link as’) and save the file somewhere memorable, like your desktop.

In Outlook, click on Tools/Macro/Visual Basic Editor:

In the Visual Basic window which will open, click on File/Import File…:

Find the file you saved (you’ll need to change the ‘Files of type’ to ‘All Files’, see below) and open it.

You can now close the visual basic editor and the macro should be installed. You can run it selecting an email and going to Tools/Macro/Macros, highlighting ‘view_attachments’ and clicking ‘Run’.

To make life easier though, add a button to your toolbar. Go to Tools/Customize, select ‘Macros’ on the left-hand side and drag ‘view_attachments’ from the ‘Commands’ window on the right onto a toolbar. Once it’s on a toolbar you can right-click it and change the button image, remove the text, etc.

It may be necessary to tweak security settings (in Tools/Macro/Security) in order to get the macro to run. Avoid moving your security level to ‘Low’ though.

For more along similar lines, the sidebar on the right has my recent bookmarks and the albums I’ve listened to most in the last three months.

I’m also using the Twitter for WordPress and Delicious for WordPress plugins. The photo albums are made using Bananalbum.