Okay, just to warn, this a 100% geek post.

I was reading my RSS feeds today to catch up on the news and I came across this really interesting program called Weather Cal that puts the weather forecast on your iCal with these cool little icons that show what the weather is.

Neat huh?

So, I began to wonder… how do they actually get that little icon in the calendar?  It has to be some kind of a character that is supported by unicode (the standard that correlates a character like ‘a’ to the number ’97′, as well as Chinese characters and all that).  I went looking and did find it in unicode.  So for example, here are a few for weather (using two different fonts to show you that each font will display something different):

Now, being as cheap as I am, I was wondering if I could get around paying the stupid $10 to get the program that actually does this for you.  The answer, really, is yes… but I don’t have THAT much time to waste.  Basically, if you go to the page for http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Yosemite_National_Park.html, you will find a little icon.  If you right click on that icon and copy the link/URL, go into your iCal program (or some Microsoft rip-off), go into the “Calendar” menu and select “Subscribe”, and paste the URL into the field, you will effectively get the same thing (sans icons).

If you really want to have the little icons, well, find a nice programmer who has spare time on their hands to write a simple parser for you that will find the strings like “sunny,” “cloudy,” etc., and prepend the little sun icon or cloud icon.  However, if you are REALLY going to do that, might as well pay the stupid $10.

UPDATE: Upon further investigation, somebody actually did it for FREE!  Check out http://www.smashin.com/weather.

Yup.  I didn’t believe it.  But when Bert told me you could get the ESV Bible for free on the iPod Touch or iPhone with Kindle, I went online today to check it out.  And yes, it is true.  It is not the prettiest interface for the Bible, but hey, it is free and it is the full version of a solid, present-day translation.

So here’s what you do:

1. Download and install Kindle from the iTunes App Store.
2. Launch the app and login with your Amazon account (I hear it is only doable with a US account).
3. Go to the ESV page on Amazon.com, and you will see a buy option (for the low low price of $0.00) allowing it to send directly to your iPod Touch or iPhone.
4. Relaunch the Kindle app and it should be in your book list.

That’s it!  Enjoy.  :)