Flashes of Panic

I’ve been using the little weather Dashboard widgets supplied by Apple to keep an eye on the unseasonably warm temps, and for some reason in recent days the temperature in Boston has been showing as notably warmer (as in, twenty to thirty degrees warmer) than other locations I follow in the area, e.g. Amherst.

Today I got suspicious, because everyone is buzzing about this incoming storm, and yet my Boston widget was showing clear weather both today and tomorrow. So I clicked through (the widget gets its data from Accuweather; I tend to use the National Weather Service myself) to figure out what was going on.

Turns out that a recent upgrade, either from Apple or from Accuweather, requires the widget to use both city and state. My widget, which was requesting simply “Boston”, was getting its forecast and conditions from Boston, Georgia, which I assume is alphabetically first on the list of Bostons, rather than, oh, most likely to be what people mean when they just ask for “Boston”?

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