Report sheet LN-01 · filed 27 Sept 2026
Conditions: five public wires, one board
A New York board that reads five feeds at once, says which ones answered, and never fills a gap with a guess.
- Instrument
- labs.llc/conditions/
- Shelf on labs.llc
- Live Intelligence · Earth
- Bench
- Local copy of the build-537 files
- Run
- 27 Sept 2026 · 19:57–20:00 UTC
- Controls
- NWS point forecast · Windy.com
- Evidence
- Source lines in the build; timed reads
Aim
Conditions is one board for the physical world as seen from New York. It gives a single headline figure each for the air, the wind, the river, the ground (earthquakes), the sun’s weather (the Kp index) and the airspace, and every tile links to the fuller labs.llc desk that owns that feed. A seventh tile, for the visitor’s own device, says plainly that the page cannot read it and does not try.
It suits weather watchers, aurora chasers and anyone curious about New York who wants one glance across several feeds and a way into the deeper desks. Our aim: confirm each figure’s source, see what happens when one fails, and set the board beside two established weather services.
Method
Apparatus: what it reads, and where the work happens
The work happens in the visitor’s browser. The script (conditions/assets/js/app.js) fires five requests in parallel with Promise.allSettled, each with a 15-second timeout and caching switched off (lines 47–56, 169–184). Four go straight to public services that need no key: Open-Meteo for air and wind at 40.71, −74.01; the USGS all-day earthquake feed; NOAA’s one-minute planetary K index; and USGS gauge 01358000 on the Hudson at Troy (Green Island).
The fifth, the aircraft count, must pass through a same-origin relay, flights/sky-proxy.php, because adsb.lol sends no CORS header. That relay is deliberately narrow, not an open proxy: one hard-coded upstream, three validated and rounded numbers, a ten-second cache (lines 11–20, 44–60). The board re-reads every five minutes while visible and holds still in a hidden tab (186–194). Weather codes become words through the WMO table and Kp through NOAA’s G-scale (26–44).
It reads
- Open-Meteo forecast API
- USGS earthquake GeoJSON feed, all_day
- NOAA SWPC planetary K index, one-minute
- USGS Water Services, gauge 01358000
- adsb.lol ADS-B API, through the flights relay
Procedure
At 19:57:51–19:57:52 UTC on 27 September 2026 we fetched the page from the local copy of build 537, called each of the five feeds at the exact address the script uses, and worked out what each tile would print.
Result
Fig. 11280 × 800
Fig. 2390 × 844
Table 1 · Run log, 27 September 2026
| No. | Reading | UTC | What came back |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Board page | HTTP 200, 43,497 bytes | |
| 2 | Air and wind (Open-Meteo) | 17.7 °C, code 51 (light drizzle), wind 19.1 km/h gusting 44.6 — tiles: 18°C and 19 km/h | |
| 3 | Ground (USGS) | 197 events in the past day; largest M 5.1, near New Caledonia | |
| 4 | Sun (NOAA SWPC) | Kp 0.0 at 19:52 — tile: ‘quiet’ | |
| 5 | River (USGS 01358000) | 6,600 cfs and 16.35 ft, both provisional, stamped 19:15 UTC — about 43 minutes before the read | |
| 6 | Airspace (relay) | HTTP 200, 138,327 bytes in 0.46 s; 283 aircraft within 100 nm |
All five wires answered, so the status line would have reported every wire read. The one figure older than it looked was the river: USGS had stamped it 43 minutes earlier and marked it provisional, and the tile shows neither fact.
Discussion
Two controls: the same job done elsewhere on the web. Each was read on its own page on the date shown, and each is better than Conditions at something.
National Weather Service point forecast
Checked .
The US government’s forecast page for a point. For 40.71, −74.01 it named its station (Central Park, KNYC) and gave °F and °C, humidity, wind, pressure, dew point, visibility and the update time, a forecast to 4 October, and hazard statements.
Where it is better
- A real forecast; the board has none.
- Official hazard statements: a Coastal Flood Statement was in force when we looked.
- Both units, more observed variables, and a named station with its update time.
Where Conditions goes further
- The NWS page carried no earthquake, river-gauge, space-weather or aircraft section; the board puts all four beside the weather (app.js 93–158).
- It reports each failed feed by name and counts how many of five answered (67–69, 178–182).
Windy.com
Checked . Its home page returned only a title to our fetch, so its App Store listing was read instead.
A global weather map and forecast service listing more than 50 weather maps, more than 15 forecast models including ECMWF, GFS and ICON, radar, satellite, custom alerts and over 67,000 webcams, for any searchable place.
Where it is better
- Anywhere on Earth, against one fixed New York point.
- Multi-model forecasts, radar, satellite and alerts.
- Far more layers, air quality and fire danger among them.
Where Conditions goes further
- No app, account or key, and every upstream named on the page, each figure one click from its desk (app.js header 10–13).
- A live river gauge and aircraft count in the glance view, next to space weather (124–158).
Sources of error: where it falls short
- Fixed place: every figure is for New York, and the Hudson gauge sits at Troy, well up-river of the city. There is no location picker.
- Fixed units: Celsius and km/h only, although the home coordinate is a US city.
- No time stamp per reading: the river value was 43 minutes old and provisional, and the tile showed only the page’s own read time.
- No forecast and no alerts: the Coastal Flood Statement on the NWS page had nowhere to appear here.
Conclusion
Finding5 of 5 wires answered; the river figure was 43 minutes old and the tile did not say so.
Conditions does the unglamorous work well: five feeds from four agencies and projects read in one pass, a narrow validated relay where a browser cannot go direct, plain words when a feed is silent, and a pause when nobody is watching. It is a starting board, not a forecast: for tomorrow’s weather or a warning, use the NWS; for anywhere but New York, Windy. As a quick, honest cross-check of five wires, it did what it says.