Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Planned power outages and weather warnings

This is topic Planned power outages and weather warnings in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 08-29-2012, 06:04 PM:

I just discovered (via Google) that our friendly local power company now offers a RSS feed to advise of planned power outages. It has always annoyed me that they call it a planned outage but don't actually notify anyone, which takes the point of of "planned".

(I posted the fact that this RSS feed now exists to a Saskatchewan techie mailing list that I'm on and one of the guys there said, "Hey, I work at Sask Power and I had no idea this existed.")

This finally gave me the motivation to set up something that I've thought about before but somehow never spent the twenty minutes that it took to research and implement.

All I want a RSS feed for is to notify me of the planned power outages and, since I'm doing this anyway, I also want weather warnings that apply to my area. Both of these are (hopefully) low-volume RSS feeds, so I don't particularly need or want this taking up space in or on my desktop and/or web browser or whatever. The least intrusive way to receive low-volume but important RSS notifications is by email.

rss2email picks up the contents of an RSS feed and emails you the information on a schedule set by you. I just set it up as a hourly cron job so every hour if there is a weather warning or planned power outage notification issued, I'll receive it on my regular email pick-up.

You folks might want to check if RSS feeds are available for this sort of thing in your area and, if so, start getting them.

rss2email appears to be available for download for both Windows and Unix. I got it pre-packaged for my Centos desktop with a simple "yum install rss2email" command.