Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Turn off severe weather emergency alerts on your Android phone

This issue has annoyed the crap out of me the last couple of months because we've had some serious rain and mildly severe thunderstorms in the Chicago area.  Twice I got woken up in the middle of the night by my phone vibrating and playing a really loud "weather alert" sound.  I finally found the time to track it down, so I'm posting the solution here.

At first I thought it was one of the 2 or 3 weather apps I had loaded.  So, I removed them all - and still got an alert last night because thunderstorms were in the area.  WTF????

Turns out that Emergency Alerts are built into the Android text messaging app (called Messaging on most phones).  Open the app and go to the Settings.  On mine, at the very bottom was an Emergency Alerts option.  I turned off Extreme and Severe alerts and begrudgingly left on Amber alerts (seems like the right thing to do).  See the picture below.  My phone doesn't have "Test Alerts" as an option, probably because it's running a fairly old version of Android.

There's a quite-ominous sound "Presidential Alerts" option that you're unable to turn off.  If I ever get one of those I have a feeling it'll be time to say goodbye to the cruel world......

On second thought, I think I'll leave on "Extreme Alerts".  That sounds pretty ominous as well.

Finally I can reload my Accuweather app.  Geez.


Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Fender Bassman 100T

I just had to post this after reading about Entwhistle using this (no, not this one, but a much older version).

Fender Bassman 100T