🧒 An 11-year-old guards your forecast

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🤯 WOW! Your phone’s weather forecast runs on satellites, radar and supercomputers. There are also more than 8,700 volunteers who walk into the backyard every morning with a thermometer and a rain gauge. No pay. No test. Same program since 1890. Thomas Jefferson was, more or less, member number one.

📖 Read time: 1.5 great minutes

I love this story, and I think you will, too. Let’s start by opening your weather app. That “normal high” for your town. The drought map. The number that decides whether a farmer’s crop insurance pays out this year. Where do you think it comes from?

A lot of it comes from Ray. (👋🏻, Ray!)

Ray French lives in Gouverneur, N.Y., near the Canadian border. Since 1975, he has walked outside at 7 a.m. and written down the high, the low, the rain and the snow. Blizzard, thunderstorm, Christmas morning. Seven o’clock. His wife, Lauren, puts it plainly: “Whether it was storming or nice or not, 7 o’clock in the morning, he’d be out there.”

Fifty years. Do the math, and that’s north of 18,000 mornings. He also taught earth science, biology and anatomy. The man practiced what he taught.

Ray is one of more than 8,700 volunteers in the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program. Congress created it in 1890. The records in Ray’s county go back to 1831. Before any of that, Thomas Jefferson kept a nearly unbroken weather log from 1776 to 1816, and the program’s top honor still carries his name.

These folks aren’t paid. There’s no test. They promise to show up and get a rain gauge and thermometer. Their readings flow into the same federal database that feeds your forecast, sets your town’s “normal” temperature, backs up flood maps and, believe it or not, gets cited in court.

Satellites see the whole planet. They can’t tell you it snowed 4 inches on Ray’s porch. Ray can.

This summer, the Weather Service handed Ray the John Campanius Holm Award, one of its highest honors for observers. Then he did something better than accept it. He stepped aside.

His son, who lives 5 miles away, has an 11-year-old daughter. Ray: “I thought, wouldn’t that be fantastic to have her learn how to do it, pass it on and enjoy weather.”

So it’s three generations and one rain gauge. Grandpa maintained his streak for 50 years. His son keeps it now. And his granddaughter is learning the 7 a.m. walk. Some families hand down a watch. The Frenches hand down the weather.

Ray says he could still do it himself. “It’s fun, I enjoy doing it.” Fifty years in, and he’s the only person I know who actually likes talking about the weather.

This story first ran on the local news in Watertown, N.Y., on WWNY 7 News and ABC50. I’m making sure the other 49 states hear about Ray.

Want in? The Weather Service is always looking for observers, especially in rural spots. Start at weather.gov/coop, then contact your nearest forecast office. Fair warning: It’s a 7 a.m. commitment, rain or shine. Mostly rain.

📩 Send this to someone who checks the weather app 12 times a day. Now they know who to thank.

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Forget guessing the answer. The real trick to Wordle is eliminating wrong answers fast. It works 99% of the time. We have the exact strategy to get the job done.

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▶️ Math nerds crack Wordle →

💸 Oops money, real trap: Money you didn’t expect lands in your Venmo, Zelle or Cash App. Then a text: “So sorry, sent that to the wrong person. Can you send it back?” Don’t. The original payment is often stolen money. It gets reversed later, and the cash you “returned” is gone for good. Don’t spend it, move it or share codes. Contact the app or your bank through official support. I wanted to be a banker, but I lost interest.

Chatbot leaves crumbs: ChatGPT can leave a tracking ID in Chrome that follows your browser for a year, including the parts of the internet where you research health problems, debt and shopping. Cue advertisers foaming at the mouth. OpenAI says ad folks never see chats. I still don’t want my chatbot leaving labels near my medical searches. It’s only the ChatGPT website on Chrome (Safari blocks it), not the app. Why did the cookie go to the doctor? It felt crumby. 

🎓 Prompt and circumstance: Professors weary of guessing which essays are AI are close to ditching those assignments entirely (paywall link). Teachers have turned into digital customs agents. Detectors miss polished cheating, and innocent students risk being flagged. Dropping essays from the curriculum saves teachers from detective duty but also removes one of education’s best thinking exercises. Maybe we go back to the good old #2 pencil.

Grandparental controls: Your child’s fake Santa portrait may outlive the Christmas ham. Parents tell Business Insider that grandparents, friends and in-laws are feeding children’s photos into AI tools for cards, coloring sheets and fixed family portraits. The younger parents see a consent problem, especially when nobody can explain whether those faces train future systems. Grandma sees an adorable keepsake. Mom sees a biometric data risk. We used to argue over who blinked. Now, the family photo comes with terms nobody read.

🫘 Computer picks kidney: Get this. In a lab test, a chatbot decided who would get a kidney, with the confidence of someone picking the lunch special. At Penn State, researchers compared leading AI models with human answers to the same two-patient dilemma. The people balanced age, health, dependents and habits, then sometimes admitted there was no clean answer. AI tended to latch onto one detail and commit. Cool thought experiment until it’s your loved one on the list. Let’s not roll this thing out. 

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your clipboard history might still have those links, messages or paragraphs you copied earlier. On Mac, press Cmd + Space to open Spotlight, then click the clipboard icon or press Cmd + 4. On Windows, hit Win + V to see copied text and pictures. I’ve rescued more drafts this way than I care to admit.

Forget Life360. It got caught selling families' location data to brokers. Nope. I use HeyPolo, the privacy-first family locator from the makers of Incogni. You get real-time location, arrival alerts when the kids get to school, crash detection and one-tap SOS. One plan covers the whole family, and your whereabouts stay private. Here's the deal: just $2.49 a month, plus 6 extra months for the entire family. No per person charges. That's cheaper than a latte. Grab it now at HeyPolo.com/kim.*

🗣️ Bring back the old Siri: Getting “Sorry, something went wrong” or waiting ages for an answer? Other folks are reporting trouble, too. While it finds its feet, go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Siri and change Siri AI (Beta) to Siri Classic. The old version is less clever but quicker. I’ll take that over another apology.

🗂️ Free up your Android: Another “storage full” warning? Go to Settings > Storage to find the biggest space hogs. Photos and videos are likely culprits, but the bonus Suggestions menu underneath can flag duplicates, unused apps and files over 25MB. Open each category and delete what you don’t want. That PDF reader you used once? It’s had its moment.

A headshot that still looks like you: Upload a photo to ChatGPT Images and try: “Keep my exact face. Relight it as an 85mm f/1.4 portrait with soft Rembrandt lighting. Use a neutral warm skin tone and fix the background exposure. Don’t reshape, slim or smooth my features.” Check eyes, ears and teeth afterward. We’re going for professional, not your long-lost Temu twin. More tips like this on my official website. 😉

📺 Give your Roku a little makeover: You’ve stared at that purple screen long enough. 😅 From Home, go to Settings > Theme and choose a look you like. Download it, and your wallpaper, screensaver and navigation sounds all get a refresh together. A jungle in the living room, without a single plant to keep alive. My kind of decorating.

Be on the show! Got a wild tech story you’re telling all your friends about? We want to know, too! Send it my way here. 

Watch out, self-driving cars, there’s a new kid on the block. 

Joby Aviation’s Cessna Caravan cruised 3,199 miles across the country over eight days with nobody flying it. Literally “autopilot.” 

The autonomous plane left Concord, Calif., navigated thunderstorms and crowded airspace, made two scheduled stops in Fort Worth and South Carolina, then finally arrived in North Carolina entirely under computer control. 

Taxi, takeoff and landing included. Think Waymo, except instead of blocking an intersection, it’s cruising several thousand feet above your house. 

Check out the video here.

🎓 What you learned today: One retired teacher helped power America’s weather records for 50 years, surprise Venmo money can be a trap, ChatGPT may leave browser crumbs, AI is making essay grading a mess and Joby flew a plane cross-country with no pilot. Not bad for one email. Scammers can grab your address, pull up your house on Street View and send a blackmail email that feels way too personal. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what’s really going on and the steps to shut it down.

☀️ The answer: B) The app did its math in Celsius, and the rounding hopped right over 69 degrees. Here’s the surprisingly un-scandalous explanation: Apple’s Weather app calculated temperatures in whole Celsius numbers first, then converted them to Fahrenheit for display. 

That meant 20°C showed up as 68°F, while 21°C became 69.8°F and rounded to 70°F. So 69 never had a clean landing spot. Poof, gone. Same deal for 65 and 71, but let’s be honest, nobody was launching investigations over those. 

My husband keeps insisting we try 69, but I think we should keep the thermostat at 72 degrees this winter. 

✈️ Airport Wi-Fi is a hacker’s favorite hunting ground: Anyone on that network can see what you’re doing. Two taps on NordVPN, and everything is encrypted. I use it every time I travel. Covers 10 devices on one account. Get 76% off plus 4 extra months.* 

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Merach, Joby Aviation

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