Alright so today I wanted to figure out the exact time and weather in Beverly Hills, California, right this second. Sounds simple, right? Yeah, not so much.
Started like I usually do – fired up my laptop, cracked open a cold one (soda, obviously), and hit Google. Typed in “beverly hills ca time right now”. Got a basic time display at the top, like “1:30 PM” or whatever. But is that live? Refreshed? Who knows. Felt sketchy.
Then I tried “beverly hills weather live”. Got forecasts, some local news maybe, but nothing screaming “LIVE UPDATING RIGHT NOW.” Most weather sites show conditions refreshed maybe every hour if you’re lucky. Not good enough for “right now”.
The API Rabbit Hole
Figured I needed something more raw. Remembered some weather APIs give current conditions. Dug around my old code snippets. Found a key for one I used ages ago. Fired up my crappy little Python script I keep for testing.
First try: Used the simple coordinates for Beverly Hills. Hit the API endpoint. Boom. Got JSON back. Scrolled through… found the “temp” and “conditions”. Sweet! But then saw the “last updated” time was like 45 minutes ago. Damn it. Almost there, but not live.
Scratched my head. What APIs update constantly? Kept searching forums. Found people talking about some specialized aviation or hyperlocal ones. Too complicated, needed sign-ups, probably cost money. Nah.
Time Zone Shenanigans
While wrestling with the weather, thought I should nail the time part properly. The basic Google search felt flimsy. Opened my terminal. Remembered Python’s datetime module needs timezone info to be precise.
- Step 1: Told Python to use the ‘pytz’ library for timezones.
- Step 2: Grabbed the US/Pacific timezone.
- Step 3: Forced it to grab the exact datetime for that zone, including any daylight savings nonsense.
Finally, got something like:
2025-08-18 13:30:47.123456 PDT
Much better. That felt concrete, pulled right from my system with the right zone rules applied. Okay, time was solved.
Weather Workaround
Went back to the weather frustration. Couldn’t find a truly free, instant updating API that didn’t suck. Changed tack. Found a major, reputable weather website known for frequent updates. Looked at their page for Beverly Hills specifically. Saw they had a “current conditions” section that seemed to refresh on the page every few minutes without reloading the whole thing. Network tools showed it hitting an endpoint every couple minutes for fresh data. Not perfect “live”, but close enough for most folks – maybe a 2-5 minute delay max.
Decided to cheat a little. Wrote a tiny scraper in my script. Not ideal, but it worked. Pointed it at that specific part of their page. Boom. Finally had a way to grab temp, conditions, and a “last updated” timestamp that was recent. It’s janky, relies on their page structure, but it got the job done for my purpose.
Slapping It Together
So now I had:
- A rock-solid way to get the precise Pacific Time time including the exact second.
- A slightly hacky but functional way to get the weather conditions updated within the last few minutes.
Threw them together in a simple webpage. For the time, pulled straight from the server’s clock adjusted for PDT using that Python method. For the weather, set up a quick cron job to run my little scraper every 3 minutes and save the result to a tiny file. The webpage just reads that file.
Refreshed it a few times. Saw the seconds ticking correctly. Watched the “last updated” timestamp for weather change after a few minutes. Good enough. Job done. It ain’t beautiful and the weather isn’t truly live down to the second, but it gives a constantly updating time and very current weather for Beverly Hills without relying on shaky Google results or broken PHP scripts (seriously, PHP for this? Come on).
Filed it under “weird little things that work”. Maybe I’ll find a better weather source someday. Until then, this kludge works.
