Earthquakes are something that we all fear of, as they come suddenly without warning and cause destruction of property and loss of human life. But not all earthquakes are that devastating. Only the earthquakes above the Richter scale level of 5 are considered dangerous. If you live in an earthquake prone area (like California or Japan), then you should be in the know of the seismic activity in your surroundings. This can be useful as more often the smaller earthquakes are a forewarning of a larger one in the immediate future. Fortunately, in the internet age we can easily stay updated with the seismic activity. If you are a Windows users, then you can make use of the Earthquakes Meter gadget to have the latest earthquakes information appear right on your desktop as soon as they occur.
You can download the Earthquakes Meter gadget from the AddGadgets website. The download is available as a setup installer as well as a ZIP archive. After the installation of the gadget, it would appear on your desktop and quickly fetch the latest earthquakes information from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) website. When a new quake is reported, it would make a loud noise to notify you. Then you can click on the new earthquake in the list to view more information about it as well as view its epicenter location using the Google Map.
If you do not like the small size or the loud noise, then you can easily customize it. You can right-click on the gadget and select Options to view its settings. In this settings window, you can select refresh rate, earthquake magnitude range to be displayed, enable disable the sound, pick a sound type and whether you want to repeat the sound. You can also select the size and the color of the data displayed in the gadget window.
Earthquakes Meter is a very useful gadget especially if you are living in an region of high seismic activity or you are a student or scientist working in the field of seismology. It uses minimal system resources and the fetches data at a very good refresh rate. The earthquakes data is very reliable as it comes from the USGS website.
You can download Earthquakes Meter from http://addgadgets.com/earthquakes_meter/.