månadsarkiv: februari 2009

English

A walk in the winter city

2 kommentarer

Today I had the opportunity to take a walk around the city since I went early from work to my medical check (mandatory to do regularly for people working on or near the railway) and since I had to skip lunch to be fasting for the medical checkup I finished a little earlier so I spent the day in the city with the camera looking for three things and I found them all.

  • Indian chai tea
  • A nice haircut that’s not too expensive
  • A nice salad lunch served after 14.30.

I was actually able to find all three and had a wonderful day walking around the city from Kungsholmen down to Södermalm and then taking the commuter train back home from Södra Station.

Snowy Bike

This Way

Underneath

Pustegränd & Brännkyrkagatan

English

HP 35s

I have always liked the HP calculators and have had a couple of different models including the very bulky HP 48 GX machine. Now when I started my new job I wanted something that would fit a shirt pocket but still be powerful enough and allow me to do more or less advanced equation solving without using Matlab or Excel or something similar.

And I found the answer to my prayers, the HP 35s which is a really cool ”old skool” calculator but with many useful functions such as equation solving and substitution. And above all it speaks RPN which is something I demand of my calculator which rules out Texas and Casio and many other brands.

RPN is the ability to quickly calculate complex series of operations without having to use parenthesis and other awkward functions. Using RPN to calculate 5 +8 * 9 means the folloing keypresses:

8 <enter> 9 <multiply> 5 <plus>

It may seem backwards and complex but it means you always get things in the right order and priority and that without using parenthesis. To calculate something more complex 10 * log (k * T * 1000):

1000 <enter> T <mul> k <mul> <log> 10 <mul>

HP 35s

English

Change alphabet in IRC

Some IRC clients such as ircII, Epic, BitchX and so on may not come with a full european setting to be able to display characters such as å, ä, ö, ü, µ, € and so on properly. This is the way to fix this.

First set your language environment to avoid unicode:

export LANG en_US

Then start your IRC application and enter the following commands:

/set eight_bit_char on
/set translation Latin_1

Now you should be able to use it properly.