![]() ![]() A small OpenWrt system (400-600MHz) with nice keyboard and screen would do it! But that still lets the keyboard and screen questions unanswered. I had a “really don’t think twice about it” cheap mobile plan for a while with only ISDN speed (cap’ed 2.5G) but 8kbytes/s is a lot for a text UI with MOSH. Ok… alternative dream: Keep all oooomh and use only a mobile teminal… can we (“the dimension Hackaday”) do that? My dream PDA probably only exists in heaven. And a battery charge should give at least 18 hours of runtime! Really running! That probably kills the Gemini PDA from my wish list? A netbook is too big, a screen-only device is not my way. The last ones I really liked were Psion5 and HP Jornada 7xx. Well… a Pi0 already should be enough, but I still haven’t found the keyboard and screen combination I’d like to have in a pocket size form factor. If I could get Org/Babel features without Emacs, I’d definitely try it. Addicted! I confess! Org’s PIM stuff is not my thing and I’m not married with Emacs. I’m doing all from literate programming to reproducible research (like polyglot Jupyter notebooks) in Org/Babel. I still wish for a scientific calculator like the TI-36X pro that also lets me write custom functions for it, preferably without having to battle unfamiliar, confusing syntax, so I can do basic EE math (like filter calculations or resistor parallel/capacitor series) quickly without having to lug my heavy 92 around. Regardless, nothing beats being asked “Is that a computer?” every time someone new sees me using it. I’m sure a similar HP calculator could work just as well or better for me, but the 92+ is what was given to me when my high school calculus teacher was cleaning out her closet and it’s been with me ever since. The full qwerty keyboard places it above the 89 and Nspire CAS because it lets me easily type in function names without using menus, while the AA batteries place it above its direct successor, the Voyage 200, in battery life.įor simpler math on the bench or at home, I use the TI-36X Pro, which I bought for a single class in undergrad that required it.įor harder stuff, I go straight to Matlab when its available. While it is a bit overwrought for most calculations, I love it for its native (no context switching required) symbolic calculations and dimensional analysis (many times saved my calculations from unit conversion errors), which place it above Matlab and most TI calculators I’ve used for small daily calculations. ![]() My daily driver in power electronics grad school is the king of TI calculators, the TI-92+. I wrote a much longer comment but it got lost, so here is a shorter version. Where am I going to get a nice-feeling numeric keypad? That leaves one option, and it’s both the Hackaday and the Jedi way. The days of the standalone calculator are nearly gone, though, so what am I going to do? I’m certainly not going to shell out megabucks for an overly-fancy calculator, nor am I going to be lured by nostalgia into picking up an antique at the ridiculous prices they fetch online. Purpose-built tools tend to work much better for their purpose than devices that try to do everything. And, when I’m actually setting out to take good photos, a real camera instead of my cell phone’s. The simple bench power supply over the programmable. The standalone audio recorder over my computer’s software. The fixed wrench over the adjustable wrench. I like stand-alone devices that do their one thing right, and I almost always pick them over their more complex, if also more capable, counterparts when I only need that function. Or maybe it’s an elegant tool from a more civilized age: the user experience is better because the tool is just simpler. ![]() Maybe it’s irrational calculator nostalgia. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t require a context-switch on the computer. Heck, I can even type calculations directly into the Unix world’s default editor.īut there’s something nice about the single-purpose device. Unit conversions? Units, or the Interwebs. And in terms of programming languages, the resources are far superior on my laptop. But why? Sure, I can run calculations on the very computer that I’m using to type right now. I want a proper desktop calculator from time to time. Why would I want something less powerful, when all that the calculator brings to the table is a bit of software? And that app can even be purchased for $20! ![]() Wait a minute! “Almost”? I have a smartphone in my pocket right now. And the calculator that he reviews is certainly powerful: with a screen, processor, and memory almost rivalling a mid-scale smartphone. Back in the day, the fanciest of scientific calculators had not just sin, cos, and tan, but were also programmable so that you could code in frequently used formulae. This week, Al Williams wrote up an article on what might be the last scientific calculator. ![]()
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