Best Scientific Calculator?

Posted on May 23, 2008 in Tech | 3 Comments

Some of my friends may already know this, but I used to be a draftsperson / mechanical engineer trainee. When I was going to school, we used the old Texas Instruments engineering calculator although most of our time was spent figuring out how to program them for games.

I started searching around for a good calculator, and then started wondering what’s the best engineering calculator now days? (That’s such a Seanism: “What’s the best?!) These things look like microcomputers which are no doubt way more powerful that my old laptop used to be back in that day - even with all 133mhz of power that it used to have.

Anyway, I’m not looking to go back to engineering and even if I was, I’d be no good at it since my math skills are pretty much toast after not using them for years but I do want to pick up a new calculator and was thinking about something that would be more than just a standard one, and those engineering calculators have a nice big screen on them so you can see the history of what you’re doing.

Wonder if someone has any suggestions? Paul, Greg? You guys are kind of savvy, what do you think?

Easy Whois Lookup

Posted on April 17, 2008 in Tech | Leave a Comment

I use http://whois.domaintools.com a TON to look at who owns a specific domain / site. The format to use this is simple - just go to http://whois.domaintools.com/domaintolookup.com and it will do the lookup.

However, I get frustrated in typing it out, so I wrote a really simple bookmarklet that will get the domain of the site you’re looking at, and pass the request to domaintools.com so I won’t have to type it every time.

Here’s the bookmarklet - you should be able to just drag this link to your browser toolbar.

Whois

Disclaimer: I have only done this in Firefox 2, so it may not work in others but theoretically should.

How to Search the Spam Folder in Gmail

Posted on January 9, 2008 in Tech | Leave a Comment

For quite some time I couldn’t figure out how to search through the spam folder in gmail (and google apps mail) unless your search found no results in the other folders. Well, it’s actually really simple now that I figured it out. Sure, I could have read the instructions but that takes the fun out of it, and it wasn’t all that important anyway.

Here’s how to search through your spam folder in gmail - it also works in google apps mail.

In the search box, type your search like you normally would, just ad “in:spam” to the end of it. So if you were to search for “password” and wanted to search just the spam folder for a password recovery email or something similar, type “password in:spam” without the quotes, of course. You can also reverse it, if you wanted to because that’s the logic that works with your brain, so try “in:spam password” and it does the same thing.

Testing Some New WP Plugins

Posted on December 14, 2007 in Tech | Leave a Comment

There’s a couple cool sounding WP plugins that I’m testing out:

• AutoSocial: helps you post on social networking sites
• Yahoo Shortcuts: more easily integrate yahoo’s stuff like maps, flickr, etc
• Wordbook: integrates a self-hosted WP install with facebook

If there’s something cool about one of these, I’ll update ya’ll here

Autosocial and Yahoo Shortcuts that I’m just giving it a quick test to see what it does. It’s supposed to make posting to social networking sites a lot easier from WP.

Gmail IMAP Server Troubles

Posted on November 5, 2007 in Tech | 2 Comments

Gmail now offers IMAP access in addition to POP so you can use one account to sync your mail with multiple computers using Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever software flavor you want.

I set it up on my Tmobile dash to play around with it before I screw up everything on my computer and have to go back and fix it. I’ve been using it for about 2 days now, and it has only successfully worked once. I tried it through a different computer and set up IMAP on it, and it still doesn’t work.

I know the logins are fine, but it looks like it is just a timeout issue more than anything. Maybe it’s just because it’s new and there are not enough resources dedicated to it by Google yet.

Is anyone else having this issue too?

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