Tag Archives: units

units: Arithmetic acrobatics

Thanks to speedtest-cli, I know full well that my landlord has capped each apartment’s access to the Internet at a paltry 60kbps. Thanks to bing, I’m fully aware that the line speed beyond our apartment router is well above that.

What gave me pause today was: At a meager 60kbps, how much data total could be pulled down on a line running 24/7?

After all, some network providers put data caps on their service, even if there isn’t a practical speed cap. (Not so long ago in Japan, I had neither a data nor a real speed cap on a residential fiber-optic line that came in from the street. I miss those days. … 😥 ) Point being, what does 60kbps work out to, in the course of, say, a month?

Enter units.

2014-06-11-6m47421-units

Well, that’s not terrible. I know some people who pay close to US$100 a month for 20Gb on a wireless hotspot. :-/ I suppose I should be grateful, even if it is a trickle. Like slurping frantically at a dribbling faucet in the middle of a desert. … 👿

units is a marvelous tool though. Just about any variation on any kind of data arrangement is neatly calculated, and a terse answer supplied.

The interface is likewise terse, but not so sparse as to be cryptic. And to be honest, the prompts “You have?” and “You want?” are intuitive enough to prevent confusion. I find them nicer than, say, “Input primary data quantity and counter.” That’s just weird.

My only suggestion to the units developers would be a mighty trivial one: Needs more color. 😉

I’ll leave you to play with units, and see what sort of nifty arithmetic acrobatics you can come up with. In the mean time I’ll be aiming aircrack-ng at my neighbor’s wireless router, and massaging it for a password. Hey, two lines at 60kbps is 120kbps total, and 40Gb a month … ! 🙄

qalc: qalculate!’s text only version

I can remember first seeing a GTK+ version of qalculate! around 2009 or so. As a replacement for a generic desktop calculator, it does a fine job.

It never really caught on with me, mostly because I don’t have need of a desktop calculator very often. galculator is okay for my needs, in its GTK2 version, thank you.

There is a command-line version of qalculate! that Debian calls “qalc,” which I have seen called “the greatest calculator ever.” I won’t say whether I agree with that or not.

2014-03-23-lv-r1fz6-qalc

qalc follows an interactive style, in the same way as bc or some other calculators, but can also calculate CLI-wise. It has onboard help, which is always good. It can access the Internet to get up-to-date conversion data.

I also like that by default, qalc shows you your entire calculation spaced out and arranged, rather than just spitting out an answer. Of course, there is a “terse” flag if you prefer the opposite.

There’s not much to dislike in qalc, but as I am finicky today, I have to be honest.

It seems that qalc (and by extension qalculator!) is trying rather hard to become all things mathematical. While there is convenience in that, I have this nagging prejudice in the back of my mind against programs that try to do everything at once.

I don’t care for audio players that double as music managers, I don’t like file managers that try to be hex editors, and I don’t want a text editor that tries to be an operating system.

All that said, I will temper my dislike by saying that qalc, to the best of my knowledge, stays within the mathematical and doesn’t try to work as a chat client too. I respect that. 😉