This is why I currently have 14 calculators open...

I guess I can do one of these a day or so. I've collected some novelties over the years.

First up is a Curta mechanical calculator. Before electronic calculators became a thing, these were the best portable calculators in the world. Notably, they were the calculator of choice in rally car sports.

They work by a series of helical gears that act as registers. A series of internal gears and value assignment switches apply an adjustable number of incrementations to those gears, multiplying gears and the tracking gears, once per "grind." The result is output as a number on top of the device. The "clear register" function is lifting the top ring, which releases the reverse lockout on the gears and a clockwise turn on the ring then resets them to their zero state.

They were designed by Curtz Herzstark, partly before WWII and partly while he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. He had filed a patent for it in 1938, shortly before his family's manufacturey became a weapons factory. During his imprisonment, in addition to nearly starving to death, he completed his plans for manufacturing of his calculator.

It had fun names like the, "pepper grinder," and "math grenade."

Halfway through a timed midterm (no computers or calculators):

Convert this 5-digit decimal number to binary
Convert this 10-digit decimal number to binary
Convert this 20-digit decimal number to binary
Convert this even longer decimal number to binary

Dev Badass Rant

There are two occasions really:

1) For our C++ project in the third semester, we had to build any kind of C++ application. Guys in team of 4-5 built record keeping systems and calculators and one even made a Tic-Tack-Toe app. My friend and I, just the two of us, made a simple program that plays Rock Paper Scissors with you. With the power od OpenCV, it used the camera to track your hand movement, predicts your next move using contours, and displays the winning move as the computer's move.
For example, if you play Rock, the computer would predict that you were gonna play rock and display paper as it's move. It wasn't perfect, but it was ours, right from scratch. When it worked at the presentation, I was swell with pride. 😂

2) I was interested in game dev so I started Unity. The first tutorial in Unity you find is the web series by Unity about rolling a ball. You simply make a platform and control the ball with your keyboard and the camera follows your ball. You also make pick ups and get points based on that. So I started there, finished the tutorial, added a few walls, made edible and non edible pick ups, dimmed the entire scene, adjusted the camera angles, transferred controls to mobile gyroscope and added a few other things and voila! MazeBall was born. It has only one level and I thought it was pretty shit.
I decided to show it to a friend and when I showed it to my mate (the one who I worked with in the C++ project), my other classmates saw it and were impressed. Like so impressed a couple of them transferred it to their phone and took home with them. 😂 Was inspired to improve.

Dropped out after 4 months at Uni when I realised that I will learn absolutely nothing useful for my future career. We were either learning HTML/CSS or coding calculators in C# . At this point I was already writing my own PHP CMSs with huge databases for real life clients. I guess I can only blame my course level and maybe I could go someplace else but it probably wouldn't be so much different.

A month after I dropped out I got my first job as a junior Drupal developer. That was 7 years ago, now I'm a FrontEnd dev in a really great environment and throughout the years no one looked at my grades or even asked for them.

Experience and passion as as valuable if not more as your education.

just had a 3AM fucking brain blast

On the TI-8x line of calculators, you can do link port shit to essentially blit music to the barrel link port. However, the only library for this sounds like dick and is a superslow piece of shit.

I've just had a thought:
The library this dude wrote spaces the note out, waits for it to end and then resets the port.

If you're blitting music to the port rapid-fire, you don't need to reset it except either after the music or during rests. I can push a note with a waveform of 0hz to the link port to reset it, so...

The dude posted his source, so I could theoretically have it set the link port to whatever note and immediately return.

This would make the time between notes upwards of like 8x faster, bringing my sample rate from like 25 to 200 or so. That's almost fast enough for barely-recognizable voice synth! A little fiddling would be needed to get me the rest of the way there, but there's probably optimizations I can do to push the envelope some.

A few of you have used the big-screened TI calculators. Like 1 of those people knows I write demos for the monochrome 6MHz Z80 ones.

I have news for that person.

The people saying that ChatGPT will replace programmers are the same ones that thought as a kid that math was useless because you have calculators

Since we're limiting this to things on my desk I can't do any more deep cuts out of my calculator collection, but this one is still somewhat interesting.

The HP 32S was my friend throughout university, it replaced the 15c I used before which does not live on my desk. The notable thing about the 32s is the fact it's an RPN calculator. RPN calculators are the best way to have friends never ask to borrow your calculator. The exchange will start by them asking to use it, you saying sure, and them handing it back a few minutes later without saying a word.

There's two kinds of people in this world. People who go "wtf" in an interview when asked to create a calculator program using a stack, and people who were oddballs and for whatever reason used reverse polish notation devices.

For those not familiar, rather than entering values into the calculator in "10+10" fashion, you instead provide it a compositional set of values until an operation is provided (10,10,+) at which point it executes. The why is, this type of operation allows the calculator to more naturally process operations, and eliminates the need for parenthesis which makes the operations less error prone in practice and easier to track.

The 32s had a 4 year run before being replaced by the 32SII. In the same way using a Curta will give you a significant understanding of how radix computations and floating points work. Using an HP 32s (or any of its predecessors) will do the same for algebraic functions, because you had to program them yourself using a basic label address system that also had subroutine support.

Kids who grew up with graphing calculators don't know how good you had it 😋

for your next edition of "TI's constantly been smoking crack since the 80s and has no intention of ever stopping":

the TI-8x calculators have a hardware buffer and an OS-provided buffer for screen data, effectively being an "immediate" buffer in hardware, to be displayed next VBlank, and a "slower" buffer, being what's copied to the "immediate" buffer when the OS decides it's time to update the screen. All well and good, maybe a little weirdly done but all in all makes sense. (You can even define a third buffer in RAM if you need to triple-buffer your shit.)

The problem arises when you use TI-BASIC and try to draw to the screen:
If you do something like, say, draw a circle, you'll notice that it's visibly drawn to the screen one pixel at a time. However, looking through what bits of the SDK I can find, the OS' "draw circle" assembly routine *doesn't update the immediate buffer!*

This means that, in TI-BASIC, the "draw circle" routine doesn't use the ACTUAL circle-drawing routine the OS provides, but instead individually calculates and plots a pixel, then updates the hardware buffer (an ENTIRE 768 bytes are copied EVERY TIME) and waits for VBlank to pass before repeating for the next one. In other words, it's deliberately slow as fuck.

Why? All the drawing commands, outside of like 2 or 3, do this. Why would you deliberately slow down the process of drawing to the screen on a system that you KNEW would be popular for people to code on???

developing add-ons for Casio calculators is definitely the best experience. No syntax or error highlighting. Average failed builds between successful builds: 12 🤔
I won't mention the default font for the code editors in there is Arial...

I've been doing some Codility exercises, and I can't see how it reflects on my skills as an engineer. It's just math riddles that can be solved with those fancy calculators.
It completely misses the aspects of managing resources, good design, understanding other people's code, hardware optimizations...

First real dev project was a calculator for a browser game, that calculates the optimal number/combination of buildings to build. I got bored constantly doing it manually, so I made this program as a fun and useful challenge. It involved basic math, and I did it in VB.

Second one was a stats tracking page for my team in another browser game, that let us easily share and keep track of stuff. It allowed us to minmax our actions and reduced the downtime between actions of different players. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL.

Third one was a userscript for the same game that added QoL features and made the game easier to play. JS

Fourth was for the first game, also a QoL feature userscript, that added colors/names, number limit validation to inputs, and optimization calculators built in the interface. It also fixed and improved various UI things. Also had a cheating feature where I could see the line of sight of enemies in the fog of war (lol the dev kept the data on the page even if you couldnt see the enemies on the map), but I didnt use it, it was just fun to code it. JS

From there on, I just continued learning and doing more and more complex shit, and learning new languages.

I was just watching a web series on X: the generation that changed the world, and damn!! Those X-ers (people born b/w 1961-1981 ) have really made changes that disrupted the whole world! Comparing to them, i feel like we millennials haven't made anything *that* disruptive.

- calculators happened which evolved to computers and then began a crave for knowledge and technology
- Netscape gave a new use to computers
- Tim Berners lee ,napster disrupted the way of sharing data.
- Google changed the way of searching.
- Amazon gave the true business value to internet.
- The revolution of music , hip hop and television.
- ...
(And these are just the first 2 episodes!)

Btw what do we millennials bachieved? Tiktok, heartbreaks, and porn fetishes :/

This is a funny one:
So I’m in school and it’s time for midterms. Our assignment is spending 3 months building an application of our choice, what did I choose?

A social media application in Kotlin
(I’ve never used kotlin i just thought it’d be fun to learn)

I get to my first class/build review and everyone else smarter than me chose calculators, timers, dice rollers, and dnd glossaries why am I like this

I have always been interested in computers. when I was in second grade, I decided I was no good at electronic circuits, and decided I wanted to program instead. My dad told be to check out free basic, and I immediately downloaded FBIDE, and followed tutorial videos on YouTube. once I finished the videos, I started to write mad libs programs. I made various types of calculators, etc. and loved it, so later I learned a bit of VB. I messed with that a bit, but didn't like it too much, and started web developing. The moment I saw some JS code, it was like an instinctive second language to me. I learned js and started making some ugly, but cool interactive web pages. When computercraft came out for minecraft, I learned lua and got a deeper understanding of programming. Now, I am using node to build a personal-use IoT server and currently making a drone flight program using a raspberry pi

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

Senior year of highschool (5 years ago), my friend and I were bored in Calculus class. The calculators we used were the TI-NSpire CX cas (the most advanced Texas Instruments graphing calculator at that time). After figuring out we could get a Game Boy Advance emulatir on the calculator, we decided we should try making out own game for it. That was when I figured out what I wanted to do with my life and havent looked back yet

Hello everyone!I need to see some opinion you guys might have.

I'm a self-taught everything about Computer, I've been trying to learn to develop software and games for a while now, was able to gather some information in a bunch of directions, but never was able be able to ACTUALLY develop anything by myself without the help of a step by step guide. Which stop me from program things and not copy pasta. I know that i seem to like how C works, since it have less features that confuse me (IMO of course)

So my question is: What kind of small projects would you recommend me to do other than calculators to help me figure out how we actually program something?

PS: I know python, C, a little bit of C++ and C#.

When I was little, my father told me about this thing he did when he was younger, he could tell a computer what to do, programming, and he promised me one day he'll teach me how to do it myself, but that day never came. A few years later, at age 10, I went to a "technology" summer camp, where one topic was programming in Processing, and I was really excited to do it, so excited and interested, that the place where I did I'd accepted me in their Coderdojo​ without having to wait the list (kinda cheating).There I learned Processing for three years, and how to use GitHub, until last year I decided to become a "teacher" myself (the topics we dealt with were really basic, and there were only beginners).
Other things I did is showing the people of my class how to program in TI-BASIC with our schools calculators, because, as they say, teaching is the best way to learn.
This course we started informatics at school, but the teacher isn't really an expert, and the few things he knows (apart from php4) I teached him.
I'm now constantly learning new things by Googling them and setting high goals for myself.

Android + servers
Hey guys
So cause I barely have time to code I mounted a server with my old cellphone, so I can advance one of my projects at work (it's a helper with stuff like tables and calculators for work [CNC machine] )
The cell phone is a meizu m2 with android 6 (don't buy one, has lots of stupid bugs)
My problem: android terminates the server and a app I use to copy files from Dropbox to the server folder (only work arround the home rooter)
F king meizu bugs : resets lots of definitions to default, like I give permition to the server app to always be on and it changes back to default when I turn off the screen.
So when I turn of the screen the server goes down
Solutions to keep the server always awake?
Also better solution to change /upload the files without Dropbox as an intermediary
Btw the app that syncs also turns off every fucking time (so no updates till I get home)

If I think about my whole year competing on Freelancer.com for similar projects for 300$-400$ and then look at those "how much will my app cost?" calculators..

What if we are wrong and the people that put 4 operations calculators for paid in the play store are actually genius?

What are nice apps to learn swift dev? :) I'm tired of all those TO-DO's apps or calculators

I wanna build something that makes me explore the capabilities of the language in deep, not just the tip

I read your comments :3

I'm doing the recommended math tasks. Since I can't trust the prof's solutions (he does errors here and there), I watch YouTube videos, Khan Academy videos, compare the results of the prof with the results of online step calculators such as wolfram alpha and find new rules I've never heard of before.

The prof doesn't really comment every step about why he's doing what. He just provides the solution and I have to reverse engineer from his solution up to the original state of the equation. Repeating the same procedure for the online calculator results as well.

I have to say that "Oh, boy, did I learn so many valuable things..." Stuff that I should have learned when I was at least doing my A levels (Abitur).

It is as if I am opening the gates to a new world. Not even exaggerating. Ok, maybe a bit. Ok, maybe a bit more, but no bit more than that.