About this blog...

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Nothing pretentious here. Just a few tips and tricks as and when I come up with them.

The material here is mostly going to relate to Linux on the one hand, and to SymbianOS S60 smartphones on the other. I'll obviously tag the entries accordingly in order to facilitate searches.

This will be a permanent work in progress. If you want to be informed of new posts then feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed or ask me to add you to the e-mail notification list.

As for my background and the reasons why I think I'm qualified to do this, I've been using computers for 30 years now, since even before Microsoft existed (yes, there were computers before Microsoft!). I've used many operating systems including multiple variants of Linux, several FreeBSD versions and Solaris. I've used and programmed for most versions of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, 9x and NT, and I'm currently self-employed as a Unix systems administrator and web-based application developer, working primarily in PHP and MySQL on Unix-based systems. I am also a co-founder of a local Linux User Group in central France, where I used to live.

Aside from the world of Unix and Linux, I'm a fan of Nokia mobile phones and have used quite a few in my time. The ones I can remember are a heavily branded handset from the French operator SFR of which I don't even know the model number, a 3510i, 2650, 6280, N73, N95, N96, N97 and I own a 5800 XpressMusic right now. I also happen to be the all-time number 2 participant in the official Nokia Support Discussion forums.

I hope you find the information here useful!

Thanks in advance for reading :)

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HP Prime benchmark

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Err, right. The HP Prime is hardly a vintage calculator given that it was first released in 2015. Better still, HP released the so-called Prime "G2" in August 2018 with faster hardware, much more RAM to work with and double the storage space in flash memory. When that happened, there was no excuse, I had to get one. At the time of writing, the Prime G2 would appear to be available only in Europe. The Americas have been left by the wayside this time around. I bought mine from derekenwinkel.nl with whom I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer of theirs. As it became known that there was an updated version of the Prime, people in the Museum of HP Calculators Forum were interested in hard data showing the improvements in performance, so I went and wrote a benchmark. The benchmark in itself is probably of limited value in absolute terms but gives a good idea of the differences between different machines. A benchmark run can comprise up to th
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Egg timer in a 41CX

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Now this is something unusual. Who would want to use a 30-year-old machine worth something as a mere egg timer, or use it at all in a kitchen, where it could easily get damaged? It just so happens that one of the machines in my collection is a SwissMicros DM41. It's built really solid and it's basically the same thing as a Hewlett Packard HP-41CX in a case the size of a credit card, so that means that it incorporates, among other things, a Time Module, which gives it a stopwatch, countdown timer and alarm capabilities. The DM41 is a great little piece of technology. However, the operative word here is "little". While its LCD is the same size as it's Voyager-sized big brother, the DM41L, its keys are just a bit too small for the device to be fully practical, but for some things its form factor makes it just right. Okay, it's more than an egg timer. This said, my DM41 gets used most of the time in the kitchen as a timer while I'm cooking. I keep i
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Is it really a Hewlett Packard?

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There are two scientific calculators recently produced that, I'm afraid, fall into the cheap, plasticky category. They are the HP300s+ and the HP10s+. The question is, are they really Hewlett Packard machines at all? They are not. They are in fact Casios that have been rebadged to look like HP machines. Want proof? Watch this video with the HP10s+ showing its real colours. If you press the MODE key four times you get to the menu where you can alter display settings. There is an undocumented function in this menu where, if you press '2', you get to the contrast setting. This is not mentioned in the manual and, indeed, it has no effect, but look at what you get on screen when you press '2'. One good thing about this little machine is that I didn't even have to put a battery in it. The solar panel above the screen provides enough power to run the calculator as long as there's enough light around.
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