Always a complication.

August having been declared a Month of Work - or, at any rate, I supposedly have 20 hours/week cleared for locking myself in my office and trying to get stuff done on a much-delayed ToasterCo project - I set about digging out project files, and resuming evaluation of a question from last week.

Hm.  Got some figgerin' to do.  Dig out the calculator.  Being at my desk, I might as well use the actual physical pocket calculator instead of the app on my phone.

Calculator display has been losing contrast lately.  Battery going dead?  What type of battery does it take, anyway?  And, have I ever changed the battery since I bought the thing?  When was that, anyway - late 1990s, perhaps?  I guess I can't fault it eating one battery per couple of decades or so.

The battery compartment contains three LR44 cells, which are somewhat leaky.  Clean out the compartment with the corner of a moist paper towel, then go fetch three fresh LR44s from the garage.  Install them.  Turn the calculator on.

Turn the calculator on.

Er... hello?  Calculator?  Turn on?

Search the Interwebz for HP 32Sii, in hopes of finding the manual (though surely I have the printed manual... somewhere).  Find it, but also: Amazon sells these calculators, for the low, low price of CHA-CHING!  CHA-CHING!!  CHA-CHING!!!  Er... maybe buying a replacement calculator isn't the best strategy.  Newer models from HP are pretty cheap, but have the doggone = button, which to me makes them unusable.  Calculators with a decent ENTER button turn out to be mighty scarce on the ground, and it looks like the only current offering from HP is a financial model, not scientific, so lacking essential features.

Back to the search results.  Manual!  Download.  Find the section on changing the battery.  Ah... sometimes it can get confoozed and need a reset.  The reset procedure, like the goggles, it does nothing.  Try the three-finger-salute erase-memory procedure.  Doesn't appear to do anything at first, but eventually the MEMORY CLEAR message appears, and I'm back in business.

And now, time to resume work.  Happy lunacy!  Lughnasadh.  One of those things.  Or Lammas, perchance.

Comments

[Rob]

When you said "work" I was thinking with a shovel :-)

I'd have used the 10 key on my computer keyboard.

[Eric Wilner]

I have a kinda-usable calculator app on my phone, and I think there's some sort of desktop calculator app on the workstation, but a real pocket calculator is sometimes a more suitable tool for the job.

... The particular calculation also involved running an intermediate number through a fractional-approximation program I borrowed a few years ago. One of these days, I should probably write a better utility for finding the nearest fractional approximation of a real number with given ranges of numerator and denominator, maybe integrated with other related calculations and constraints. (This is mainly for programming PLL frequency multipliers.)