The Molecular Universe

I use Nanoblogger (nb) to make this blog. Nanoblogger is very simple and it does not rely on a separate database. This minimizes the number of moving parts to know about and maintain.

Additionally, when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, it is normally straightforward to isolate the source of the problem and resolve it with Nanoblogger.

Recently I noticed, for example, that the calendar which shows up in various places in the blog had a mistake in it, whereby there were underscore characters around the current date.

Looking into what might have happened, I found that the 'cal' command on OS X has started to embolden (by default) today's date. What was happening was that the 'cal' output was then not being parsed correctly by Nanoblogger into the resulting page. The solution was simply to employ the '-h' option with 'cal' - which stops the highlighting function.

The 'cal' command is referenced in Nanoblogger's calendar.sh file. Change this string to 'cal -h' and the problem is solved...'

The ascii below shows the before and after effect for 'cal'. The error looks a little different in Nanoblogger - but this is the source of the problem - and its solution.

#cal
    August 2019       
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  
             1  2  3  
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10  
11 12 13 14 15 16 17  
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  
25 26 27 28 29 30 31  
                      
#cal -h
    August 2019       
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  
             1  2  3  
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10  
11 12 13 14 15 16 17  
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

This is the manual for a pocket Casio PB 100 computer from the 1980s.

Casio PB 100 Instruction Manual.

This machine still works today (2019) and it is generally a wonderful thing! This was a time when if you had a computer you were expected to do at least some programming - and most people who owned computers could therefore do some basic programming - that is just the way it was...

The companies and people who created the computer revolution minimized the amount of programming that users had to do themselves.

Here is a scan of the Psion Series 3 Brochure from 1993 or thereabouts. A really good piece of advertising material. I hope that the product manager who created this did well for him or herself.

Psion Series 3 Brochure.

This is the manual from a programmable calculator from the 1980s. This was a fantastic device. It did not have many steps of programmable storage (only 38) but it could store programs indefinitely - and it was not particularly expensive. It was a huge technical achievement at the time - and still runs perfectly today.

Casio fx-180p Manual

I put one of these up for someone recently. It is an interesting device - it uses a lithium ion battery - and provides WiFi-based video. So far it seems to be working...

Here is the manual. The manual is also available from the manufacturer online - this is the one that arrived in the box.