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Calculator blog


Musings and comments about our common interest

 

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Classic charger substitution

Some customers have asked for a solution for the Classic battery. What has been suggested is something similar to the Woodstock battery holder: a 3D piece that can handle 3 normal batteries (still to be decided if we can fit AA or it'll have to be AAA) and that integrates the contacts with the calculator. All in the HP original black and with the usual HP classic fixings. 

Anyone interested? Just to know whether to devote design time to it or not!

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HP45 Easter Egg

I found this curious video while looking for self test documentation on HP calculators:

 

And I thought that the first stopwatch had to wait until HP41 time module!!

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More news about the site

There are some news about this site that I would like to share with you.

New Products

I have found several "old" products that will be published in following days. These include 3 classic machines, 2 woodstock, 1 clamshell, manuals and chargers. Some of them are in really excellent state, and come with boxes and other accesories. I am in the process to test them, clean them and take pictures.

WP34s

There are already three units being sold - taking into account the apparent risk it may involve (in reality there is no significant risk - the machine works wonderfully). This means that I have posted 2 contributions to the project, and an additional one when I get the payment for the new one.

There is a local calculator hobbyist to whom I have lent one to try - sorry, this is something that can only be done locally and if you trust the person. I have met this individual a couple of times and seen that we share a significant number of things  - from the business school we studied to our other hobbies (music and Hifi, anyone?)

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(here comes a rant)

I had a long discussion on calculators with him. When coming back from the meeting, I reflected on what makes me tick with a calculator - and I have to acknowledge that, in my case, it is the machines that I have used in the past. In that respect, the wp34s has everything I might want on a calculator (except perhaps matrix tools), but is a little too difficult to work with. And I tend to come back, time after time, to the dumb old calculators that were easy to use to me - the HP17bII and the HP19bII. The HP17bII is current, the 19b is not - and it is a pity. The 19b has all the trigonometrics and mathematic tools that the 17bII has not. In addition, has the 4 lines on screen (3 lines plus menu line)

An idea for HP - you have mastered the HP17bII in its latest version. Why not add the 19bII features that are missing in the HP17bII? (Now the HP17bII has a problem: the HP30b has true programmability, Black and Scholes already written in firmware, and a lot of mathematical functions missing in the HP17bII. It even comes with a clever menu system. I still feel that the ease of use of the 17bII is superior to any other calculator by HP or by any other brand for that matter - but someone should do something to ensure thet it remains at the top of the heap (or should I say "the top of the stack")

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By the way, I have not posted the black one yet.

Pagerank

Last Friday I re-installed some SEO tools in a new computer, and connected to the website. Until now, and due to the fact that the site is quite new (since beginning of February), we were not classified (i.e. the ranking of the page was zero). Most of my local competitors were 0 or 1 as well - this means that their only chance of getting traffic is through adwords. Well, this Friday I saw that we were 3 !!

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This is still miles away from Educalc.net's 5, or hpcalc.org's 6. (It is worth noting that hpcalc has as well a sales site for the US, whose ranking is 4) These sites offer substantial information apart from sales, and the ranking is well deserved. I myself delve into their pages when I need to find information or software. I aknowledge that thecalculatorstore.com is still very far from them. We miss both the time they have spent over the years (on one side), but as well the expertise that people like Eric Rechlin possesses.

There are 2 ways of getting visits: either you pay a significant amount to a Search Engine Optimisation company, or you take the difficult way of adding more and more pages of relevant content. I have chosen the second way. However, it requires a significant amount of your free time, both looking around for interesting content, imagining what can be of interest to my fellow visitors (that's not too difficult - I just need to put whatever pleases me, and plain hard working to put it down to the screen.

That said, Google offers a wonderful set of free tools to manage your website, but the information it gives is some times inconsistent, jumps up and down for no reason that I can explain, and leaves you downfounded. How are we going down on this and that keyword, and going up on these others, if we have made no changes regarding any of them?

In any case, I am enjoying the hell of it, and learning a lot in the process. 

Other news

Finally, there are still no news about new products that I can release. Please observe the careful wording of the sentence - even in the avoidance of keywords that may give away more information than needed !!

When the time comes, we will send a newsletter to all registered user. You do not need to buy to register, and the current registered users know that we do not spam - in fact we have not sent any newsletter as of late!!

 

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