March 2, 2009
Liquid Hydrocarbon Conversion
Creating a web based volume conversion utility has provided an excellent chance to try out the Google App Engine. And while there are plenty of websites that can provide simple volume conversions (including the Google Calculator), there are few that allow for the units of measurement used with liquid hydrocarbons.
http://volumeconv.appspot.com
The utility provides the following conversions:
barrels to mcf (thousand cubic feet)
barrels to gallons
barrels to ft3 (cubic feet)
barrels to m3 (cubic meters)
barrels to liters
mcf to barrels
mcf to gallons
mcf to ft3 (cubic feet)
mcf to m3 (cubic meters)
mcf to liters
gallons to barrels
gallons to mcf (thousand cubic feet)
gallons to ft3 (cubic feet)
gallons to m3 (cubic meters)
gallons to liters
ft3 to barrels
ft3 to mcf (thousand cubic feet)
ft3 to gallons
ft3 to m3 (cubic meters)
ft3 to liters
m3 to barrels
m3 to mcf (thousand cubic feet)
m3 to gallons
m3 to ft3 (cubic feet)
m3 to liters
liters to barrels
liters to mcf (thousand cubic feet)
liters to gallons
liters to ft3 (cubic feet)
liters to m3 (cubic meters)
Anything missing? Please contact me at pete {at} stoltenow {dot} com.
Posted by stoltenow at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2009
Blackbook gets an upgrade
It seems the trusty laptop is now over 2 years old. Where did the time go?
Old faithful is a Apple Macbook (black) 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1 GB of RAM, circa mid 2007. I recently realized for the low price of approximately $20 USD, I could double the memory. And while the 2 year old machine still seems to be fast enough, for only $20, why not?
I could have gotten 4GB for $30, seems like a good deal right? Unfortunately, the laptop only "officially" supports 2GB of RAM. Doing some reading, it seems 3GB *may* have been possible, but for my web browsing, 2GB will probably be alright.
All went well with the upgrade, the little dude seems to boot twice as fast.
The old memory (2 x 512 MB SO-DIMMs)
The new memory (2 x 1 GB SO-DIMMs)
Battery Removed, Ready to upgrade memory
Inserting the new memory DIMMs
Posted by stoltenow at 5:36 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2009
Netflix Roku Player Video Quality (4 Stars)
The Roku Netflix player provides different levels of streaming video quality, depending on the speed of your internet connection. There are 4 levels quality, where 1 is about on par with the worst Youtube videos, and 4 is almost as good as DVD quality (maybe).
When a program is selected and starts streaming, the Roku box decides what is the best quality level you can get with the current internet connection. 1 star for the slowest connections, all the way up to 4 stars for the best speed connections, which is typically cable internet. (They're not actually stars, but I like to think of them as such)
I have a DSL connection (Qwest) with a 1.5 megabit download speed. When I first plugged in the Roku player about a year ago, my 1.5 megabit DSL connection, I would typically get the "2 star" level of quality. Occasionally, it would give me the horrid "1 star" level of quality. But I would never see anything above level 2.
Well in the past few weeks, I've been seeing "3 stars" of quality, over the same speed internet connection. Once I even got 4! I didn't change anything, and yet suddenly I'm getting better quality streaming video? And It looks great. It's on par with VHS quality, if not a touch above.
I can't be sure, but I *think* the audio quality has gotten worse. Could Netflix be sacrificing audio quality for better video?
Posted by stoltenow at 1:35 AM | Comments (0)