Yes, in fact before I got my DM42 I had one holiday where we had no internet access in the evenings and as the children were small and slept early, I didn't have much to do but I was able to learn a lot about using and programming free42.

You do have to remind yourself at the beginning that you're using RPN, but after a while it feels a bit like working sums out on paper.

Just to clarify - means two taps of the esc key in succession will clear highlighting (ps I'm curious how other people do it!).

nmap <esc><esc> :noh<return>

Yes, I also have caps mapped to esc, but done in keyboard firmware so that holding it functions as ctrl.

In neovim I have two escapes mapped to :noh

I tried to play this on an original IBM PC. Without a mouse and only 4 colours. It went badly.

Yeah, I think they need to tune their nibs before they let them out. No such thing as too much flow - just too little paper.

I was too stupid to realise how hard they were to do right.

That's lovely - these calculators are very 'dad' style to me also (though my dad had a 70s style Casio). There's something about the voyager HP calculators with their landscape format - they are really satisfying to use, I can see why he kept it on him!

It's a Stilform fountain pen. They are a recent make using machined parts and bock nibs with a nifty magnetic cap. I'm having slight issues with the bock nibs though - they are going to need a bit more work to keep the flow how I like it.

I always thought of financial calculators as a sort of gelded single-function function machine and I didn't really get them. However, that would ignore the vast number of models available from HP, and that their second ever pocket calculator was a financial one. It turns out that solving the time value of money equation is non-trivial, and the work done on that probably paved the way for calculators with a solver.

The other thing I didn't appreciate until I had to use it, is that the interface of the 12c - with the 5 buttons in the top left for n, i, pv, pmt and fv is peak user interface. Press once to input data, but a second consecutive press of these buttons will trigger the solve and drop the result into x. It's perfect, and means you can solve and use all the calculator functions and stack continuously. Most modern methods use a table, which is hard to extract and input information from the calculator.

This might be the best looking graphing calculator I've seen.

These were such great machines, so far ahead of their time. I had a 3a, and nothing has beaten the Agenda program on it. I think part of the reason it was so good was that it wasn't a touch screen and the keyboard control was so well thought out, especially tab to bring up a monthly calendar. And what modern calendar has a year view that is useful?

That is a well-filled pen! It looks like others have said this, but nothing has ever beaten my 90s PDA for organising my life.

The Asvine is a poor man's ASC, but it is beautiful and arguably the difference saved covers the DM42. But that's me jumping through mental hoops to justify a purchase of course.

The global problem is that healthcare is costing significantly more as medicine progresses. Almost every Western health system is spending more as a % of GDP each year. The reason is that we are getting much better at treating what were previously very poor prognosis conditions. It wasn't that long ago we had one not very effective treatment for multiple myeloma. If that didn't work, there wasn't much left to do. These days with have around 10+ regimens, and patients are living for much longer and going through 3, 4, 5+ types of treatment before nothing further can be done. These treatments cost up to £50k/month. But they also cost more from your doctor - who now needs to be a superspecialist and spend more time working out exactly how best to sequence your treatment, and you also need more specialist nurse involvement, and more time from day unit nurses to deliver the treatment.

I really don't believe private is the answer. Someone here mentioned Germany has a private system. A quick look on wikipedia shows we spent $4188-5493/capita from 2018-2022, Germany spent $6290-8011 for the same time period - they spend 45.8% more than the UK. I would rather we first try matching our spending with a system we wish to emulate rather than privatise first.

Ha ha, I will bear that in mind for any future posts. However, that is an R/S key on this occasion :)