Wait, did I say control, I meant query… Sorry to disappoint! I am a home automation nerd. Recently I’ve noticed that as it gets closer to warmer or cooler extremes that it takes longer for my hvac system to bring my house to the temperature I want. I’ve also noticed that NEST claims to automatically learn these factors. Not to be outdone by the Griswolds, I decided to look at building this into my system. I had been experimenting with using the weather.com site to pull this data but then someone pointed out that NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) actually publishes this information on their site. I was…
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Advanced Features of the Mac OS X Calculator
The Calculator application in Mac OS X is pretty handy beyond the basic 10-key functions that most people use. As with many things from Apple you can make things much more complicated than the easy to use, basic screens that Apple provides. For example, did you know that Calculator can perform binary, hexadecimal, ASCII and Unicode conversions? To do so, click on the View menu and select Programmer (or use Command-3 to open the view. You can also stop carrying around that old TI-85 you’ve been using for years (to some degree) to calculate those random tangents from time to time. One of the best parts of Calculator is that…