One thing about weights and measures: what you have is often not what you want. YouÂ’re weighing in with grams, and up pops an ounce. Moving right along with kilometers, and yonder comes a mile. Per hour! The discrepancies never end, and who can figure that crazy nine-fifths-or-five-ninths Fahrenheit Celsius conversion without pencil and paper? Your Treo answers this call with a great set of conversion calculators. These are (press the Right button on the 5-way, or select from the pulldown menu, please):
Weights and temperatures
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Length
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Area
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Volume
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This simply means you can add 2 and 2 pounds, and get 4 pounds, press the kg button and convert to 1.8143694979812 kilograms. You can divide your recipeÂ’s call for 4 cups of flour by 2, because Miss Otis canÂ’t make it for lunch today, and quickly find out thatÂ’s 32 tablespoons, or 0.473 liters, same as 0.167 cubic feet.
The calculators do exactly what their names imply, so thereÂ’s not much need to look at them one at a time. WeÂ’ll just use the Weight/Tmp one to demonstrate how they all work.
Suppose youÂ’re planning a trip to the Louvre, and you find out that ParisÂ’ average annual temperature (checking Wikipedia) is 11.7 C with average rainfall of 641.6 mm. DoesnÂ’t say much, does it?
Use the TreoÂ’s calculator to make non-metric sense out of it. Tap 11.7, then degreesC, then tap degreesF, and feast your eyes on 53.0 F. A little chilly, but thatÂ’s an average annual. Depend on better in the summertime. Currently, in late July, itÂ’s upper 90Â’s F. As for rainfall, switch to the Length converter/calculator, tap 641.6, tap the mm button, then tap the in button, to convert to 25.2 inches.
All of the conversion calculators work the same way. As with the others, the EEx button (Enter Exponent) switches entry to scientific notation mode, in case you need to convert AvogadroÂ’s number of avocadoes to metric tons of guacamole.
There’s no provision in the Treos for converting European recipes from weights to volumes – that’s a monumentally inexact science anyway -- but you can readily change cups to teaspoons to milliliters, gallons, etc., and perform basic arithmetic on them along the way.
Use the “History” feature (see the pulldown menu) to view your calculations’ results.
Housekeeping
We arrive at the end of the calculator series at last, but first let me tidy up.
In the Financial Calc section of Part 2, I misplaced the decimal in the Time Value of Money example. The correct APR is 5.5, not 0.055.
Thanks to my friends (and they know who they are) for emergency tutoring in higher mathematics, trigonometry, and financial matters. To flesh out the Logic portion of this section, I updated the information from the Parens calculatorÂ’s user guide. The TreoÂ’s calculators are based on that shareware program -- see Palmblvd. The program is no longer supported.
Summary
Well, there you have it. All the Treo calculators dissected, explained, and documented. What else is there to say, except, “enjoy!”
