You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2011.
I was amazed to learn about Heron’s formula for measuring the area of any triangle, irrespective of the angles, knowing only the length of each side. The method is very simple and can be done in minutes by any kid with a cheap calculator.
Here’s how it works:
1. So, if the side lengths are a, b and c, add them together (a+b+c) and divide this number by two to get s= (a+b+c)/2
2. Subtract each side length in turn from s to get (s-a), (s-b) and (s-c).
3. Calculate the product of s*(s-a)*(s-b)*(s-c) = p
4. The square root of p is the area of the triangle.
This guy Heron was able to prove the validity of this formula for ALL triangles about 2,000 years ago. That was before computers and calculators or even slide rules. Possibly, he didn’t even have paper and pencil to write with. This is truly amazing.
Just came across a great free tool called OmniDiskSweeper which is very easy to use. Basically, it outlines exactly what files fo what size you have in what folders on your drive.
I recovered 10 GB without much trouble that I wasn’t even aware I was “wasting”.
Incidentally, on my Mac which has just 2GB of RAM, this tool discovered a 2GB file called sleepimage which I didn’t know I had. Well, it’s what’s used to save all the stuff you have in RAM when the computer goes to sleep. If you lose power, your work will be retrievable through the sleepimage. There’s no point in trashing it as it’ll be remade on the next boot. It can be discarded, however, if you decide to change from sleep mode 3 to the older sleep mode thus saving a lot of space. Read about it here.
Nearly two weeks into the new year and this is my first post of 2011 in this blog. Anyway, I’m starting on a rather low key, but nevertheless very useful, note.
If you need to exact path of a file or a folder in OS X, it’s not as easy to get it as it is in Linux. However, I came across this collection of ways to overcome this problem in Quora. Basically, there are three options:
1. Open Finder, select your file or folder, then drag it to an open terminal window and drop it. The full path will be printed in the terminal
2. Select the file or folder in Finder and then click on Get Info (either right click and select from the context menu or just Cmd-i). The path is shown in the Where item. Copy this by highlighting and Cmd-c or simply by tripling clicking on the path. Paste it to wherever you want with Cmd-v
3. Use the script as explained in this link.
