Recent content by rdanner3

Ditto here, although I'm running Linux as well. (Win7 Home Premium was installed on the laptop; I installed (and use extensively) Linux Mint 13.) I have heard of (and have on my machine) Inkscape and LibreOffice (which is a fork off the OpenOffice code; fairly mature and VERY stable). As for...

Sorry for the longish delay on my reply to this. 5-yr-old in house and I've also been a bit scatterbrained! In reference Trek, especially ST:TOS, I fully agree that the Silver Bird of the Galaxy's reasoning was a bit flawed, but then again, he was a cop when he originally wrote out the...

The only Habitable Zone "calculator" I've seen at all is useless for what I need; it only shows three very-general star types (basically, small, medium, super-huge) and is leaving me totally unable to figure out other critical data in re: the star classes of these star systems. Based on what I...

In ST:TOS, the stardates weren't even consistent. Wasn't until ST:TNG that stardates were consistent enough to actually be useful for anything. (The "stardate" of a Captain's Log in ST:TOS was actually a random number. This has been confirmed by people who worked on the series (including several...

Mass of the planet is discussed in one of the other threads I began. Basically, density is identical enough to Earth's that using that as a baseline works. While this larger planet's water percentage is only (IIRC, must check my resources!) 57% vs 78% for Earth, the ecosystem is very different...

Regelis, for example, is a more arid world than Earth (with only 57% water area vs. Earth's 76-78%), while Trekala is probably closer to Earth in both size and general livability. Heck, it is even likely that the star the latter planet orbits is a direct analogue to our own Sun, albeit a very...

What I need, really, is to be able to work out the size of the globes in question, the orbits of the planets, etc. One planet in my books, for example, has a gravity of 1.916g, and an orbital period of 1157.407407407 Terran days (which equates to 1000 local days (of 100000 seconds)). Another is...

Without some idea of planet size (and therefore likely surface area) I could make serious mistakes regarding distances on-planet? And ditto for distances between star systems or planets. Some of the star systems are legitimate (and known!) systems within the Milky Way, so accuracy is highly...

The fact it failed completely after the first cleaning (and I followed very specific steps to correctly clean the unit top-to-bottom, some of which were not mentioned in the manual's "How to Clean Unit" section) turned me sour on the whole idea of air purifiers, to be honest. However, I did...

As a writer, this is important for me to know, since if they aren't worth the money to purchase (and many of them are indeed for-pay, rather than Open Source), I need to avoid mistakes. Currently looking at several programs, some of which I know are likely to be Windows-only. Since I...

White bread? UGH. Too much bleach in it. Whole-grain or whole wheat is much better. I do not even consider white bread unless there is literally no other choice. McDonald's? Won't go there. Ever. Too many artery-choking choices, very few relatively-healthy. And that doesn't count in the fact...

Yes, I have, but finding correct data on the different star classes (or an actually-working visual calculator!) has been interesting. Okay, that does make sense, insofar as I actually understand what you've mentioned. I would be incorrect if I said I understood all of this. :-) And I acknowledge...

My favorites I first saw in an old DOS game... "Man who invented baseball wrong. Man with four balls cannot walk." and "Man standing on toilet high on pot."

Consider the fact that there are silent systems that are very highly effective. One such used to be made by (or for?) Sharper Image, but the one I eventually bought (the Ionic Pro) worked fine until it needed its first cleaning. Hasn't been anything except a very expensive tripping hazard since...

Given a planet of the same (relative) density as Earth, and a G-force on said planet of 1.916G, what is the procedure to determine the radius and surface area for such a planet, given it having only 57% water coverage? I will admit that I am working on this for a book series I started in...