Design, citizenship and the city
20 September 2008
While this won’t be news to some, most people still don’t know that you can use the standard Google search box as a sophisticated calculator and unit conversion tool. So if you type:
into the search box, you’ll get 6. Pretty handy, but nothing you couldn’t do easily with your desktop or computer calculator.
Where Google Calculator comes into its own is handling almost every conceivable unit of weight, volume, time and even computer storage. This is great if you need to estimate an upload or download time. Here’s how you do it.
My broadband uploads at a nominal 256 kilobits per second and downloads at 2 megabits per second. Bear in mind that these speeds are always theoretical maximums and you’ll never achieve exactly that in practice. There are plenty of online broadband speed calculators if you want to know what your real speeds are.
Google Calculator lets you use full names for units or abbreviations. It’ll take MB for megabytes, Mb for megabits, Kb for kilobits, etc. Make sure you know your bits from your bytes.
In fact, we can get Google Calculator to do this conversion for us if we’re not sure.
Type: 1 byte in bits
and you’ll get:
1 byte = 8 bits
Now, let’s estimate the time it’ll take to download a fat 70 megabyte podcast. I need to dash out the door in 5 minutes. Can I do it?
Type: 70 MB / 2 Mb / sec
That’s 70 megabytes at 2 megabits per second.
You’ll get the answer:
(70 MB) / (2 (Mb / sec)) = 4.66666667 minutes
So we can just do it. It’ll probably take a bit longer than five minutes but we’ve got an idea of roughly how long it’ll take.
It works the same for uploads. Say we’ve just shot a great video clip and we want to upload it to our favourite video sharing site.
The video file straight from the camera is a hefty 190 megabytes. How long will that take to upload?
Type: 190 MB / 256 Kb / sec
That’s 190 megabytes at 256 kilobits per second.
This gives the answer:
(190 MB) / (256 (Kb / sec)) = 1.68888889 hours
A hefty upload that’ll be. Perhaps it’d be best to use a conversion tool to reduce the size and quality of the video if that’s going to be a problem.
At least with Google Calculator we can make good estimates and use them to make good decisions.
23 October 2008
Google Calendar is great.