I would like to share a program I'm writing with you guys

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1

So I haven’t been on here in a while. I’ve been generally avoiding the Internet for the last month due to the post-election shitstorm here in the United States (glad that has finally died down somewhat).

But anyway…

I thought I would share this with you guys because I get the sense you might need/want this for the same reasons as me. Its a program I am writing for doing unit conversions called ‘yucon’:

This originally all started because whenever I play this game, I need to convert between units often because I am trying to replicate say an engine whose specs are all in 'Murican units. And yeah I know I change the game to use those, but I refuse because SI units are PROPER DAMMIT!

Problem is, the Windows calculator is crap - all that hunting and pecking through menus to find the unit you want - ICK. Also, it along with other utilities I’ve used build the units into the program so you can’t easily add ones it doesn’t recognize. I kept coming back to this basic problem:

I can type what I want faster than using these stupid interfaces… and these programs don’t have the units I need!!

Thus decided to do it better so I started writing a little program I call ‘yucon’. The name was originally to be ‘ucon’ short for ‘unit converter’ but that was taken for bit of server software. It was so close to ‘Yukon’ though, I just couldn’t pass up the pun.

Basically it just lets you type conversions as they would come naturally to you. Say I want to convert 4.0625 inches to mm. Just type something like:
4.0625 in mm
or
4.0625 inch millimeter

And it gives you the answer:
103.188

Simple. No BS. Tons of other goodies too. Its yet unfinished - this is just my first beta release and I will be adding more features and refining it in the coming weeks and months.

Anyways its free of charge and free and open source software (FOSS), licensed under GNU General Public License. Works on Windows and Linux. Use it for whatever you want; pass it along; change it; modify it. I don’t care. Heck tell your friends. That’s what FOSS is all about! Cheers!

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2

one question. as Github says it’s only a source code package in the .zip, how would i install?

3

Its lying to you. There is a folder called ‘bin’ when you unzip it that will have the precompiled executable in it. You’ll see it if you go to the repo’s main page.

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Well, this just earned itself a place on my desktop.

About the only thing it doesn’t seem to do, and the only thing I wish it had extra, is a fuel-consumption conversion. That way I could figure MPG in US gallons, UK gallons, as well as km/L and L/100km from challenges without having to either change my in game settings or search for the conversion.

Even at that, it’s rock-solid. It’s quick, no-nonsense, and very effective.

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i have an issue, the help doesn’t work and i get an error of “units.dat is either corrupted or not found” although it’s there in the cfg folder

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So far I’ve been using google for this, but I might look into it today.

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i’ve been using this so far but i’ll give it a shot

okay here’s some point i would like to say/ask:

  1. the help needs to be more specific. what units are can you convert into? is fuel economy not convert-able too?
    because i just tried km/l to L/100km. it didn’t work
  2. is it made in C/C++/C#?
  3. why no GUI? isn’t is pretty easy to make this in some sort of GUI based environment?
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