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Archive for August, 2006

Thousands of Printable Puzzles!

Monday, August 28th, 2006

You asked for ’em, you got ’em. In addition to my new collection of 3,200 Jigoku puzzles, I have added 4,800 Kakuro puzzles and 1,600 Krypto Kakuro puzzles to my collection of free printable e-books. For those of you new to Kakuro puzzles, I have also added an excerpt from my book, Masters Kakuro, which […]

Coming Soon: More Puzzle Varieties

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

I’m making some new varieties of Sudoku puzzles which will be added to the puzzle pages soon. Here is a preview of my new Jigoku (also known as Comparison or “Greater Than”) Sudoku puzzles: Challenging Tough Super Tough Insane I call these Jigoku because of their resemblence to Jigsaw puzzles. Jigoku also means hell in […]

Some AOL search statistics

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

I’ve been trawling thru the leaked AOL data with some perl scripts and came up with a few statistics. The data contains search records for about 658 million users collected over a three month period from March to May 2006. According to AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, this represents 0.33% of the search traffic conducted through […]

AOL: Funny Ha Ha, Funny Sad

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Two weeks ago, AOL mistakenly released about 3 months worth of search logs. In the data, the user-ids were replaced with numbers, in an attempt to “anonymize” the data. Despite this anonymization, the release of this data clearly violated the privacy of a great number of AOL users, and AOL quickly stopped publishing the data, […]

Free printable sudoku – now even krazier

Monday, August 14th, 2006

The majority of folks visiting this website for puzzles prefer the easy and intermediate puzzles. However, there is a small but vocal contingent campaigning for hard puzzles. Yes, even harder than my “super toughs”. So, I’ve added a 6th difficulty level, insane, which includes the puzzles that I omit from the super-tough class as basically […]

Candy you ate as a kid

Sunday, August 13th, 2006

The Old Time Candy website has over 200 kinds of classic candy, many of which are hard to find at the local candy store. I created a new coverpop mosaic showing all their selections, and you can play with it here.

A Year of YouTube Submissions

Saturday, August 12th, 2006

I used YouTube’s APIs to help make this graph. It shows thumbnails of all the videos that match the tag “joke” which were submitted over the past year. There are about 7800 of them. I can’t show all the thumbnails because they are just too many of them. I used ‘joke’ as a kind of […]

YouTube™ meets CoverPop

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Here’s a new coverpop I just made of 1512 of the most popular (according to various criteria) videos on YouTube™. The videos are arranged horizontally by the date they were uploaded, and vertically by the color of the thumbnail. Mouse over a thumbnail to see more info about the video. Click to play the video […]

Wild, Weird, and Wonderful

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

After watching seasons one and two of HBO’s excellent series Carnivale on DVD, I wanted to learn more about carnivals and circuses in the early 20th century, so I picked up four different books on the subject. Here is my report. Mark Sloan’s Wild Weird and Wonderful, The American Circus 1901-1927 is my favorite book […]

Stereo Harmony

Monday, August 7th, 2006

This weekend, after adding stereo support to my software synthesizer, JSyd, I added three new stereo variations to the Whitney Music Box. These are fun to watch and listen to with headphones. Variation 14 Variation 15 Variation 16