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Archive for 2012

The mark of the unicorn

Saturday, December 8th, 2012

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted, but hopefully, there are still one or two of you out there who understand the value of a good RSS feed. I’m back to write about a book I’m enjoying, with the following cryptic title: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 If this line of BASIC code […]

Get started with Jigsaw Sudoku

Friday, September 7th, 2012

I recently added a new puzzle variety to Krazydad, called Jigsaw Sudokus. These are very similar to normal Sudokus. Like those puzzles, each row and column contain all the digits 1 through 9. However, these puzzles are missing the 3×3 blocks found in regular Sudoku. Instead, the puzzles are divided into a set of irregular […]

Graffiti Shroud

Saturday, August 11th, 2012

If you combine a sufficiently large number of (uncorrelated) photos, and choose the images carefully, you can approximate any image you like. This “Shroud of Turin” was made by carefully choosing 300 photographs from a larger set of 20,000 photographs of graffiti. All images come from Flickr and are Creative Commons licensed. The images are […]

Penrose Puzzle: Area 51

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

This Penrose Slitherlink puzzle is inspired by David Millar’s “Area 51” puzzles, which you can find at The Griddle. The puzzle works like a regular Slitherlink puzzle, but with a few twists: The aliens must be kept inside the fence. The cacti must be kept outside the fence. The white circles indicate a straight line […]

June Processing Workshops

Monday, June 4th, 2012

This month, I’ll be teaching two Processing workshops at CRASHspace, the awesome hacker space in Los Angeles. You can sign up for these classes in the CRASHspace store. This is a fundraiser for CRASHspace: all proceeds will go towards paying the rent and such. Each class is 4 hours long, and costs $60 ($40 for […]

Chess Music at Handmade Music L.A. #3

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

Next Saturday, I’ll demonstrate my musical chess system at the 3rd Annual Handmade Music L.A., at CRASH Space in Culver City. There will be a number of other tinkerer/musicians there as well, showing innovative pieces of homemade music technology, including circuit bending, noisy circuits, repurposed video-games machines, and amplified motors. Hope you can join us! […]

Solve Krazydad puzzles on an IPad with UPAD

Monday, April 16th, 2012

Lately, I’ve been solving Krazydad puzzles on an iPad, using my finger, or a stylus, rather than printing them out and solving with a pencil. My iPad app of choice for printable puzzles is UPAD, a great little drawing app that works well with PDF files. It is available in both free and paid versions. […]

Floret Slitherlink

Saturday, April 14th, 2012

Here are six new Slitherlink puzzles for you to try. This puzzle is based on Floret Pentagonal Tiling, which was suggested to me by Danny Sichel. The additional clue styles (ampersand and dollar sign) were inspired by David Millar’s excellent “Area 51” puzzles, from The Griddle. Fill in some of the dotted line segments to […]

Letters, I get letters

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Dear Krazydad, My husband just started doing KenKen and really loves it. I have a question for you as most of your Inky puzzles seem to have this symbol in them: What does the symbol / mean? Confused Dear Confused, The / symbol is used to mean division (as in 12/4 = 3). It means […]

Lego Mindstorms used to make artificial bones

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012