About the Krazydad Website

This website has been offering free puzzles to the public since 2005. My mission is to provide puzzles to under-served groups that need them, including prisoners, pensioners, home-schoolers, hospitals, churches, and classrooms. There are currently about two million individual puzzles on the site, and over sixty unique varieties. You are welcome to download, print and solve as many as you like for your own personal use

I do not grant a blanket permission to republish the puzzles for free (particularly in for-profit publications and ventures), however I will often grant free-use permission for small-circulation and non-profit newspapers and newsletters, in exchange for attribution.

If you wish to purchase puzzles for an app, book or newspaper, please contact me at the email address below.

Who is responsible for this website?

Hi! I'm Jim Bumgardner. I'm a programmer / pianist / composer / puzzle constructor / teacher with a passion for making software art and software toys. From 2010–2020, I was working at Walt Disney Imagineering. I am now doing web development for the State of California.

This is my puzzle website, and (occasional) blog. My other websites include WhitneyMusicBox.org (visual music), and Joy Of Processing (old Processing tutorials).

Do you make the puzzles on the site?

Yes, most of the puzzles on the site were created with the aid of software that I have written personally. I have been working on such software for a long time. Eventually I hope to have enough time to write a book on the topic.

Did I see one of your puzzles somewhere?

Probably. My puzzles have been appearing daily in The New York Times (as "Two Not Touch") since April, 2020. My Sudoku puzzles are distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication and appear online and in print. I have sold puzzles to a few other publications, including Games magazine, Bloomberg Business Week, and Radio Times. I've also authored a number of puzzle books for PuzzleWright Press, Ulysses Press, and Tiny Lobster (my personal imprint).

Have you written anything interesting?

How nice of you to ask! Yes, I have written a few books, papers, tutorials, etudes, and so on. You'll find the more obscure stuff here, and my puzzle book catalog here.

How do I contact you?

Use this handy dandy email address.

Are you the same 'jbum' who used to be active on Flickr?

Yes. I was a big fan of Web 2.0, which is sadly, now a thing of the past.

Aren't you the guy that made the Whitney Music Box?

Yep. I can also make spaghetti.

Are you the same 'jbum' who created The Palace visual chat system?

Yes. I conceived and was principle programmer of The Palace, a fun internet thing from the 1990s, as well as a co-founder of The Palace, Inc., which was a victim of the dot-com bubble.

The Palace received numerous honors, including "Best of 1996" by Entertainment Weekly; a Webby Award nomination; "Cool Innovation of the Year" nominee; Chicago SUN-Times' Best Website: 1998; Top 100 Websites of 1998 and # 24 on the Forbes Magazine POV List.

Via my emails, I have heard from several successful software engineers who cut their teeth on Iptscray, the Palace's built-in programming language. So cool!

There is some more palace-related stuff on my old vanity website, which you can peruse via the Internet Archive: jbum.com

How do I follow your every move?

Well aren't you a little creepy? :) I'm not super active on social media these days.

Here's my scrapbook – a collection of newspaper articles and ephemera
...a list of my publications
...my YouTube channel
...my Github repositories
...my Bluesky profile
...my Threads profile
...my Facebook profile
...my Twitter profile
...my old home page (via archive.org)
...the RSS feed for my blog. What is this, 2005?
...my flickr stream (also in RSS)
...and my resume.