Some people begin the new year by pledging to lose weight or quit smoking. My usual pattern is to try to find two or three new obsessions each year. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that these obsessions find me! This last year, those obsessions included digital photography, photo mosaics and logic puzzles. After 20 […]

I’ve developed a new kind of puzzle which I’m calling a Krypto Kakuro. They combine elements of crossword puzzles, sudoku and cryptograms (or cryptarithms to be precise). Here are some samples for you to try. If you aren’t familiar with kakuro puzzles, I suggest you solve a few of those first, before tackling these puzzles, […]

How krazy do you have to be to fly around the world on a sleigh and jump into a gazillion chimneys? This mosaic portrait of Father Christmas is constructed from Flickr photos matching various christmas-related tags: snowman, wreath, christmas tree, poinsettia, etc. This image was made using techniques I describe in the forthcoming book Flickr […]

If you like my sudoku puzzles, you’re gonna like my new kakuro puzzles. Also called Cross Sums, these puzzles are like a cross between a Sudoku and a crossword puzzle. I’ve been working on some software that generates these puzzles, and have published a set of them here at Krazydad. Each file contains 20 puzzles, […]

My phyllotaxy poster has been showing up in some unusual places, other than the sides of refrigerators. Not too long ago, it showed up as part of this amusing keynote presentation by Dick Hardt, for the O’Reilly Open Source conference. Dick was talking about new web technologies, and used an early image of the poster […]

A few days ago I went hunting for free music notation software. Once again I was struck by the bewildering array of music software out there, clamoring for your attention. I found at least a hundred notation packages alone. I think the reason for this is that a lot of musicians are programmers, and it […]