Sudoku is a game of pure logical deduction, just like Kakuro and other Japanese number puzzles. Unlike games of luck such as card and bingo games, guessing is never required. I’ve now learned a number of methods for solving tough Sudoku puzzles by hand, including X-Wing, Swordfish, Jellyfish, Squirmbag, Turbot-fish, XY-Wing, XYZ-Wing, Conjugate Pairs, Bowman […]

Flickrini Strzelecki writes: My fridge is now covered in flickr posters. They are cool mosaic type collages of photos posted to flicker groups. I sometimes find myself standing there, fridge open drinking from the milk bottle drawn to looking at the miriad of little pictures in these collages. Want some posters for your fridge? Get […]

There’s a drug rep riding up in the elevator with me to Doctor Schott’s office, a pretty young woman in her 20s. I know she’s a drug rep because in addition to a shopping bag with a big box that says Protonix on it, she is carrying a tray with four different Starbucks beverages on […]

Check it out! Paul Bausch, the author of Amazon Hacks and Yahoo Hacks, had one of my posters laminated! I think this means he likes me! Well, that, and he agreed to co-write the forthcoming Flickr Hacks from O’Reilly, with me. I’ll be working on some of the more technical hacks, and I intend to […]

George Pendel’s Strange Angel is about pioneering Rocket Scientist Jack Parsons, who played a pivotal role in the creation of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). A self-taught explosives expert, Parsons also led a double life: He was fascinated with the occult, and was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the local chapter of the Ordo […]

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the creators of the original Macintosh computer, recently published a book, Revolution in the Valley, about his experiences at Apple in the late 70s and early 80s. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes and valuable lessons about software management, many of which seem awfully familiar to me. Andy’s love of […]

Meet Fubuki (Ty Siscoe), one of the most prolific and talented photographers on Flickr, the photo-sharing service. I constructed Fubuki’s portrait out of thumbnails from his large collection of excellent photos, using the Flickr API. My software is written in Perl, using the ImageMagick library. For more of my mosaics, check out my flickr stream.

Currently my sudoku software does a very crude job of estimating puzzle difficulty. There’s an especially wide range of difficulty levels in my “super tough” puzzles – some of them are pretty easy, others are genuinely “super tough.” My experience shows that most other computer programs do a pretty poor job at this too. The […]

If you don’t already use bookmarklets, del.icio.us or an RSS reader, then the last few paragraphs of this post will be difficult to decipher, so I’ll start with some background: del.icio.us is a tagged bookmarking service (with a clever, hard-to-spell, and now much mimicked URL) that makes it easy to share bookmarks among multiple computers, […]