Jekyll emailed me again this week. Or maybe Github wanted to flex dependabot, how good it is at scanning files. Those files have numbers in them, and the numbers are too small. Number must go up. I played the game a few times, but even if I updated last week - sorry, that’s no fast enough. The bot needs me to push that button again. That weekly cadence is not reasonable for a static site that’s been updated 6 times in as many years. ...
Jpeg parsing
Not puzzle related, but this is from awhile playing with file formats. To jump to the end, here is the running version - if you drag an image in, it will parse out the sections to the console. Jpeg loader This is an incomplete parser - that is, it won’t convert the image back to pixels. I want to map the segments of the source file to pieces of the jpeg pipeline, so as a first milestone each necessary section of the file is parsed out. ...
Nonogram viewer
Nonogram time! These paint by number puzzles, (sometimes picross if you’re Nintendo) show up frequently in puzzle events, and there’s a sea of steam games with these drawings as the main mechanic. And now there’s one more way to play them, embedded in this website: Nonogram viewer You can select a local .non file for the site to render - then left click + right click will fill or X a square as you go. Click again to clear. ...
Javascript impressionist
This rabbit hole was a few steps in the making. The original drive was from a picture a friend shared - reminding me of a project I worked on as homework awhile ago. CSEP 557 - Impressionist I tracked down the source. After some false starts getting an environment setup for C++ and OpenGL, I made a hasty decision - could this whole thing be redone in javascript? Short answer - yes, and with the features built into canvas, it was a pretty easy map: ...
World Henchmen Puzzles
I was reminded when linking to The Game on wikipedia that the worldhenchmen.org site has been down for a bit. I really like my cryptic crossword in the application, so I set about reviving a copy from the game supplies. World Henchmen Organization backup Tweaks and learnings The github hosted version of this site is very particular about capitialized / non-capitalized paths, while local jekyll doesn’t seem to care CSS :hover is much easier than what we were doing for buttons before ...
Unity Tutorial
I’m trying out unity, in preparation for helping write puzzles in a hackathon. In short this meant trying out a tutorial on the unity site: learn.unity.com/course/create-with-code It’s geared for absolute beginners in Unity and programming, so the coding was very basic, but I found it a good way to experience pieces of the editor in a slow roll out. linky Locally in jekyll this works - I can link to the project and it will run. ...
5 year Heroku Update
Once there was a wedding. Since it was my wedding, it needed puzzles. I was trying out the heroku api at the time, so all these things game together to make: wedding.jettjones.net Which has been great, heroku’s free tier only runs my site on the very rare occasions I remember and want to show someone. Cheap as cold stored bits, which is in this case means free. But in 2020, heroku shut down the base image for these 5 year old images, and 20 reminder emails later, I have a quick cleanup chore to do. ...
First Post!
How did we get here? To put some order to scattered thoughts - write them down. To embarass yourself later - publish those steps. Combine two threads to get here - for some small projects, getting them hosted is a first step that usually falls to analysis paralysis. Github pages look nice and easy, so I’m taking that as a project on its own. Next steps should be getting more projects up. ...