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Tag Archives: geek

Addictive ‘Life’ tutorial

Irregular Life is a flash game which will get you addicted to Conway’s Game of Life. I played to about level 15 just by symmetry-guessing –you see three gaps in a pattern and you’ve got three squares to place– so it’s not that hard, at least in those early levels. That’s not really the point, [...]

Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem…

… Explained in Words of One Syllable, by George Boolos (not Boole).

If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk.

If you’ve got access [...]

Iterated Beer Response

We’re back from Greece with many photos and stories, which I’ll start putting online in the weekend. For now, a geek-out interlude, mixing work-in-progress from the office (not my own work, admittedly, but the desk next door) and beer.

Mario Bros in lego

Ok, it’s via BoingBoing, but it’s too cool not to share. A stop-motion Mario Brothers sequence in lego, with music by recorder and sound effects by voice. Delightful.

How not to set your auto-reply

I’ve anonymised the following, to protect the guilty (note the cc: field):

Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:39:20 +0200 From: [list admin] To: Sender <sender@domain> CC: some-seminar@domain, some-list@other.domain, another-list@third.domain, list-the-fourth@another.domain, list-v@another.domain Subject: Re: [some-seminar] March 30, 2007

Dear sender [sic],

Please note that it is possible to submit [...]

Geek insomnia

Ok, so having a laptop sometimes isn’t a bonus.

Obviously if I go to bed too late, I don’t get enough sleep. But also if I go to bed too early, I end up staring at the ceiling for hours and … don’t get enough sleep. So the trick is to hit bed early, but to [...]

Google image search barriers

I’ve just been hacking around with one of my pages, trying to tweak what Google Image Search thinks it represents. The page contains a number of short paragraphs, each with a header and a single picture. The problem is that Google cleverly mines the text surrounding each image for keywords, above and below, meaning that [...]

Kubuntu wireless woes

I just bought a wireless card, installed Kubuntu Dapper Drake, and imagine my delight when it just worked, out of the box, no problems at all! Glory be. So I ran a complete update, crowed publically, and went to bed. The next time I started up, the wireless card had apparently evaporated.

The solution is actually [...]

Mutt config: double-double-quote

A little oddity of Mutt I just discovered, which I haven’t seen documented anywhere. When setting a string variable containing spaces

set index_format=”‘%4C %Z %{%b %d} %-15.15L (%?l?%4l&amp;%4c?) %s’”

you seem to need two layers of nested quotes. (Ahem. And it needs to be all on one line. But you knew that.) At least as far as [...]

Link dump

Quick links to a week’s worth of browsing:

Design: flowerlike lightbulb unfurls as it warms up. [via sensory impact] Craziness: every year two Greek monasteries bombard each other with fireworks. [via Nemo Ramjet] Life/art mutual imitation: A British explorer disappears in the Amazon jungle, while looking for a lost city. Attempts to find his remains, and the city he searched for, are [...]