Ben North's blog

Continuing the Dragon 32 theme, I extracted from cassette a sequence of versions of a Tetris clone I wrote long ago, and tidied it up a bit.

Partly for the challenge, and partly for nostalgia, I reverse-engineered the Dragon 32 game Invader’s Revenge, creating an essentially complete commented disassembly. I also created a Pytch version, which is embedded in the full write-up.

Explaining how a relationship within Pascal’s triangle explains both The Twelve Days of Christmas and a pleasing feature of a juggling performance.

After Zach restored an old barograph, we compared its readings with official air pressure data from Met Éireann.

In the first Harry Potter book, our heroes have to find two useful potions hidden in a collection of seven bottles. The clues are given in the book, but one of the clues refers to the biggest and smallest bottles, and the reader doesn’t know which those are. Can we solve the puzzle anyway? (Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash)

In the same way that there are magic squares, where every row and column add up to the same sum, it turns out there is also exactly one (non-trivial) magic hexagon. Although this solution can be worked out mostly by hand, it was interesting to explore the different approaches to writing code to search for it.

There are many, many Countdown solvers on the internet, but I think there is something new about my approach.

By carefully choosing their frequencies, you can make a grid of flashing lights show two different pictures every now and then.