Covering various topics, usually of a vaguely nerdy nature.
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.
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Explaining how a relationship within Pascal’s triangle explains both The Twelve Days of Christmas and a pleasing feature of a juggling performance.
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After Zach restored an old barograph, we compared its readings with official air pressure data from Met Éireann.
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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)
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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.
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There are many, many Countdown solvers on the internet, but I think there is something new about my approach.
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By carefully choosing their frequencies, you can make a grid of flashing lights show two different pictures every now and then.
Continue readingOne of the sports in the Wii Sports Resort game is Island Flyover, where you get to pilot an aeroplane round the island and its surrounding waters. There is a lighthouse, and when you fly near it, you hear a sound very like Morse code. My younger two children and I decided to see if this really was Morse code, or just something made to sound a bit like it. Our first job was to capture the audio while a player flew the plane near the lighthouse. This is what we got: This was going to be tricky for us to analyse, so, in Audacity, we applied a high-pass filter to try to cut out some of the engine noise,
Continue readingA previous post described a Lego implementation of an escapement mechanism similar to one I’d seen in the British Museum. Recently, Zach and I built something a bit closer to the actual Tompion escapement. The pins are all in a line round the wheel, and the pallets are also in a line, offset around the circumference. It still has the difference that the interaction between the pins and the pallets takes place on the side of the wheel, rather than the top. Pleasing that this one worked too!
Continue reading[This is a guest post written by Zach.] I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop for a while now and it has been working great, but one annoying thing was that I had to turn on both my monitors (in case the mouse is in the wrong one) when I wanted to check my email, so I thought to make a light box to tell me if I had an email. Also, flashing lights are always cool. I, with my dad, built a display box with three LEDs so it can show up to seven emails in binary. Hardware The hardware side of this project was pleasingly simple because the Raspberry Pi has built in GPIO pins. What
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