It’s that time again… the King William’s College quiz is upon us. It rained pretty much all Xmas break, and when it didn’t rain we were cooped up in the house with “flu-like illnesses”. But I guess it was fairly restful, most of the time.
Geek joke for kids
Q. Why can’t you tell a joke in octal? A. Because 7 10 11!
A maths diversion
One of my colleagues came into my office the other day, and said to me: If p is prime and greater than 3, prove that p² – 1 is divisible by 24. Interested readers might want to try this for themselves: it’s not particularly difficult. Of course I started in…
War is over if you want it
Indeed. Imagine what a better place the world would be if John had been alive these last 30 years. Have a happy and peaceful holiday season, whatever you celebrate.
Blizzcon 2010 with friends
This year once more I was really looking forward to Blizzcon. Although there wasn’t a new amazing announcement since StarCraft II is out, Cataclysm is imminent and Diablo III has been announced for a while, there was enough going on that was cool to celebrate for a couple of days….
Twelve times table
It is puzzling to me that in the US, that holdout of the Imperial system of measurement, schoolkids learn up to the ten times table only. When I was at school, I learned up to 12, even though the UK had been metric for a decade already. But apparently nobody…
It works!
A quick trip to Radio Shack, and I got the components to hook up the Symbolics keyboard with Teensy. I didn’t even alter the keyboard itself as Hans Heubner did: rather I just used a standard 6-pin RJ25 socket and connected the Teensy to that, then plugged the keyboard in,…
Cult of the Keyboard
We’ve got a bit of a keyboard cult going on at work. Of course, I’ve been a fan of decent keyboards for years and a strong believer that keyboards (and mice) generally get too little thought when buying a computer. Ergonomics are important: everyone recognises the value of a decent…
I’m still alive – here’s the latest
Hi there, so much to report since the last update. First, we had the single-car garage (which was being used as a junk storage space) converted into my office/cave. The contractors did a really good job for less than we were expecting. I uploaded some flickr photos of my new…