Nothing works properly (II)

[simont]

I've done something horrid to my right forefinger, which is making typing alternately painful and inconvenient (depending on whether I'm currently remembering not to use it). I hope it'll go away by itself and I won't have to shift it by extreme measures such as laying off keyboards…

I collected a new pair of glasses today (my left eye has apparently become marginally less short-sighted, which I suppose is nice). They give me more peripheral vision than the old ones, which is good; but the arms are completely the wrong length and don't hook behind my ears properly. I suspect a trip back to Boots is in order, annoyingly.

Two of the four self-service checkouts in Tesco were out of order when I went there to buy my lunch today. Two days ago it was a different (but overlapping) pair. Is it really so hard to get them all working at the same time?

And my watch, whose battery I had changed a few weeks ago, gave me a battery warning today. It changed its mind fairly fast, but I worry that it might be time for a new one of those as well.

Add that lot to my ongoing NTL woes and my (landlord's) washing machine packing up and you're looking at a pretty annoyed Simon, who's currently hoping to see at least one thing working exactly as designed in the course of this week. Grrr.

On the plus side, this diary is now mirrored into a third location (*waves* to any new readers gained thereby), and today somebody sent me a Sudoku puzzle with the clues arranged into the shape of my initials. (3x3:a4_1_7e2c3d9h5d3_2_8b9_7_6b1f5a9f2a5b7c4a6c1_6_3e, for anyone with a copy of my ‘Solo’ program.)

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

What's the third location?

[simont]

A newsgroup for journal-type posts, internal (and private) to a system I use. I know a few people who've been saying for ages that LJ should be news because then you could use existing newsreader technology to keep track of which bits you hadn't read yet (friends pages are just about OK as far as they go but keeping track of comment threads is the very devil of a job); someone had the very simple idea of setting up a newsgroup for that purpose and seeing how it went...

[timotab.livejournal.com]

I don't get the fixation with sudoku. (this is piglet from mono, btw)

[gerald_duck]

Coo — it's actually solvable given only moderate effort, too.

How do your game-IDs work? Were they able to design that Sudoku, or did they have to spent ages finding something that matched and had the right hash, or whatever?

[fluffyrichard.livejournal.com]

IIRC, game ids are something like:
letters represent a run of spaces (a=1, b=2)
numbers represent a number in a column
underscores separate numbers (which would otherwise be combined into one)

[simont]

They designed the puzzle using a Java applet at Puzzle Laboratory, which lets you specify the precise set of clue squares and will then attempt to invent a soluble puzzle starting from that.

I haven't yet worked out how it's done, though. It certainly isn't as simple as inventing a random filled-grid solution, blanking out all but the specified clue squares and seeing if the result is soluble, because I've tried that and it never seems to get anywhere.

[rmc28]

I shall plug again Workrave, which is excellent for the avoidance of keyboard-related pain. If you use Windows or Linux, that is.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

I claim hereby that I'm working according to my design, since nobody knows what I'm meant to be for anyway ;)