Today I am 27. Coo, gosh etc.

And I have a present for everyone reading this. Partly in the Hobbit tradition of giving rather than receiving presents on one's birthday, but mostly because it happens to be today that I have it just about ready to roll.

Over the past week or so, I've been starting my own small collection of puzzle games, of roughly the Minesweeper class (i.e. things in tiny windows which you can pop up on your desktop and give yourself a two-minute break from whatever else you were doing). That collection is now working well enough for me to put it up on the web for other people to have a play with and try to break it.

So if you're bored with Minesweeper, or bored with work, or just generally bored, or if you just feel like selflessly helping me to beta-test some newly written software (ho ho wot a good excuse), you can point your browser at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/, and have fun. (Windows and Linux are both supported; anything more exotic than that is currently not, but could easily be if someone contributed some effort).

Bonus points to anyone who suggests a good overall name for the collection as a whole. It's currently called ‘puzzles’, which somehow just doesn't have that snappy sound to it…

(This is still beta software; there might well be really silly bugs in it. Feel free to test and play the games, but I'd rather people didn't start linking to the web page until I'm reasonably convinced it all actually works properly.)