More Dragon 32 nostalgia
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.
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Reverse-engineering the Dragon 32 game Invader’s Revenge
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.
Juggling-ball pyramids and a Christmas song
Explaining how a relationship within Pascal's triangle explains both The Twelve Days of Christmas and a pleasing feature of a juggling performance.
An old barograph
After Zach restored an old barograph, we compared its readings with official air pressure data from Met Éireann.
A “knowledge puzzle” in Harry Potter
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 )
Searching for the magic hexagon
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.
(Yet another) solver for the Countdown numbers round
There are many, many Countdown solvers on the internet, but I think there is something new about my approach.
Two pictures in a grid of flashing lights
By carefully choosing their frequencies, you can make a grid of flashing lights show two different pictures every now and then.
Decoding a Morse code Easter Egg
One 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…
A modified escapement design
A 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…