Some people begin the new year by pledging to lose weight or quit smoking. My usual pattern is to try to find two or three new obsessions each year. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that these obsessions find me!
This last year, those obsessions included digital photography,
photo mosaics and logic puzzles. After 20 years as [...]

I’ve developed a new kind of puzzle which I’m calling a Krypto Kakuro. They combine elements of crossword puzzles, sudoku and cryptograms (or cryptarithms to be precise). Here are some samples for you to try.
If you aren’t familiar with kakuro puzzles, I suggest you solve a few of those first, before tackling these [...]

How krazy do you have to be to fly around the world on a sleigh and jump into a gazillion chimneys?
This mosaic portrait of Father Christmas is constructed from Flickr photos matching various christmas-related tags: snowman, wreath, christmas tree, poinsettia, etc.
This image was made using techniques I describe in the forthcoming book Flickr Hacks - [...]

If you like my sudoku puzzles, you’re gonna like my new kakuro puzzles. Also called Cross Sums, these puzzles are like a cross
between a Sudoku and a crossword puzzle. I’ve been working on some software that generates these puzzles, and have published a set of them here at Krazydad. Each file contains [...]

My phyllotaxy poster has been showing up in some unusual places, other than the sides of refrigerators. Not too long ago, it showed up as part of this amusing keynote presentation by Dick Hardt, for the O’Reilly Open Source conference. Dick was talking about new web technologies, and used an early image of [...]

A few days ago I went hunting for free music notation software.
Once again I was struck by the bewildering array of music software out there, clamoring for your attention. I found at least a hundred notation packages alone. I think the reason for this is that a lot of musicians are programmers, and [...]

I’m working on creating more printable puzzles for the site, in addition to the sudoku puzzles.

Here’s a collection of printable mazes, suitable for solving with a pencil. Perfect for a rainy day when you’ve got a bored kid in the house or office.

The mazes come in 5 different difficulty levels, ranging [...]

These 4 non transitive dice are one of the great illusions sold by British Toy & Magic Shop Grand Illusions, which specializes in mathematically-based novelties.
Ask a friend to choose a die, you choose another. Make ten throws, and you will win the majority of the throws. No matter which die your friend [...]

I heard Howard Dully’s personal story about his transorbital lobotomy, 45 years ago, on the way
home today, while listening to NPR. This chilling and emotional tale, in which Dully finally confronts his father about the operation which ruined his life, makes up for 9 months of horrible music cues and pledge breaks. This [...]

After seeing my Wacky Packages Coverpop, astronomer John Dubinski wrote to share with me his amazing
large-scale photo mosaics of Wacky Packages (and also take my ego down
a few notches, by demonstrating his superior geekitude).
These are the most accomplished photo mosaics I have seen to date, involving random image placement of images with [...]