The latest addition to my puzzle collection, Galaxies are elegant puzzles in which symmetry forms an essential component. You are presented with a grid containing circles, in seemingly random positions. You fill in the lines of the grid to form an island, or galaxy around each circle. The galaxy shapes must be rotationally (or 180° [...]

Eighty-seven year old puzzle constructor Yochanan wrote to tell me he has posted scans of his hand-made crossfigure puzzles. You’ll find 80 puzzles, divided into 4 collections here. I find these puzzles to be excellent. However, because they are scans from a book, it helps to zoom in on each page to make the puzzles [...]

Apparently, “Kennie” was a little too close to “KenKen” for Bob Fuhrer, who sent the following missive this morning: Dear Mr. Bumgardner, I am President of Nextoy, LLC and KenKen, LLC, which owns and controls all rights in the KenKen® and Kendoku® brands of mathematical logic puzzles. I have recently learned that you are publishing [...]

Apparently, the paltry few KenKen puzzles published in the Times weren’t enough, so a number of you wrote to me asking for KenKen puzzles. I’m publishing a new kind of puzzle called a Kennie. It’s similar to a KenKen, but has a few minor differences. Kinda like those chocolaty sandwich cookies that aren’t exactly like [...]

I’m currently working on a significant update to my classic Colr Pickr. Stay tuned.

While waiting around at the local Michael’s, I picked up a 3 dollar copy of the Great Illustrated Classics version of The Time machine by H.G. Wells. I was surprised to open it to an illustration depicting a character from a cheaply made 1950s Sci Fi film — most certainly not a character from Wells’ [...]

In a software design meeting the other day, I found myself saying “it needs to be a little less here” (tapping myself on the forehead) “and a little more here” (tapping myself on the heart). As a pointy-eared technical guy, I’ve long been resistant to this type of language, knowing it to be logically meaningless. [...]

The last few days, I’ve been obsessing over the island of Manhattan (which I’ll be visiting briefly in May), and Google Street View. I’m currently working on a few Street View related hacking projects in my spare time. Here’s one of them. I wrote some scripts that did an exhaustive search of the Street View [...]

My nephew Ben, a budding computer programmer, found this old picture of me in a book about computer programmers. The photo has the following caption: “Sometimes programmers play computer games when they need a break from their work projects.” What the author perhaps didn’t realize (the photograph was obtained from the Corbis Stock photography archive), [...]

This weekend, I counted all the words on Project Gutenberg. This has been done before, notably, here. My script crawled most of the English language books on Project Gutenberg (about 20,000 titles), and counted how often each word appears, and how many books each word appears in. The script ran for about 20 hours. You [...]