Hanayama Puzzles for Sale

Japan's Hanayama company makes some of the best commercial puzzles you'll find. They license from top designers for their cast metal puzzle series, which have an attractive form factor.

Unfortunately, you could only reliably buy them in Japan. Until now. Canadian web store Puzzle Master Inc. sells the entire line of Cast puzzles to Canadians and Americans. Yippee!

I bought four puzzles to fill out my collection. I actually own the originals of each of the puzzles I bought, but the Hanayama versions can safely come to work, unlike the high-end wooden versions in my puzzle cabinets.

Wikipedic

From the National Puzzlers' League mailing list, comes my favorite recent neologism:

At a party I was at recently, a new term was introduced: "Wikipedic", by obvious analogy with "encyclopedic". Intended usage: "I have a Wikipedic knowledge of X". This signifies that you know a great deal about X, in the form of facts you heard or read somewhere you don't really remember and whose accuracy you can't vouch for. But it's probably mostly right.

Manifesto Games

I've monitored Greg Costikyan's blog for a while now, reading along as he worked to create a video game company that would give creative, independent game designers a way to attract a wider audience. He believes that large game publishers squash edgy, quirky titles in the same way that book publishers only market safe bets. Interesting books, or games, rely on the random nature of word-of-mouth praise.

After a lot of work, he recently launched Manifesto Games to bring fresh games into the world, or at least to provide a marketplace for those games. Expect interesting and charming games. I've downloaded a demo of DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, which Ed recommended. (Not that Ed). Even a short moment into this amusing and addictive game, I'm not asking myself if I want to buy the full game: I'm asking myself if I should.

Donald Crowhurst

A former co-worker of mine is sailing around the world by himself. I heard this today and remembered a long-ago around-the-world solo boat race where one of the sailors faked his position, eventually going insane when he realized he might "win" and have to submit his doctored logs to close inspection.

Melissa and I went to a one-man opera about this story, and that helped me find the full story: "around the world boat race opera insane atlantic" works, but it's not as limiting as you might imagine. The racer's name was Donald Crowhurst, and here's his Wikipedia entry. At the opera, we bought A Voyage for Madmen, a book about all 9 sailors. Melissa dug it out of her bookshelf, and I added it to my soon-to-read queue.

Hopefully, my former co-worker won't suffer a similar fate. He recently completed a 37-day stretch in the South Pacific, all by himself. He's made of sterner stuff than I: I'm pretty sure that after a week or two of that life I'd be lecturing the fish on the appeal of steampunk for the modern computer lover.

Ultimate Roshambo

Paper-Rock-Scissors. Yawn.

How about Paper-Rock-Scissors-Man-Woman-Devil-Alien-Dragon-Snake, and so on for a total of 25 options (with hand symbols). I know this made the rounds a while back, but it came up at work and I thought I'd mention it here in case you haven't seen it. http://www.umop.com/rps25.htm has the details, an image of all the relationships and a linguistic chart ("Devil Tempts Woman" for instance). Try that the next time you need a tie-breaking move.

Tooooom

I don't normally do this kind of post, but this short animation is hilarious. Melissa and I have already added several lines from the story to our quote repertoire ("I had to drink all my bad milk" and "No, You!").

Full URL, since this domain wraps pages, http://www.mikeadair.com/David%27sNewSnail.swf

That's What It's All About

Zelda: Twilight Princess, one of the launch titles for the Wii console, will allow you to swing your controller to move the sword. It seemed lame that they didn't support this at E3, so I'm glad they added this most obvious use of the motion sensor in the Wii controller.

Now no sword-swinging game on the Wii will dare to ship without this functionality. (They also changed the bow and arrow motion sensor stuff, but I didn't hear if that was good or bad before.)

But the real question is: When can I pre-order the thing!

Wei-Hwa's Google Puzzles

Wei-Hwa Huang is one of the world's best puzzle solvers. He's always among the top finalists at the World Puzzle Championship, and at International Puzzle Party, he dusted his opponents in a puzzle-solving competition at one of the banquets.

He works at Google, and has been authoring a puzzle module for their personalized home page, putting up a new item each week or so. But now, you can find all the individual puzzles on his feedback page. Wei-Hwa brings a huge puzzle knowledge to bear on these Google puzzles, and they're a good way to take a break from all those other tasks you should probably be doing instead.

Testing Qumana

Fatemeh pointed a bunch of food bloggers to an offline blog editor called Qumana, and I'm testing it with this post. It's got a wysiwyg mode with common HTML tasks, along with a source mode, and it has a simple way to add tags to your post, something I always forget to do. It's a bit sluggish on my Mac, but that could be because I have a zillion apps open right now.

Curiously, it has a panel on the right for Categories, even though it knows I use Blogger, which doesn't support that feature

How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords

I just learned about this guide to solving cryptic crosswords on the National Puzzlers League website.

If you've ever tried to decipher one of these puzzles (which I prefer to the standard New York Times puzzle), you know that the clues make no sense. This is because each clue contains a literal definition and a piece of wordplay that creates the answer. Two clues for the same word should be easy, but when you don't know where one half begins and the other ends, and when you don't know which comes first, it makes the puzzle more difficult. And that's before you stumble into variety cryptics, where the rules change.

Hopefully the NPL guide will give you a leg up, if you've struggled with these in the past.

The Snail Tube

One of my favorite purchases at International Puzzle Party was Gary Foshee's "Snail Tube." It falls roughly into the "impossible object" puzzle category, where you have to determine how something was made, or how it works.

Picture a little more than a foot of thick aluminum pipe. It's an empty tube. You hold it straight up and down, and then drop a ball bearing down the tube's shaft (only slightly wider than the ball itself). The metal ball moves at a steady pace through the tube for six and a half seconds. Then it drops out the other end.

It doesn't take long to discover that the ball bearing is a strong magnet. But aluminum isn't magnetic. The ball doesn't stick to the tube's wall; it just saunters down the length of the pipe.

So how does it work?