AoC 2016 Day 2: Pin Typer

2016-12-02

Source: Bathroom Security

Part 1: Take a keypad with the following layout:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

AoC 2016 Day 1: Taxicab Simulator

2016-12-01

Source: No Time for a Taxicab

Part 1: Starting at 0,0 and given a string of L# / R# to turn left / right and move # squares, where do you end up?

Solving Loop Puzzles

2016-07-14

A quick puzzle from Daily Programmer:

∞ Loop is a mobile game that consists of nm tiles, placed in a nm grid. There are 16 different tiles:

┃, ━, ┏, ┓, ┛, ┗, ┣, ┳, ┫, ┻, ╋, ╹, ╺, ╻, ╸, ' '.

The objective is to create a closed loop: every pipe must have another tile facing it in the adjacent tile — for example if some tile has a pipe going right, its adjacent tile to the right must have a pipe going left.

The most straightforward solution is a hybrid combination of constraints and backtracking, similar to what I did when solving Takuzu and tile puzzles.

Mirror iTunes playlists to Spotify

2016-06-22

At the moment, I have an Apple Music subscription. It’s great to be able to listen to more or less whatever music I want to. I switched from Spotify because they were missing a few artists that I actually did want to listen to. Unfortunately, there are a few things that Apple Music doesn’t do that I would like to have–chief among them the ability to play on a Roku.

One nice thing that Spotify does have though is a fairly powerful API: Spotify Web API. Inspired by a post on Spotify and billboard.py which automatically creates Spotify playlists from the Billboard music ranking charts, I decided to write up a script that can sync my playlists from iTunes to Spotify.

Parsing Motorola Surfboard stats

2016-06-04

A few weeks ago, I was having some pretty bad problems with my internet randomly hanging. Given that I’m now working from home, that wasn’t exactly the most optimal of situations to find myself in, so I decided to dig a bit deeper. After a bit of looking, I found myself at my cable modem’s built in web page:

(This is after I fixed my problem. The values aren’t perfect but they’re much better.)

Automatically uploading files

2016-06-03

Quick post today. I was working on a website where I have a live server running the code on another machine. I wanted to write a quick script that would copy any files I changed to the remote machine. This is something you can do automatically in most IDEs, but I wanted something both a bit lighter weight and to have the excuse to write something myself.

Audiobooks to Podcasts

2016-02-26

I’ve recently started to listen to audiobooks again (The Aeronaut’s Windlass). If you buy books through Audible or some other setup that has their own app, it’s a straight forward enough process. On the other hand, if you have them on CD and want to play them on a mobile device… It’s a little more interesting.

I tried a few different apps that purport to do exactly what I wanted: import an audiobook as a folder full of MP3s and play them, but none that quite meet what I wanted. Since I also listen to a lot of podcasts and have more than one podcast app that I really like (I’ve used and liked both Downcast and Pocket Casts), I decided to see if I couldn’t use one of those as an audiobook player.

Command line unicode search

2016-01-06

Similar to Monday’s post about command line emoji search, I often find myself wanting to look up Unicode characters. I have a custom search engine / bookmark set up in Chrome / Firefox (uni %s maps to http://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=%s&.submit=Submit&subs=1). That actually works great, but given how relatively much of my day I spend on the command line, I thought it would be interesting to do something there:

$ uni delta
⍋	apl functional symbol delta stile
⍙	apl functional symbol delta underbar
⍍	apl functional symbol quad delta
≜	delta equal to
Δ	greek capital letter delta
δ	greek small letter delta
ẟ	latin small letter delta
ƍ	latin small letter turned delta
𝚫	mathematical bold capital delta
𝜟	mathematical bold italic capital delta
𝜹	mathematical bold italic small delta
𝛅	mathematical bold small delta
𝛥	mathematical italic capital delta
𝛿	mathematical italic small delta
𝝙	mathematical sans-serif bold capital delta
𝞓	mathematical sans-serif bold italic capital delta
𝞭	mathematical sans-serif bold italic small delta
𝝳	mathematical sans-serif bold small delta
ᵟ	modifier letter small delta

Command line emoji search

2016-01-04

Sometimes, I find myself wanting to communicate in emoji.

🐔

How about this:

$ emoji chicken
🐔

$ emoji "which came first, the 🐔 or the 🥚"
which came first, the 🐔 or the 🍳

Advent of Code: Day 25

2015-12-25

Source

Part 1: Take the relation:

F(n) = \left\{\begin{matrix} 20151225 & \textrm{if}\ n = 1 \\ 252533F(n-1) \mod 33554393 & \textrm{otherwise} \end{matrix}\right.

Arrange the values according to Cantor's diagonal argument. Find the value at a specific cell.