Source: How About a Nice Game of Chess?

Part 1: Generate a series of hashes: MD5(salt + index). For each hash starting with five zeros, write down the sixth character.

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Source: Security Through Obscurity¹

Part 1: A room is described as a name, a sector ID, and a checksum as follows:

aaaaa-bbb-z-y-x-123[abxyz]

name: aaaaa-bbb-z-y-x
sector ID: 123
checksum: abxyz

A room is valid if the checksum contains the five most common letters if the name (ties broken alphabetically).

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Source: Squares With Three Sides

Part 1: Given a list of sides, determine how many form valid triangles. (Hint: triangle inequality)

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Source: Bathroom Security

Part 1: Take a keypad with the following layout:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

Using the instructions UDLR for Up, Down, Left, and Right respectively, move a ‘finger’ around over the keypad. At the end of each line of instructions, output the current digit.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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