Journal

Journal

LinkedIn Daily Games

Ramen Junkie 1 Comment

A lot of people like to play brain games, and while Crosswords have been popular for a while, Wordle really popularized the whole “Once Daily” craze for online games a few years ago. I have done Wordle, and a ton of variations on Wordle. I did Sudoku for a while. I was even doing Crosswords for a bit. Currently, my go to is the daily LinkedIn Games.

They are in the app, they may be on the web too, I don’t know, I don’t look at the website. Hell, I don’t even really look at the app except to play the 5 games they have.

Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about these games for a bit, and what I think it means for my own thoughts processes. They more or less fall into two categories, word games, and special games. I am pretty good at all of them, but very good at the special games.

Crossclimb

Sort of a crossword like game, you have a series of words all of the same length, with clues for each word. But the trick is, the end result will be words that can be ordered in a way that only one letter changes.

So the one this morning had something like, “Ice turning to water” and “To get with another person” as clues.

Melt and Meet.

You have to arrange the words though, so one clue in between might be “To lose feathers”, Molt, which would come above.

I typically average half the average time on this puzzle daily. You get two hints, for a single letter or a full word, each has a cool down. It can be useful to just accept the idea of using these when younger really stuck, though I don’t use them often.

A better strategy is to just move on, then see where you have gaps in your arrangement to get clues.

Like the above examples, maybe you can’t get Melt, but you have Molt and Meet. Well, the M and T are common, so there is likely at least one word in between those, because two letters changed. It would take “two hops”. This also means you can conclude it’s either ME_T or M_LT or MO_T or M_ET. You basically have 4 words to try to sus out the answer from.

Pinpoint

Definitely weakest game, but probably not for being bad at it. You get 5 clues to find the common denominator. The first two tend to be really obscure, most of the time.its obvious by the 3rd, and the last word is usually very obvious.

My problem tends to be, I get too abstract with the connection and expect them to all be really obscure like the first clue sometimes is.

Today has Wet, Boiler, Bathing, Three Piece…

I guessed Slippery (when wet), Room (Wet Room, Boiler Room), Water (all are water things), Bathing Suit (which was wrong) but the answer was simply “Suit”.

It’s notable, that this is the only puzzle you can actual fail. All of the others just get a larger and larger timer, and as far as I can tell, the timer is unlimited.

Zip

This is a newer one, its kind of interesting, I am super good at it. Like I said, I am really great at the “special” puzzles.

You have a grid with a sequence of numbers laid across it, sometimes there are walls. Not every square has a number, it’s usually either 6 or 8 at the max. You have to start at 1, and connect the numbers in order, while also filling in all the squares.

You have to be able to get them in order, sometimes this means doing some zig zag to pick up blocks, also, you have to be able to see ahead a bit since you may need to leave a path to get a later number.

They feel pretty easy, but I find it fun to do and almost always get it in the 10-20 second range with 0-2 backtracks.

Tango

I want to like Tango more, but I am not sure what could really be changed to make it more enjoyable. The object is, you have a grid each row and column has 3 each of a sun or a moon. You can’t have more than two in a row of any symbol. There are sometimes indicators like = or x that means that two blocks must be equal or opposites.

Sometimes they replace the symbols for holidays. The final four used Basketball teal mogos, which honestly kind of fucked up my ability to logic, I think maybe the problem was the colors were sort of reverse from normal.

Every game of Tango feels like it’s either just, filling in a chain of obvious drops. Or, you make one guess in the right spot, usually one of the = or x nodes, and then fill in the logic chain until you hit a dead end or win. If you hit a dead end, clear the board, and start with the opposite.

Queens

Saving the best for last, I actually went looking for a place to JUST play Queens puzzles. I should try to program up something to generate them maybe.

It’s kind of a Sudoku style game.

For queens, you have a grid, it has several continuous colored sections or irregular shapes. They can be as small as one square. The object is to put a Queen crown in every colored section, but also, only one in each row and column

So you start with obvious singles. You also can eliminate some for anything that is a row.

The real trick to being quick as these is eliminating “large rows”. Say every color intersects the two middle rows. But two of the colors, exist entirely in the middle rows. You can eliminate two rows now from every other color except those two. Each row, has to be one of those two colors, because those colors can’t be placed anywhere else. These can be 2, 3,4 whatever high, though they become less useful if it’s 4 and are about useless if it’s 5, aside from maybe now you have 3 colors in the opposite set that makes a “large row”.

Another one is to catch where placing a crown eliminates a color completely, which can make choosing easy sometimes. If you have a 2 block nestles inside a 3 block “L”, you know it’s not going to be the “inside” box because you would remove all the spaces from the 3 block “L”. For example.

You run these “filters” across rows and columns and it makes a lot of the solutions become clear.

You do occasionally have to just guess and go for it. And after a while even when guessing, you might end up with no place to put a crown, but you have a good “feel” for how to adjust.

I usually win these very fast, within 20 seconds usually.

Journal

A Brick of Coffee

Ramen Junkie 1 Comment

Let’s do a “boring post”.

I bought a coffee brick. It’s not fancy, it came from Aldi. Hell, it’s possible this is the “least fancy” way to make coffee. Most of the time these days I buy beans and hand grind them, but I like to keep alternatives in case I am feeling lazy.

So I decided to try the “brick coffee”.

I was not sure what to expect here at all. Would I need to cut slices off and grind them up? Would I need some sort of other thing I didn’t have, how do I store it between uses?

So, as my kettle was warming, I set about opening it up. The packaging was a bit stubborn, and I ended up having to cut it open with some scissors and…

It’s… Basically just… Ground coffee… Shaped like a brick?

Kind of disappointing honestly. I wanted special tools to be involved.

There was a very satisfying “hisssss” when the package pressure was released, so it had that going for it.

The packaging suggested 1 tbsp per 6oz, and my French Press is roughly 32oz. I did some math and came up with “about 2/3rds cup of coffee. Which is more than I normally use, but I went for it anyway

Once the water was boiling, I poured some in and finished up with some other things around the kitchen while waiting the 5 minutes for it to steep.

For storage of the rest of the grounds, there was enough give in the package now to just use a regular bag clip.

The end result was, fairly strong, taste wise. Probably more because of how much coffee I had used. It was powerful enough to overpower my normal creamer flavor.

Overall though, I think I will stick to my coffee beans.

Journal Linux & Open Source

Linux Post Install Clean-Up

Ramen Junkie No Comments

So, now that I’ve returned to Linux again, I’ve come across several sort of, clean-up tasks that needed to be completed to get things working fully.  A lot of my activities are, by design, machine agnostic.  That is to say, they run off “the cloud”, either through a service or something I am hosting.

One big one I use is One Drive.  I don’t NEED one drive running locally, but it’s convenient and nice to have.  Aside from just syncing and backing up all my writing through it, I also use it to do things like, sync blog graphics files and screen shots.  I’ve found this One Drive Linux Client, which seems promising, I’ve gotten it set up easily enough, but I have not quite worked out how to get it fully working with a selective sync.  I don’t need everything off my One Drive, and don’t have the drive space for that anyway.  So this one is pending a bit.

That hasn’t really slowed me down, I already also use GitHub for a lot of my writing as a secondary place with versioning, etc.  I made sure everything was up to date in Windows, then did a pull from the three remote repositories I care about, my Journal, my Digital Notes library, and my Web Clips library.  I made a few updates and made sure I had the workflow down for keeping things synced.  This also prompted the creation of a simple script to push everything at once.

#!/bin/bash  
git add -A  
git commit -m "Updated via Simple CLI Push"  
git push

I thought about adding the option to add a custom commit message, but these are all private repositories so I don’t really care about what the commit messages are. I also added this to the shell so I can just run it with “gitpush” from anywhere.

This also meant properly setting up SSH keys in Github, so I could actually pull the libraries. I also realized I would need to set up my SSH Keypairs for my web server space, which wasn’t hard but was mildly inconvenient because account based SSH is disabled. The simple solution was to reenable it using the Digital Ocean console, add the keys, then disable it again.

Probably the biggest hassle I had was getting the two NTFS partitions, one on the old primary Windows Drive, and a second on the same physical secondary drive as the system. I mostly use this drive for “working files”. Ebooks to read, monthly file dumps off my phone, programming projects, etc.

It’s just files.

I could manually mount both drives when I started, but any reboot would unmount them. I went out and looked up the fstab settings to use, and had no luck. In fact, I had the opposite of luck because at one point, I couldn’t mount the secondary storage drive at all in Linux. Only in Windows. I tried many options in both OSes, and finally just, backed everything up and wiped the partition in favor of a native ext4 format.

Since I had all this space now anyway, I remapped my /home/ folder to it, which is kind of good practice anyway, then copied everything from the old working files drive into a folder in my own home folder.

This ended up being a weird hassle too, because at one point I had “pre copied” the working files, before the migration, only to discover they had vanished when the /home/ folder was moved. I think what was happening, was they were not part of the encrypted blob, so the system simply, ignored them. So I had to unmount everything, reboot, which failed because now there are no user settings, drop to a recovery console, move the files OUT of the personal home folder, remount it all, then copy the files, again, from inside the OS, so they would receive the proper encryption and show up properly.

What a hassle, but it’s done.

The only real missing element here is that my copy of Affinity Photo is only licensed for Windows, so I’ll need to buy the Linux version. I don’t mind, I have been meaning to upgrade to version 2 anyway. I think Version 2 even has a new sytle liscence that is OS agnostic.

Another last one I’d like to do is automount the network shares from my NAS and file server on boot, if present. I don’t always use the laptop at home though, which means this could be weird when it can’t access them. But I also have an Open VPN tunnel to get to my home network, so there is probably a way to set it up in a way that connects through that always.

Journal

On the Doing of the Things

Ramen Junkie No Comments

Long time no post, or, sort of, I have been posting on Lameazoid as part of Blaugust, but even that has sort of fallen apart completely. I wasn’t planning to do the full 31 days, then it just started happening, but then it just… wasn’t.

I think mostly I have just still been in a weird funk lately and I was sort of shaking it for posting but not really. I have also been busy off and on with life stuff. My wife and daughter have rented a shop space. My daughter is opening a vintage shop in the front half, something she has wanted to do for a while, and they will be able to run all their online sales stuff from the back and be better organized and productive with it.

The shop isn’t open but there is a website full of links for the online stuff at RTThrift.com.

The shop itself has needed a bit of clean up and work to get set up, and though they have been doing a lot of that, I still get recruited to do things like, haul hundreds of totes from storage to the shop, and sand the entire upstairs with an upright floor sander. Let me tell you, using that thing was surprisingly fun. Highly recommended.

It’s heavy as fuck though, bring a friend to lift it into the car, even if you split it into two-pieces like we discovered in time for the return trip.

There has already been a lot of interest in it through the locals in town promoting it coming and people we talked to at one of our many garage sales.

For my various hobbies I write about here instead of there, There hasn’t been much exciting going on.i have not done any code or electronics projects recently, like blogging, this whole endless funk has me slacking on learning and other things. I have been listening to a ton of music, but nothing I had any impulse to write about.

The garden is going pretty meh, both my lemon and lime trees died, and I am barely getting any peppers or cherry tomatoes. And no regular tomatoes. My basil and oregano aren’t doing great. My mint is going pretty gangbusters but I don’t really know what to do with it. I mostly planted it as a pest deterrent.

I do have a fun Kickstarter device finally shipping that I will have to write about once I receive it and get a chance to play with it some.

I will also add that it’s not really writing that I am down on, just blogging. I have been writing personal journals to Joplin pretty regularly. It’s just not stuff I intend to share.

Journal

This Year’s Garden

Ramen Junkie No Comments

I meant to post when I planted but did not because, “reasons.” More specifically, a lack of motivation to do so. It’s not exactly anything impressive anyway, but that isn’t really supposed to matter anyway. My 2024 gardening is underway, and if it’s anything like the past several years, it will not be very fruitful.

At our old house, we had a pretty decent garden. I built a nice tiered raised bed pyramid thing, we grew plenty of peppers and tomatoes and the plants were super large and full. We had so many tomatoes we made a ton of salsa and I think I still have hot peppers frozen somewhere, though I doubt they are any good years later now.

The new house has been, not so successful. We get a lot more backyard animals here, and generally speaking, they eat all the fruits and vegetables. We have tried a few things to discourage it from keeping them up high on the back deck, to rubber snakes and other things.

I am trying again this year. I moved all of the plants (everything is is pots or buckets) down to the lower deck area, the pots still have the useless rubber snakes. I put my wind chimes down there as well, I am hoping the noise deters the animals a bit. In the past, we could not really use this lower area because we had our dog outside down there fairly often and she would get into things. She passed away a few years ago (like 20 years old, we thought she was immortal). So the lower area is available.

Anyway, also for deterrent, I have planted a bunch of garlic in the bottoms of all the pots, and a few mint plants in small pots nearby. Both are supposed to deter animals due to the smell, or so I hear.

As for what, it’s nothing super fancy, a tomato plant, a cherry tomato plant, a green pepper plant, a poblano pepper plant. I also have some oregano and basil. I also had a cilantro plant but something has already come along and snatched it up completely. Most of the plants I picked up from a sale at the local college agriculture building. They did not have any mint there though so I picked those up at the Kroger. They were conveniently on sale in the vegetable department later the same day I had gone to the college sale.

I also had my leftover plants from last year. Sadly, none of those had made it. We took them inside for the winter but they don’t seem to be coming back at all. Something took and ate my oregano and basil from last year anyway. I also had a Lemon and a Lime tree I had bought on clearance at the end of the summer last year. Both just seem to be dead sticks still.

I don’t have enough plants to make any huge batches of salsa or anything, but hopefully I can start getting some vegetables to eat occasionally.

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