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Entries from February 2003

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MOVED: untitled.gif orchestra (28 Feb 2003 at 13:05)

The untitled.gif orchestra has moved to iuma.com, since mp3.com is now too concerned with making money off independent musicians than it is with helping them be heard. All my other music will be moving soon, too.

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Bye-bye Mr. Rogers! (27 Feb 2003 at 12:15)

Pittsburgh's own Mr. Rogers died today.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/27/rogers.obit/index.html

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Retractor (19 Feb 2003 at 00:26)

Here's a fun chess puzzle I found. It's a retrograde analysis puzzle (my favorite kind), meaning that you have to play chess in reverse for part of it. The specification here is for white to retract one and then mate in one. That is, white must take back one move that he may have just legally made -- and then make a different move from that position to mate black.

This problem would be unremarkable except that it is a problem four times over: once you've solved the puzzle as pictured, solve it again with all of the pieces shifted up one space. The solution will be completely different, and again there will be only one way to do it. Then, solve with the pieces shifted up another space on the board -- again, a different solution. Finally, solve it a fourth time with the pieces up a final space. Minimal and clever!

Hint: Note that you can take back captures, inventing the presence of any black piece that could legally have been captured by white. Also, you should brush up on your obscure chess moves if you're not entirely confident. Since each position will have a different solution, the solutions will of course be position-dependent; since a pawn can do different things based on where he is, it's all going to be about those pawns.

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Pencil Carvings (17 Feb 2003 at 15:10)

Check out these things that people carved out of pencils!

http://www.infofreako.com/jad/pencil/0list-e.html

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Distributed Proofreaders (06 Feb 2003 at 17:46)

Distributed Proofreaders is a relatively fun but actually productive way to kill time. DP provides support for Project Gutenberg, which is a large collection (7000) of public domain books (of all sorts). At Distributed Proofreaders you look at some OCR text of a page, along with the graphic of the page, and you correct the errors that you see. So you get to read snippets of really old books (my favorite so far was a catalogue of strawberries called Success With Small Fruits), and Gutenberg (and the rest of the world) gets them archived digitally forever.

Right now there are a bunch of cool books being proofread, including HG Wells, Hans Christian Andersen, Alexandre Dumas (in French), and the Encyclopedia Britannica. They go pretty fast, though!

http://texts01.archive.org/dp/

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IOCCC 2001 (04 Feb 2003 at 14:22)

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest's 2001 winners have been published. Some year I want to enter this thing...

http://ioccc.org/years.html#2001

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mp3.com (03 Feb 2003 at 17:51)

mp3.com just changed their service again; it's no longer free to upload more than 3 songs. I hope they change their minds soon, but in any case I'll probably be moving all my stuff (hundreds of songs) to somewhere that I don't have to pay for. Any suggestions?

(15 comments — almost 15 years ago) [ comment ]

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