Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Free the keys! The Dvorak Zine is a handy introduction to the One True Keyboard Layout. Your wrists will thank you…

I feel like I should provide content. Here’s a cool video game preview from YouTube:

Spore is a Sim Everything game—from amoeba to galactic conquest to fanfic. Read more about it from the NYT.

The Sudoku Variant of the Day is Hanidoku, which I discovered at Michael Mepham’s Daily Sudoku site. Hanidoku uses a hex-based board instead of a grid. As a longtime sudoku variant addict, I thought I’d start with the Moderate example, but it turned out to be pretty hard for a beginner.

There’s a whole site devoted to Hanidoku already with a daily HaniDoku, hints, and free Hanidoku software. You can also find some quick hints in this discussion thread.

I can’t resist blogging about weird new sudoku variants and the perpetual accident that is the T, so the blog is back. The website is also back at the ficml.org domain, although some links may be broken.

More news to follow at a more decent hour.

As of this post, the blog is officially petrified. I don’t have WordPress running here at freeshell.org; instead I have static copies of all the pages up for future reference. Future news will be posted in my LiveJournal, I suppose: jemimap.livejournal.com.

I was doing a database backup in order to upgrade WordPress to the latest and greatest when I saw that my hosting service will be closing up shop on July 31st. So instead of upgrading, I closed all comments to keep the spammers at bay for the interim.

Where will I go? What will I do?

I haven’t been blogging much lately, so I may just close down the blog and slink back to freeshell.org, my former host. They have some PHP support now, or so I hear (but not a free database for WordPress).

Sudoku Online now has a color version of their Jigsaw Sudoku of the Day. They also have a version with candidates, which is to say, the numbers 1 through 9 cluttering up the empty squares, and some examples of Jigsaw Samurai Sudoku.

Miss Snark is damn mad about a scam artist scamming an ISP into taking down a list of scam artists. Jim Hines recommends a google-bombing in response, so here’s the appropriate link to the scam artist from SFWA’s Top Twenty list: Barbara Bauer.

All’s fair in love and snark…

Update: Follow the fun with the Barbara Bauer Technorati tag.

Happy birthday to Jerie!

I downloaded GrandPerspective on a whim, and ended up finding and deleting about 3 GB of cruft from my hard drive. There’s no Universal Binary yet, but then who’s had an Intel Mac long enough to fill it with large, forgotten files that have to be tracked down and deleted with a graphical disk usage viewer?