Larry Hosken: New: 2022

>> Here's three of my popular posts from 2021: I walked all the way around San Francisco Bay. Along the way I got to see some new-to-me parts of Richmond and a debris-removal boat in action near the n...
Book Report: On the Plain of Snakes The author traveled from the USA to Mexico. A famous author, he could access places you or I could not: Local writers gave him letters of introduction; but nobody knew what he looked like,* so he co...
>> Please enjoy these snapshots from my morning walk: New year, new me folder to set up to hold my blog pictures, please pardon my dust ♫ la la la ♫ ...
>> UPDATE: This post has been superceded. I've been playing Wordle, the online game that's like a cross between Mastermind and guess-the-word. It occurred to me that the ideal "starting word" would hav...
>> Today I got the second half of a shingles vaccine. That's not thrilling news, but when I wake up tomorrow morning with a boatload of side effects and wondering "Did the omnichrons finally get me...
>> Update: This blog post, which superceded another blog post, has since then itself been superceded. Try to keep up. Also, my "only root words" explanation wasn't quite right. Apparently, non-root wo...
>> Okay, now RAISE is my new Wordle starter word. As before, I am not the first to figure this out. Last night, I was measuring a starting word's quality based on how many green and yellow squares it yi...
Book Report: S v Z This book accompanies Tauba Auerbach's exhibit now showing at SFMoMA. It's an interesting piece of art in its own right. That's a good thing, I guess? I find myself comparing it to an earlier book d...
>> Because of the recent COVID-19 surge, I've kept my morning walks close to home. E.g., this morning I walked past this building on the hill across the street from my apartment. In other news for ...
>> Months ago, anticipating wildfire season, I ordered an air purifier from my local hardware store, along with some other stuff. But they sold their last air purifier before they could fill my order. S...
Link: ‘Epically heroic and tragic’: how a family treasure hunt ended with a son lost at sea Article in the Guardian: Hunter Lewis spent years creating the adventure, but it ended tragically when he didn’t return from preparing the final clue The searches took participants all over Humbold...
Link: "Puzzle World" Discord I joined the Puzzle World Discord, a set of chat rooms for puzzlehunt and gnarly-puzzle enthusiasts. If you're not into Mystery Hunt and peek at this Discord today, you might think "oh gee whiz maybe...
>> ♫ Big gray nemesis ♫ ♫ Bombogenesis ♫ ♫ Everybody happy ♫ ♫ As the storm blows in ♫ ...
>> Nowadays, I appreciate outdoor hot dog stands. They're very well ventilated and I can buy food unlike that I'd cook for myself. When I ran the hotdog stand at the MIT Mystery Hunt, I made more hot d...
>> Plum blossoms starting up on Hillway Ave. Not a lot so far, but they're a-comin' ...
Wrung‽ When I noticed that Wordle's list of potential answers had ARISE but not BOXED, I figured that it only used "root" words: single number, present tense, etc. But WRUNG was an answer. And now I peek at...
1 Million Steps I'm still playing that Pikmin Bloom walking-around mobile phone game. I recently hit a milestone: I've walked a million steps while playing the game. ...
Book Report: America, Inc. America, Inc is speculative fiction; but instead of the usual technology-speculation, it's organization-speculation. In the USA nowadays, corporations are people with free speech rights. This novel e...
>> Today's an election day in San Francisco. I wore my "I Voted!" sticker. On my morning exercise walk, I saw zero (0) other people wearing such stickers. I saw one (1) polling place volunteer...
>> Daily 5-dle #0007 11 : 5&8&6&11&10 polydle.github.io/?classic/daily/5 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨⬜🟨🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜...
>> a city in such decline ...
>> As I headed out on my exercise walk this morning, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. In a house garage that hosted a polling place for last week's election, there was still voting equip...
>> The COVID19 new case rate in San Francisco has been pretty low for about a week. Thus, yesterday I went to the comic book store for the first time since the omicron variant roared in. (I like comic b...
>> This morning I rode BART out to Berkeley, walked around south & west Berkeley for a bit, and caught AC Transit back. That's not super-exciting, but it is my first time getting out of town since the f...
>> I've still (occasionally) got it, as judged by my grocery store total. #1337 ...
>> When I went to the blood bank on Friday, I saw something funny: there were banners up declaring "Blood Drive Today." I wondered Why "today"? Why is today different from all other days? San Franc...
>> Oof, I'm just now finding out that large parts of fave novel Angle of Repose were plagiarized from the journals of Mary Hallock Foote. I really liked the authentic-sounding descriptions of life in th...
Book Report: Practical Doomsday Happy Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire anniversary! It's a good day to read Practical Doomsday, a guide to disaster preparedness. It's written by an author who's familiar with prepper cul...
>> It's election day in San Francisco again, the second of four this year.* I wore my "I Voted" sticker today. I didn't see anyone else with a sticker. Now that California's a 100% vote-by-mail state, m...
>> Your search "ano trespassing sign" retrieved about 365 results (0.33 seconds) ...
>> Maybe the real horror was that Alien was inspired by terran lifeforms. ...
>> If your memory is very good, you might remember there was a TV crew getting footage at the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. Specifically, I dodged around that crew as I carried pancakes at the Pancake Pictiona...
>> The handy service that automatically tweets my blog posts failed to authenticate to Twitter last night. So I took some time this morning to blearily poke at settings. Maybe it works now? I guess to f...
Book Report: Unix (a History and Memoir) Brian Kernighan wrote some remembrances of his time working on Unix-y things at Bell Labs. Some of it was new to me; some I'd already read elsewhere. (When I think about the timing, I suspect that th...
>> I got my second COVID-19 vaccine booster today. I didn't get this second booster as soon as it was available; I waited a bit. UCSF medical smartie Bob Wachter advised older folks to get their se...
>> Wow, that's the fifth email from the San Francisco Department of Elections asking me if I'll volunteer at the polls June 7th. Usually they email me just once per election. When someone from the ...
>> Eric Harshbarger made another desk out of Lego. There are pictures and progress videos. One of the videos also has a cat. ...
Book Report: Stolen Skies It's another novel by Tim Powers, who writes speculative fiction with the plotline What if this weird real-life event because that silly legend is true? They're good books. But when reading this book...
>> I'm filling in my ballot, scrolling through the California Voter Information Guide and got distracted by the candidate statements for California's Board of Equalization, 4th District (southern Cal). ...
>> Genius ...
>> The Collaborative Word List Project is a darned useful resource for word puzzle constructors and now it's free.* This is a list of phrases and hand-tuned scores. Here are a few lines from the file: ...
Thr33dle I made Thr33dle, a version of 3-Polydle with an auto-suggest function. That's a strange statement with a lot to unpack. In the past few months, I've played a lot of Polydle, a Wordle variant tha...
>> San Francisco, a city in decline (if you're walking downhill (which I was)) ...
>> When the apartment building repairperson was un-blocking my kitchen sink drain, he asked, "When did your garbage disposal stop working?" And I confidently answered "Wha– It works fine." I knew ...
>> Some gold-color sidewalk chalk art for the golden ratio. Willard Street, San Francisco, USA. ...
>> ...
>> I walked a mile (the wrong way) along the San Francisco Marathon this morning. ...
Book Report: Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties CW: police violence It's a survey of 1960s Los Angeles radical politics. This is a long book; Los had so much radical politics back then. As you read the history, you find out why there was so much...
>> I'm progressing nicely in that Pikmin Bloom walk-around-with-your-phone game. I've walked over 2.5 million steps, yes indeed. ...
>> I joined a couple more social networks, WT.social and cohost. I guess when E1on Mսsk threatened to buy Twitter, people started looking for places to go next. Thus, new socials popped up on my RADAR. ...
>> I updated that Bewordled game, the one where you swap tiles to make words kinda like Bejewelled but with words. Now it looks prettier with firecracker emojis and clouds. After I updated it, it occurr...
>> I updated the big ol' list of words and the big ol' list of phrases on the Phraser page. A couple of months back, I noticed that The Collaborative Word List Project was now free. I've used the C.W....
>> Ah yes, San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood is full of easygoing hippies… …and then there's this guy. I saw this notice taped up on someone's house. Someone from San Franci...
>> "The California Department of Housing and Community Development said Tuesday that it would focus on San Francisco for its first ever 'housing policy and practice review,' a process that will dissect...
>> San Francisco is getting new public trash bin enclosures. There are a few designs up for consideration. I visited one design today. It just plain didn't work. When folks tried to throw out their tras...
>> In the recent San Francisco District Attorney recall election, we found out many San Franciscans thought the D.A. has a lot more leeway than was true. And then there's this guy: ...
>> As I walked in San Francisco's panhandle neighborhood this morning, I saw an ambulance named "Krakenwagen" decorated with kraken (sea monster) art. This vehicle is a pun. "Krakenwagen" is german...
Krakenwagen update: Searchers more rigorous than me found a couple of better online pix of the krakenwagen (small pics here, click a pic for link to original). Thanks to Ray Ryan and Dan Egnor for finding these an...
>> I walked past the krakenwagen again and took better photos this time. ...
Book Report: Imagine That! It's the autobiography of Ed Smith, one of the first African-American people to work in electronics design, video games, and personal computers. Dude grew up in a then-bad neighborhood and seemed des...
>> On my morning exercise walk, I saw SFFD ladder trucks doing some sort of rescue on 17th Street. 17th Street is pretty steep; it's easy to remember it's 17% steep (though not that steep on the block w...
crunching IMDB data IMDB, the Internet Movie DataBase, has a lot of information about movies, TV shows, actors, directors, gaffers, animators, etc. I just crunched some exported IMDB data to build a crossword dictionary...
>> I'm feeling lucky. Just days after I figured out how to extract a list of titles of well-known movies and TV shows from IMDB data, today's Toddle puzzle category is movie titles. Toddle challenges y...
>> Maybe a secret message; maybe a wild goose chase, I dunno: I saw this sign hanging behind a door on Douglass Street near 18th: If you dig up your trusty puzzlehunter's decoder sheet and start r...
>> A little model house appeared in Golden Gate Park near the 19th Ave & Lincoln entrance, by the fence of the Arboretum. It sits atop a… stump? Do I call it a stump if it's taller than ...
>> Got my #FluShot. Forgot to take a selfie, tho. ...
>> Thank you Google Books for clearing up the burning questions on common English usage, e.g. is there a space in "backasswards"? (Answer: sometimes, but mostly no.) I usually say "bass ackwards" b...
>> It's kind of a cute error message. I liked it until I remembered I encountered the error while trying to contact On Trac for assistance. ...
>> I've had a good time playing the word puzzle game Cell Tower at https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/cell-tower/ ...
Milestone: 39 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 39 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
>> On this morning's exercise-walk, I took pictures of some things that seemed out-of-place. Not every out-of-place thing is bad; most quite the opposite. ...
phraser improvements Phraser, the tool for generating word+phrase lists useful for solving+designing puzzles, is now smarter when reading crossword constructor dictionaries. Thus, hundreds of thousands of words+phrases g...
Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a three-word English phrase. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. The artist gave me four ...
>> If you were stumped by that "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzle, it wasn't just you. The puzzle page now has a hint button. Press that button for a hint. ...
>> On my morning walk, the stretch of Haight Street by Buena Vista Park was being taken over by movie-production people. The big signs said Dust Bunny but the smaller permission notices said PYM product...
>> If you were still stumped by that Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle despite the hint, there is now a Reveal Answer button on the page. ...
>> I randomly encountered Jeffrey Oldham in the park today. I was surprised to see him since it wasn't election day. We know each other from work, but in recent years we've met on election day. Jeffrey'...
>> There's a new art installation up by JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park. When I first saw it, I thought "It's too bad my puzzlehunt-addled brain's going to spend the rest of the day trying to find a messa...
>> It's been many years since the 2-Tone Game, but when I catch sight of a checkerboard in the corner of my eye, I can't help but size things up for puzzle potential. E.g. this mural this morning. What'...
Applying for a USA passport online My new passport just arrived, yay! I successfully applied for it online, using the experimental new system. tl;dr the system messed up my picture the first couple of tries. I made little tweaks to th...
Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle 2022-10-10 This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a two-word name. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. Can you guess the original phra...
>> If you stared at Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle and still couldn't figure out the answer, you'll be glad to know it now has a Reveal Answer button. I'm just impressed because my paren...
>> Bivalent vaccine selfie: (I applied the circly photo filter because all my vaccine selfies were starting to look the same.) ...
>> In the upcoming election, San Francisco Proposition D defines "affordable" housing in a way that surprised me, but made sense when I looked up California state law. Prop D makes allowances...
Polytechnic Way San Francisco has a new commemorative street, Polytechnic Way. It's named for Polytechnic High School, which you probably haven't heard of. That school is defunct now, its main building torn dow...
Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle 2022-10-24 This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, two words. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. Can you guess the original phrase? If...
San Francisco California Election Notes I filled in my ballot. I'll point out a few propositions where researching the details changed my mind. California Props [26 | 27]: allow sports betting administered by [native Californian tribes | ...
>> Surfwords is an intense word game. I'm enjoying it so far… in short doses, because it's intense. ...
>> Last year, I spotted some Hallowe'en riddle decorations at a neighbor's house. Alas, I didn't spot them until after Hallowe'en, too late to be useful. So this year, I'll post a link back to my last-y...
>> If you were stumped by Monday's "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzle, you'll be glad to know it now has a "reveal answer" button. ...
Laberinto Verde: floreciendo Folks continue to decorate the car-free portion of JFK Drive Promenade. There's a new road mural, Laberinto Verde: floreciendo by Josué Rojas, assisted by Anthony Jiminez. I suppose to really ca...
>> All the cool kids are downloading their Twitter data lest the amazingly-even-less-competent new leadership breaks everything. So I downloaded my Twitter data. I have more than 700 thousand ...
Hallowe'en Haunt ♫ Oh I don't want no more of that carnie life / Gee Mom, I want to go home ♫ From now until 2100 tonight it's Hallowe'en Haunt on JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park. I saw people setting up som...
Mumbled Artist's Instructions 2022-10-31 This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a three-word English phrase. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard. The artist gave me four ...
>> Not sure if the orange blob on this stump is a mushroom that grew in the rain; or a pile of candy corn left out in the rain by discerning litterbug trick-or-treaters. ...
>> If Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle stumped you, you'll be glad to know there's now a "reveal answer" button. ...
>> I signed up for Patreon. I have a list of blogs+feeds I follow. Some of these have associated Patreons, but I'm too lazy to go over the whole list by hand. Hey, gimme a break; it's a long list! Is ...
>> I've been doing some small-data tinkering, putting together a dashboard to answer my recurring question: are the COVID levels in San Francisco low enough such that I can go to the supermarket in pers...
>> Spotted on my walk this morning: ladybug deco on this column (painted by fnnch) Ha ha ha, see it's funny because I said "spotted" and ladybugs have spots. ...
>> I just went through the emotional rollercoaster of watching someone solve a puzzle live on video. It was a puzzle I helped write, so I was pretty much either yelling "no no no" or breathing "whew!" t...
Poll Clerking 2022 Friends, I have a tale of luxury and decadence. November 8, 2022, I once again volunteered as a poll clerk for a San Francisco election. Though California was a vote-by-mail state, it had only been ...
>> Some Twitter executives resigned last night; specifically execs who make sure that users' private information stays private. So, long story short, I deleted my Twitter account. Short story long: ...
>> Some days back, I mentioned I was tinkering with a little San Francisco COVID dashboard, calculating the risk of going to the supermarket vs getting groceries delivered. Since then, I learned more ab...
>> Can't look away ...
Mumbled Artist's Instructions 2022-11-14 This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a two-word English phrase. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard and came up with this: ...
>> If Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle was too difficult, I have good news: There is now a "reveal answer" button. ...
>> A few weeks back, I blogged a picture of the road mural Laberinto Verde: floreciendo. It was hard to figure the mural out from my picture; it's a big mural on the ground; so my on-the-ground picture ...
Nick's Labyrinth I continued my morning exercise walk past Laberinto Verde: floreciendo and in amongst some trees I bumped into a new-to-me labyrinth. And when I search the web for it, I don't find anything. I guess ...
>> Lately I wrote some "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzle in which I tell an AI drawing program some weird drawing instructions like "shutter panned ants," post the artwork, and challenge folks to g...
>> Someone was asking me what they do with the Golden Gate Park pianos on JFK Promenade at night. They put piano covers on them: ...
Mumbled Artist's Instructions Puzzle 2022-11-21 This is a puzzle. I gave an artist some instructions, a two-word English comic book title. Alas, I mumbled those instructions and the artist did their best to depict what they heard and came up with ...
Leviathan by Jason Shiga I enjoyed the puzzle book Leviathan by Jason Shiga. It's a sort of choose-your-own-adventure comic book. (Shiga's made other such CYOA comics before, you might remember Meanwhile… from some years bac...
>> If Monday's Mumbled Artist's Instructions puzzle was too hard, good news: there is now a "reveal answer" button. ...
>> I have set up an account on the social network post.news. If you're also on post.news, let me know so I can follow you. If you're not already there, I'm not necessarily encouraging you to join right ...
>> It was good to see these people again. Let's hope those test negatives were true ones. ...
>> Looks like that Entwined light-up art installation is coming back to the Peacock Meadow in San Francisco (as has been noted elsewhere). ...
>> Every so often, you stumble upon something that reminds you how much more is going on in San Francisco than you know about. ...
>> In theory, the "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzles were a challenge to figure out some absurd thing an AI had tried to draw. Reverse-engineering an AI is a fun challenge. But it turns out AI is ...
>> Did you ever find out about a new-to-you API and immediately know what you wanted to use it for? ...
>> ...
>> When I walked through Golden Gate Park, the carnies were setting up Jingle All the Way, also known as the San Francisco tree lighting ceremony and official lighting up of the Entwined artificial tree...
Democratic Primary, a.k.a. Shooting Themselves in the Foot You may recall a couple of years back I blogged about "electability," specifically, if a USA political party wants to pick an electable candidate, they should listen to voters in states that are medi...
>> You can use the Give2SF program to donate your private $$ to San Francisco's public services. You direct your funds to different pieces of the government. E.g., you can direct some to "COVID-19 ...
rephrased Phraser word+phrase lists I updated the scored word and phrase lists over at the phraser page, using data from a recent copies of Wikipedia and other wikis. Soon after I updated them, I saw that my over-enthusiastic tool tha...
>> Some weeks back, I set up a dashboard of San Francisco COVID-19 data. It showed data that was already available elsewhere, but zoomed in near the low end of the graph. I wanted a graph that I could g...
>> I see the New York Times Guild is going on strike tomorrow and puzzle nerds are realizing they can't play Wordle (assuming they don't want to cross the picket line to play with puzzles). I'll post li...
>> If you're on tumblr and I know you and I don't already follow you, let me know so I can follow you. Or you can follow me. Or whatever. As Twitter continues to implode, I noticed some artistic types ...
>> Oof. San Francisco's Elections Director got caught helping a vendor sell their voting equipment to the city. The Director's contract is nearly up and the SF Election Commission wants to search for a ...
>> Yesterday, my phone's camera app updated. Today, it crashes when I attempt to pinch-to-zoom. It turns out I pinch-to-zoom a lot; I guess it's my go-to move. In theory, I could still use my camera for...
>> What if "Ballard" wasn't just a Seattle neighborhood but also a word for a ball-shaped bollard? ...
>> As Twitter continues to implode, people move from Twitter to Mastodon. If you're moving from Twitter to Mastodon, there are tools that look over the list of accounts you follow on Twitter, finds thei...
>> W- were they on sale? Suddenly ballards are all over Golden Gate Park. (Pictured: Ballard, ballard, ballard. Bollards, ballard. Ballard, barrier, ballard. Ballard, barrier, ballard.) Oh...
J M dot O As Twitter continues to implode, it's preventing folks from posting their Mastodon addresses. Thus, if you're looking to move from Twitter to Mastodon, you might not know where your friends are, or h...
>> I am learning more about things javascript can do in the browser, without using a computer server. Like when a web page tells you to upload a picture, I assumed that the web page had to save that pic...
>> Oh cool, the city set up a Men's World Cup viewing party on JFK Promenade so the local soccer fans could watch on the big screen without swapping air. In case you're wondering "since when does L...
>> My latest innovation in recipes for the easily distracted: the latke bowl. Are you tired of carefully flipping over your latkes, making sure they don't splash oil on your stove? Ugh, that requires to...
>> In San Francisco these days, you want to toss plastic bags in the trash, not in the recycling bin. This was news to me. I knew that plastic bags get tangled up in other things in the recycling bin, m...
>> There was a grocery delivery mixup and now I kinda feel like I've been challenged to prepare a meal featuring a surprise mystery ingredient. ...
>> On this day between rains, I walked in a strangely lush Golden Gate Park. Today, one could pretend San Francisco wasn't dealing with a drought on top of everything else. ...