Following on from a previous post, I wanted to explore what effect various kinds of strategies for solving Wordle have on how quickly you solve it. So I implemented Wordle in python, and then spent a while trying to find a good word list to use as a basis. Now, I know that you can inspect the Wordle page itself and find the list of words it uses for validating real words and the list of wordle answers, but I don’t want to use that list, so I made my own. Read more

In response to some discussion on twitter, I dug into how common different letters are at different positions in a word. Since the discussion was prompted by the popular word game Wordle the focus was on five letter words. My approach was to download a word list from the first google hit for word list download, and then throw python’s Counter module at it. from collections import Counter # Download a wordlist such as the one available here: # https://github. Read more

NFTs are all the rage these days, but I’m here to tell you about the next big thing. But first, let’s talk about what’s wrong with NFTs. NFTs – Non-Fungible Tokens – give you a way to secure ownership over a hyperlink to an image. That ownership is secured by its being stored in a ledger, and that ledger is decentralised and cryptographically secure. Now, that’s a really exciting prospect, but there are problems. Read more

There’s a lot of stuff in the default emacs modeline, particularly once you start adding a bunch of useful minor modes like show-paren-mode, smartparens-mode, aggressive-indent-mode, which-key, helm, company-mode etc etc… I honestly don’t find it useful to have access to all that information in the modeline, (if I need to know what’s active, I can just run C-h m). There’s a couple of packages specifically designed to shrink or remove minor mode indicators from your mode line (diminish, delight…) but I don’t really want to have to explicitly set an option for each minor mode. Read more

Here’s a niche little script I wrote. Are you in the intersection of the Venn diagram of people who use i3 window manager (or something similar such as regolith) and people who use the TaskWarrior to do list app? If so, you might be interested in this script that puts the description of currently active tasks in your i3bar. I’ve submitted a pull request to i3blocks-contrib, but there are a lot of PRs pending, so I don’t know how active the repo is. Read more