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Scratches On The Libel Belt
Mar. 9th, 2007 09:27 pmI found a book of "Japanese Puzzles" on a Chapters bargain rack a couple of weeks ago. This doesn't just have your Kakuro and Sudoku, no sir. This one's got, if not the whole works, at least a lot more of it--Slitherlink, Light Up, Nurikabe("Islands In The Stream"), Hanjie("Paint By Numbers"), Hashi, etc. Some of them have connectedness rules--Nurikabe, Slitherlink, and Hitori--which can be very helpful.
I'm still in the Easy section. I find the Slitherlink puzzles interesting, but they still take me hours to finish, which makes me think that I'm missing a few basic principles. I seem to get to a point where every loose end seems to have two possible paths onwards, sometimes quite divergent ones, and there's nothing to choose between them. Eventually I manage to find one that causes a closed loop or a dead end, and I can fill in a little more, but I feel like there should be some way to speed up that process.
Nurikabe got a lot easier when I discovered online one of the rules that they'd neglected to mention in the book(no 2x2 black squares). Hanjie I was familiar with from before, so I'm probably having the most fun doing those, though they are the most frustrating when you've made a mistake. I'm mostly just skipping the Kakuro and Sudoku, since I have enough of those in my other books. Light Up I don't find particularly challenging, and there's only been one Hashi puzzle so far, which makes me think that they're all in the Hard section. Oh, and then there's Hitori, which seems deceptively simple.
( I ramble on about Sims 2 some more. )
I had a bit of a scare a couple of days ago. I was trying to get into the Goth household, but whenever it started to load it it would crash. Sometimes it seemed to get farther than others, but never far enough. Now in my Testing Grounds neighbourhood, where I've been playing fast and loose with cheat codes, it got to the point where sometimes I'd crash the computer when I exited a household, but I hadn't done those kind of shenanigans in Pleasantville, certainly not with the Goths.
Googling in desperation, I saw a few message-board posts saying that the way to fix the problem was to update your video drivers. I've only had my computer for about a year, but I figured it was worth a try anyway. I downloaded new drivers, and the installation instructions told me to uninstall the previous ones first, then reboot, then install the new ones. That sounded a bit weird to me, especially the part about not having any video drivers, but I went along with it. Of course, after the first reboot I was at 640x480, with all my desktop icons smushed into twice as many columns, but the reinstall went smoothly, I restored my resolution, and what do you know? The Goth household didn't crash! In retrospect, the problem probably was that I had one of the Sims' stereos on, and trying to bring up the sound may have caused it to crash. But updating the video drivers may have freed up a tiny bit of processing speed or something. I dunno.
By the way, how precisely does it determine where to put your icons when you shrink your screen resolution? Every time this happens to me, I swear that I can't reconstruct their original positions from the reduced layout. They never end up in quite the right place. Maybe I should save a screenshot every time I rearrange my icon layout or something. (Or maybe I should create a desktop with sequentially-numbered icons and experiment and see if I can figure out the algorithm, and more importantly, its inverse.)
I'm still in the Easy section. I find the Slitherlink puzzles interesting, but they still take me hours to finish, which makes me think that I'm missing a few basic principles. I seem to get to a point where every loose end seems to have two possible paths onwards, sometimes quite divergent ones, and there's nothing to choose between them. Eventually I manage to find one that causes a closed loop or a dead end, and I can fill in a little more, but I feel like there should be some way to speed up that process.
Nurikabe got a lot easier when I discovered online one of the rules that they'd neglected to mention in the book(no 2x2 black squares). Hanjie I was familiar with from before, so I'm probably having the most fun doing those, though they are the most frustrating when you've made a mistake. I'm mostly just skipping the Kakuro and Sudoku, since I have enough of those in my other books. Light Up I don't find particularly challenging, and there's only been one Hashi puzzle so far, which makes me think that they're all in the Hard section. Oh, and then there's Hitori, which seems deceptively simple.
( I ramble on about Sims 2 some more. )
I had a bit of a scare a couple of days ago. I was trying to get into the Goth household, but whenever it started to load it it would crash. Sometimes it seemed to get farther than others, but never far enough. Now in my Testing Grounds neighbourhood, where I've been playing fast and loose with cheat codes, it got to the point where sometimes I'd crash the computer when I exited a household, but I hadn't done those kind of shenanigans in Pleasantville, certainly not with the Goths.
Googling in desperation, I saw a few message-board posts saying that the way to fix the problem was to update your video drivers. I've only had my computer for about a year, but I figured it was worth a try anyway. I downloaded new drivers, and the installation instructions told me to uninstall the previous ones first, then reboot, then install the new ones. That sounded a bit weird to me, especially the part about not having any video drivers, but I went along with it. Of course, after the first reboot I was at 640x480, with all my desktop icons smushed into twice as many columns, but the reinstall went smoothly, I restored my resolution, and what do you know? The Goth household didn't crash! In retrospect, the problem probably was that I had one of the Sims' stereos on, and trying to bring up the sound may have caused it to crash. But updating the video drivers may have freed up a tiny bit of processing speed or something. I dunno.
By the way, how precisely does it determine where to put your icons when you shrink your screen resolution? Every time this happens to me, I swear that I can't reconstruct their original positions from the reduced layout. They never end up in quite the right place. Maybe I should save a screenshot every time I rearrange my icon layout or something. (Or maybe I should create a desktop with sequentially-numbered icons and experiment and see if I can figure out the algorithm, and more importantly, its inverse.)
