I don’t want to spoil the surprise of this year’s puzzle box (and to be honest I’m still finishing it), but here’s the gift from a few years ago. It’s a thin rectangular box about 5″ long with a plug at the top that’s held in place by two wooden pegs. The pegs are cut halfway through so they can both slide in and out through their respective holes, but each peg blocks the other from being removed. Figure out how to remove the pegs and you can open the box.

This particular design is based on a 1949 disassembly puzzle called Pick-a-Peg, which I found described in New Book of Puzzles by Slocum and Botermans (a picture of the original can be found here). After some internet sleuthing I found the 1946 patent application that describes the inner workings in detail, and from there I was able to modify the design to work with laser-cut pieces and turn the disassembly puzzle into the locking mechanism for a box. I especially like how cleanly the original puzzle works as a locking mechanism, almost like it was designed with that in mind (though as far as I can tell it wasn’t). I did a similar repurposing with the Handcuffs puzzle, but this is much nicer.

Jay opened it in about seven minutes, though of course some of that time was spent carefully checking for any hidden explosives. My one design critique is that the pegs feel too delicate, to the point where people are afraid they’ll break if they push too hard. If I do a redesign I’ll either use a larger diameter peg or switch to using brass or steel rods.

Diet Coke & Mentos

Diet Coke & Mentos, Version 2

This year’s theme for Halloween was super heroes, so around the beginning of October I set out to design a Wolverine costume. The outfit is based on the X-Men movies, because it’s a lot easier to look cool in black leather than yellow spandex. The claws I based on the comic books, with thin claw-like blades coming out of studs on the backs of my hands rather than knives coming out from between my knuckles as they did in the movies. That was both because I like the more animal look of the original and because it made it a lot easier to make the claws retractable.

For more pictures, video and step-by-step instructions on how to design your own, check out my Instructable at instructables.com.

When I was writing dynamic pages for a project a little while back I got tired of not being able to see what my page looked like after all the JavaScript got done with it, and eventually I tracked down this cute little bookmarklet:

javascript:if (window.document.body.outerHTML != undefined) {''+window.document.body.outerHTML+''} else if  (document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML != undefined) {''+document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML+''} else if  (window.document.documentElement.outerHTML != undefined) {''+window.document.documentElement.outerHTML+''} else {alert('Your browser does not support this functionality') };

Just copy it all into one line (remove the linefeeds, they’re just there for readability) and put it as the URL of a bookmark. Then whenever you want to see the real source of a page, it’s just a click away.

(I wish I could remember where I found this little gem, but from a quick search it looks like it’s been floating around for a while…)

The latest addition to our magnetic wall: a wall-mounted magnetic chessboard. Basically we took a cheap chessboard, glued some rare-earth magnets into the bases of the plastic pieces, and glued some magnetic backing onto the board itself. To the side is a little magnetic label with one side printed “White to move” and the other printed “Black to move.” Just make a move and flip the label over for the next person to move.

A nice side effect was he noticed the screen’s hairline crack I’d gotten when the phone fell out of my pocket. From all I’d read on the Net I thought I’d have to pay $250 to have that repaired, but he said so long as it was just a single hairline crack and there was no damage to the case itself they could do a warranty replacement — five minutes later I was walking out of the store with a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone.

(Thanks to Nat for the link!)

 mkdir tmp
 cd tmp
 cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
 cd emacs
 fink install libungif libjpeg libtiff
 export LIBS="-lresolv"
 ./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local
 make bootstrap
 make
 sudo make install 
 cd /usr/local/bin/
 sudo ln -s emacs emacs23