|
|
|
Spelling Bee alternatives
Wednesday, May 24 2023
Gretchen and I play the New York Times Spelling Bee separately most days of the week. She plays in the New York Times app, which, luckily, maintains a separate database from the game when played on the web (which is how I play it). This makes it possible for us to both play separately using just her membership (since I don't ever have memberships to anything except TalkingPointsMemo.com). Occasionally, though, there are glitches with the way the Spelling Bee database works that causes weird cominglings of the data between our respective games. In the past we could work around this by agreeing to load the game at a specific time and then playing it without reloading it. But in recent weeks, Spelling Bee has been changed so that it periodically reloads automatically, merging our games. This situation gotten so bad that this morning I went looking for a solution, since (as you can probably sense) playing Spelling Bee has become an important part of my life. It turns out that there are open-source versions of Spelling Bee that can be run locally or a web server I control. As with most modern web apps, these all have to be compiled using NPM tooling. The first such Spelling Bee knock-off was written in TypeScript and had such unfixable compilation problems (ones that not even ChatGPT could help me solve) that I gave up on it. Instead, I ended up with something called Open Spelling Bee. It also had to be compiled in NPM to work, but the compilation was fast, and quickly figured out how to hack it so that it would take letter arrangements from a set of letters in a query string variable. To actually get it to take the day's list of words, I will have to write some sort of parser, though (depending on whether or not I can get Javascript to simulate a logged-in Gretchen on the New York Times website) I might have to have it accept the pasted-in source from the New York Times's Spelling Bee page, where the day's list of accepted words still is presented in human-readable form.
As I often do on Wednesdays (particularly at the end of a sprint in my remote workplace, when work expectations fall precipitously), today I painted a tiny painting on credit card (one that had belonged to Powerful, as it happens), this time of an orca jumping out of the water. Then at lunch I drove into Uptown, mostly to get provisions at the Ghettoford Hannaford so I'd have stuff to put on the bagels we'd bought yesterday. They didn't seem to have any vegan cheese or cream cheese at all, though I thought I remember them having it in the past. So I ended up buying things like lettuce, faux turkey lunch "meat," three kinds of ice cream, and two kinds of beer. While nearby, I also went to Herzogs mostly to get electrical wiring equipment that will allow me to build out some of the control systems I want to add to the basement at the cabin.
I had the typical boozy afternoon that I usually enjoy during a sprint retrospective (which, as always, feels more like a happy hour than anything else our remote workplace does). I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine despite concerns that that was the cause of my digestive problems during the last two weekends at the cabin. Today my gut was performing like a champ, even after eating a frozen pizza that Gretchen had baked yesterday and that I reheated today.
After work, I rode the red battery-powered bicycle up to the pile of scrap metal near the abandoned go-cart track on Georges' land. Sometimes I find things to salvage in that pile, which, today, included a plastic hatch that apparently fell off his Tesla. As I was riding the bike home, I was trying to also drink a sixteen ounce imperial stout, and this wasn't sufficient for the irregularity of the ground (I was traveling on something more akin to a logging road than a driveway). So I lost control and "wrecked," as my redneck friends put it back when I was a kid. It wasn't a bad accident; the bike was undamaged and I was unhurt, though I'd squeezed the beer flat in my hand.
Today's tiny painting. No, that credit card number no longer works.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?230524 feedback
previous | next |
