Hobby Software

No matter what your hobby is, you can find software of interest. This software can handle tedious aspects of your hobby such as keeping records, and give you more time for the fun aspects. This article is devoted to some of my hobbies. Sooner or later I’ll write articles on other people’s hobbies.

I’m a real fan of acrostic puzzles. These puzzles are a sort of three-dimensional crossword puzzle. Each puzzle includes definitions and a text, which is often a literary quote. In addition when you find the first letter of each definition you usually generate the quote’s author and title. To my way of thinking the extra dimension makes these puzzles more fun than standard crossword puzzles. But there are some problems with these classic paper-based puzzles. It’s getting harder and harder to find printed collections of acrostic puzzles. It’s quite tedious to copy the letters from the definition area of the puzzle to the quote area or vice versa. Any error, including a transfer error can be hard to find.

E-crostics puzzle, try it you may like it.

Enter the computer. I haven’t found too many acrostic Internet sites but I know a great one that is absolutely free; ecrostics.com. They publish a few puzzles a week and addicts can access their extensive stock of puzzles. The computer interface eliminates the letter copy problem. You can change your mind as often as you want without tearing any paper. The computer interface implies a great advantage over traditional puzzle books. You can access a key code and look up the solution, one letter at a time. In contrast it’s hard to see only a single letter at a time in the back of the puzzle book. This site even offers a program for puzzle constructors.

One of many Suduko software packages.

Suduko is another one of my hobbies. I don’t really care for the computer interface, and prefer to waste my time with the standard paper and pencil. One problem that I find with Suduko is the absence of any error correction mechanism. Unless you catch your mistake immediately you are cooked. The computer could help out in at least two ways. The simplest is to provide a tell-me-when-I’m-wrong mode. Another, more sophisticated mode would let you back up one number at a time as often as you want. These features and others are available on some computerized Sudoko software. I don’t care to look for them because I’m already spending enough time with the acrostics.