![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Curiosity...
Apr. 29th, 2014 11:38 pmAmong the things I've found of Natalie's around the house is a Master combination lock with a new type of dial. Instead of the traditional dial with 40 numbers on it, this dial has a sort of joystick that can move in one of four directions, up, right, down, and left. From what I can tell, the factory combination consists of four joystick movements, and since any move of the joystick dial can go in any of the four directions, this means there can be at most 44 = 256 different default combinations.
This may seem like an insignificant number compared to the 403 = 64000 different combinations possible with the traditional dial, but there is apparently a technique that can be used to reduce that number to something like 100 different combinations, in practice.
In other news, I got a load of work done today, but was slowed down by idiocy. One 3,000-word document is going to get a lot bigger, because there are apparently several pages of text that appear in bitmaps, not as editable text, and my TM program blithely ignored said images, as it's designed to do.
In between everything else, I helped Galina erect a BBQ gazebo on the back patio. It looks nice, it was simple to put together, but it's kind of flimsy, so I wonder what will happen when the first really strong gust of wind comes along. The umbrella we had out there previously was lifted out of its table and flung about 15 feet away, breaking some important members.
Tai chi went well. Upon returning home, it took almost 2 hours to watch a 42-minute program on the Roku. I suspect a lot of network congestion, but suspicions don't really address the issue.
Ah, well. Time for rack drill. G'night!
This may seem like an insignificant number compared to the 403 = 64000 different combinations possible with the traditional dial, but there is apparently a technique that can be used to reduce that number to something like 100 different combinations, in practice.
In other news, I got a load of work done today, but was slowed down by idiocy. One 3,000-word document is going to get a lot bigger, because there are apparently several pages of text that appear in bitmaps, not as editable text, and my TM program blithely ignored said images, as it's designed to do.
In between everything else, I helped Galina erect a BBQ gazebo on the back patio. It looks nice, it was simple to put together, but it's kind of flimsy, so I wonder what will happen when the first really strong gust of wind comes along. The umbrella we had out there previously was lifted out of its table and flung about 15 feet away, breaking some important members.
Tai chi went well. Upon returning home, it took almost 2 hours to watch a 42-minute program on the Roku. I suspect a lot of network congestion, but suspicions don't really address the issue.
Ah, well. Time for rack drill. G'night!
