My current plans, and a small (or not) puzzle

High school is coming up, life is getting jam-packed.  My focus is getting better though so it may get easier later.

Psychic Fatigue, Part I: The Rabbit Hole

First post in our series: Our family took a trip to Colorado and Utah a couple of weeks ago.  And I could say, I absolutely loved it.  But there is a huge twist...

Find and replace

One time I wanted to rename a single-letter variable in my code for a USACO problem so I can present it publicly with less confusing variable names.  But turns out, it replaced every instance of that letter in the entire file, and not just the variable reference, and the result was... chaos.

3-in-1 Shampoos

I grew up in a country where 3-in-1 shampoos were not that common.  So when I visited a tourism resort there in my hometown, they offered 3 different types of liquids on the counter in the bathroom, each in small bottles:  Shampoo, Conditioner, and Body Wash.  We even got to grab some extras, and use it for a few months after we went home.

A Peculiar Handwriting Quirk of Mine

Hang on, we like to go fast!
    —I like fast!

—Kristoff and Anna, Frozen (2013) 

Another short-form today:  Most of the time, I just need to get my math written on paper really fast, so I can spend the other times thinking what to do next.  So I take a couple of shortcuts: work smarter, not harder.

Medium Daily Integral Writeup 7/22/22, to draw attention to a calculus property

A neat little calculus theorem, then a practical application.

An unusual way of telescoping

Middle school was a flower in spring:  It was beautiful, it bloomed, yet it wilts momentarily and leaves behind the barren, untamed, yet still hopeful landscape.  It was a lot, yet it was too little that I had done in that time.  One of those middle school things that I continued to cherish was those middle school math contests.

LINK TO PROBLEM and LINK TO ACTUALLY CORRECT SOLUTION WITHOUT FLUFF

Energy Management

I post here semi-frequently.  But it's summer, and there's other things I may be doing, like grinding through math problems (as you have seen on this blog I'm very interested in math).  I also do a variety of other interests.

Announcing the Tinkerer Archive!

I noted in a previous blogpost about CSS setup that it was possible to print each blogpost onto a nice layout.  Now, I am announcing an official archive of all posts on this blog, stored in a public Google Drive link as PDFs.

Left as Exercise

Last post ended up way longer than expected with the backstory, so posting a small joke to satisfy potentially tired readers (and a lesson I learnt from the situation).

Exactly Why Are There 8 Tetracubes?

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tinkerer!  Today, I will be sharing my writeup of why there are only $8$ of those beloved tetracubes that we all cherish and play with.

Lessons Learnt from Customizing My CSS for This Blog

... or, Behind the Scenes:  How I do my styling for this blog.  Shorter post this time with list of takeaways.

A C++ Pitfall (or, respect Java)

It seems like a lot of programmers have been making fun of Java lately.  I'm also guilty of this; I teased badly about Java with a gal that just finished AP Computer Science A, who claims that she loves it.  (I regretted it later.  If you see this, sorry.)

First Post!

TL;DR  This is the blog of John, a 14-year-old (as of writing) programmer and tinkerer who likes to untangle things and understand them.