Decorative gourd season is upon us, Halloween is breathing down our necks, Christmas cards and wrapping paper are creeping over supermarket shelf space like commercial mould. And yet here is the Undignified Organ to put three good things upon your autumnal plate.
An Analog Computer
The Turing Tumble is an ingenious game puzzle that replicates the functions of a binary computer code physically with red and blue balls standing in for the 1s and 0s.
The pack comes with set of xx puzzles which are embedded in a story of a lost spacecraft attempting to reboot an alien technology in order to get back home.
The puzzles take the form of a board which you to “program” using an array of ramps, bits, crossovers and interceptors to perform specific, and increasingly complicated, procedures to achieve an outcome, as indicated by the the final pattern of blue and red balls at the bottom of the board.
It is ostensibly a STEM learning tool, but is more than enough challenging enough for me adults.
Pay-What-You-Want Digital Products
Humble Bundle is an excellent resource for digital books, games and software. Each bundle is a curated collection available for a limited time only, with tiered pricing structure, inside which you can pay what you want.
I have bought some create titles (pdf & from the MAKE: back catalogue as well as numerous comic-books as .pdfs. Each bundle has an associated charity, who receives a percentage of the sale, however you can also choose to increase the amount of money the charity receives from your purchase (or select one of Humble Bundles other charity partners.)
Most of the games come in the form of a platform key (Steam, Ubisoft Connect, GOG, etc), many of the books and ebooks are DRM-free and can be dowmnloaded in a rnage of formats and can easily be converted from ePub to Kindle friendly .mobi format using Convertio or numerous other tools.
Door key magnet
Such a mundane thing, but I am always grateful to know exactly where my house and car keys are when I’m in a hurry. That is because it has become a habit to hang them on this wonderful oak keyholder & shelf I purchased from Etsy, and hung by the front door.
The keys are attached to magnets embedded, unseen inside the wood.
Although the person who made ours doesn’t appear to be selling them at the moment, they did it to spec (i.e. I specified the length of the shelf & the number of magnets), but it’s worth checking with other providers if they’ll customise it for your property.