Picked Up A New Skill

So a few weeks back, I found a shredder on the side of the road. It was pretty nice, so I figured I’d take it home, and see if it worked. Free is a pretty nice price for a shredder.

So I got it home, and it worked in reverse, just not forward. Turned out, one of the wires had come off one of the boards. After probing around (it wasn’t obvious where the break was), I finally found the right place to connect the wire. So last weekend, I  broke out the soldering iron I bought a while back, and tried my hand at soldering. It wasn’t pretty but it worked. Soldering achievement unlocked!

Unfortunately, when I put the shredder back together, another wire got caught in the motor’s fan, so I have to splice a wire now. That’s an old skill for me though.

The Sudoku Project

I always say “I’m going to write a simple sudoku app for my portfolio site,” and then never get around to it. Well, I did start once, and got pretty far. Now I’m going to try again. So first, I need to lay out some objectives. What does it mean to be complete? What features do I want to have?

  • It’ll load the puzzle via an ajax call.
  • There will be a way to save the puzzle.
  • It’ll highlight duplicate numbers.
  • It’ll be accessible.

So first off, I’ve got an idea for three of these goals, but the accessibility goal is not so clear. Hearing issues is not a problem, there’s no sound in this application. Motor issues also not a problem, I was going to make it keyboard driven. Cognitive I can address partially by making sure there’s not information overload. The visual issues are what concerns me.

For the visual issue, of course I can make sure we’ve got good contrast, and large enough numbers (or they scale up). What I’m not so sure of is what’s the best way to present sudoku to users without vision? This is going to require some research.