Picking this back up after a long break

Man, I've missed this so much. Only one post so far this year and it was ages ago. Basically, stuff just got kind of busy, a surprise change of job in February/March took up a big chunk of my time, and with my attention divided between the blog and the shiny new website I ended up not contributing a great deal to either. But~! Enough excuses. A few nights ago - just for the hell of it, just for old times' sake - I dug out the heptominoes and just had a crack at solving something with them. Just a 29x29 rectangle with a central 9x9 hole (and some other unit holes). Knowing full well it wouldn't be something interesting enough to write to the blog or the site about.

And I remembered why I started doing this in the first place.

Spring 2019 - when this blog started) - was, for me, not exactly the most fun of times. And I think in those evenings of stumbling into the world of polyforms, retreading the steps people like David Bird and Michael Keller had made way before me, it became a sort of meditative thing. When I was knee deep in a hexomino or heptomino thing all I was able to focus on were the pieces at hand (and occasionally the Andrew W.K. I had blasting on the iPod) and it was a welcome break from everything else going on. Kept me sane (or at least, kept me from getting any less sane than I already was...)

And I think that's what I need now.

Fig. 1: I finally made good on that promise to buy a proper camera instead of just using the one on my phone. Problem now is, I don't know how to use it (and I scale down the photos for the site anyway to save space) so they still look just as bad.

It's not like I've got a lack of things to write about on the blog, anyway. In the past 6 months or so I've been getting things made (generally laser cut) like no-one's business, though these generally lie in the more 'out there' realms of polyforms - sets where the base shape is something weird like a domino sliced in half diagonally, or assembly puzzles of mathematically incomplete polycube sets. Think Soma cube, and its many variations and relatives. Enough to keep churning posts out on here anyhow.

Here's a picture of some actual polyominoes, as way of apology for turning this place into LiveJournal up there before:

Fig. 2: Four-colouring these adds an interesting challenge.

Oh, and I made this too.

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It's the nine enneominoes that have either the 2x4 octomino or the 3x3 with a missing corner as a subset. There's one solution (excluding rotations and reflections) for getting them into that 9x9 box, and I'll leave it as a puzzle for the reader (if indeed there are any).

I made this stupidly small - the pieces are at a scale of 5mm/edge meaning the entire thing including tray is a mere 65mm wide. I was trialling how small I could feasibly make pieces and have them still be nice to play with. Because I have plans for a certain large set of pieces. And evidently 5mm/edge is just a tad too small. Might have to do 8mm.