feedback as a crossword setter: published newspaper crosswords have rules around where you can have unchecked squares (where "checked" means "the same letter appears in two different words"). the most basic rule for new york times style american crosswords is "zero unchecked squares", and for british style blocked crosswords it is "no word should have two consecutive unchecked squares". not following either of those conventions gives the crosswords an amateurish feel, and also contributes to the "feels way too hard" feedback some other people have left.
ugh, this is definitely a great thing to do but it's quite off-putting to see the "improve your focus and productivity" framing. that's uncomfortably target oriented for something that is fundamentally about appreciating and cultivating the mental state in which you enjoy your mind's inner resources and let it wander down serendipitous paths.
I don't stare at walls personally because I find that state easiest to access in a moving vehicle, so my equivalent is sometimes daydreaming rather than reading or scrolling my phone when I'm on a bus or train.
I had a copy of scott joplin's "the entertainer", likewise randomly passed around. somehow it was more fun to listen to it on the computer than a tape would have been :)
as a kid i didn't understand much about how it worked; i mostly played around with it to get "laser" sound effects, but in retrospect it was astonishingly sophisticated for an 8 bit home computer. (which described a lot of the machine's capabilities!)
Reading that comment I heard That Sound from the BBC Micro manual that they used to demonstrate the ENVELOPE command, the one with the rising and falling sequences of tones. I probably haven't typed that example in since I was in primary school, probably P7.
I'll probably have to go and find an emulator now, and try it out again.
I have been programming for most of my life, and am very engaged in the art and craft of it, but I have a very hard time answering superlative questions like "what is the weirdest bug you fixed" or "what project are you proudest of". mostly I enjoy projects while I'm doing them, but don't have the kind of memory that lets me compare old and new work and see which one I rated higher by whatever metric. also bugs in particular tend not to stick in my mind - I can ramble at length about fun architectural decisions or ad hoc DSLs, but bugs I mostly fix and move on; even if they were super interesting to debug at the time I tend not to remember them later on.
this is one reason i will not pay for extra usage - it is an incentive for them to be inefficient, or at least to not spend any effort on improving my token usage efficiency.
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