Danie

The Creator of Wordle Just Came Out With a New Game, and It’s Difficult “Cryptic crosswords, on the other hand, treat each clue as its own puzzle. Instead of straightforward definitions, the clues rely on wordplay that hints at the answer. The rules can be tricky to explain, and there are many different ways a clue can be constructed.” Yes, not so easy as just plugging letters in or looking for patterns of letters. This requires a lot more thought. Still I started out with hit-and-miss until I got used to Wordle. It's like a new muscle that one must exercise a bit. The tutorial examples were not too difficult, but they were mostly three word combinations. The daily puzzle for today is 6 words which must be reduced to 8 letters for a word that relates to “slant”. But even if you think you know what the word is, you still have to manipulate the 6 words with the transformations, to arrive at the correct word. This is a whole different kettle of fish. This really makes the old concise crossword look like child's play. See https://gizmodo.com/the-creator-of-wordle-just-came-out-w… or https://www.parseword.com #technology #puzzles #words #games

Europe is building an alternative to Microsoft Office “Office EU is a cloud-based office suite built entirely on open-source software and hosted exclusively on European servers, has launched as a direct competitor to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its pitch is straightforward: keep data in the EU, run on transparent open-source components and comply with EU law by design. The platform combines file storage, e-mail, calendar, document editing, chat and video conferencing in a single browser-based interface.” It is really time that the Microslop monopoly was broken. It is not just about digital sovereignty, but also this belief that one must by MS Office to do documents. It is just not true, and so many non-profits and governments are spending a lot of money on what could have gone directly towards societal services. But the big problem has been up to now you had to self-host or install something, and there were an array of free choices to choose from. Surprisingly, many users do not want choices and it paralyses them. Contrary to belief, the other party receiving your documents does not actually need the same brand of software to read your documents! Ideally you'd want to also use a proper open standard document format like ODF, but you could also use the MS OOXML standard that MS Office uses. Hopefully with such an enterprise effort behind Office EU, it will get traction. This is a cloud based solution which uses NextCloud in the background, and anyone can self-host NextCloud themselves too, so there is no vendor lock-in. See https://techcentral.co.za/europe-is-building-an-alternati… or https://office.eu #technology #opensource #digitalsovereignty