Puzzling

At last, there's a crossword app just for us foodies! My new Gourmet Crosswords app has just been launched, for all iOS devices (apart from very old devices, as Apple no longer supports them in new apps, unfortunately). There are 25 crosswords, all 15 x 15 grids, for only 99¢. As with our QuickBreak apps, the crosswords are completely customisable: you can change the backgrounds, grid colours, letter colours, highlight colours, and choose between five different fonts. We've added a nice new script fancy font. The graphics feature one of my watercolours, a still life with figs. So — just how good a gourmand are you? Test out your knowledge of cooking techniques, international recipes, ingredients, wines, and spirits on the Gourmet Crosswords to find out! Can you score 100%?! 

It's been a while, sorry! Anyway, here is the analysis of the Gemini Cryptic from The Canberra Times, Monday 19 November. The definition is underlined, except in double definition and cryptic definition clues. ACROSS 1) Oversight the foreman's responsible for ? (11) = SUPERVISION Cryptic definition. 'Over sight' is sort of a coined definition for 'super vision'. What the foreman is responsible for  is the definition. 9) Threatens to finish in bad spirits (7) = IMPENDS Container. Finish = END. Put it in  IMPS ( bad spirits). IMP(END)S. 10) It limits the field to insure against betting losses (5) = HEDGE Double definition. A HEDGE can limit the field  (as in bordering a garden or field), and a HEDGE fund is one that insures against betting losses  (speculation losses, rather than race track betting losses). 11) Rent is said to have been raised (4) = HIRE Homophone, indicated by is said . As is common with homophone clues, it's not ...

Because I've written so damn MANY crosswords over the last few years, we've already got Volume 2 of our Quick Break app up and running ! So - same awesome interface - 50 new crosswords - with a supercool red look, instead of purple. As with Quick Break 1, you can customise the interface in roughly a trillion ways. Check it out! It's shiny!

Thank you! Thank you so much for helping to correct thousands, if not millions, of pages of scanned text! What? You aren't doing anything of the sort? Oh, yes you are ... read on! Optical character recognition (OCR) is the method used to digitise printed material — old newspapers and book, for example, can be scanned using OCR technology, and then we can access them online. The National Library of Australia uses this technology for its massive  Trove database, for example. The problem with OCR is that it's not always that accurate, especially from older printed material with yellowing paper and faded or smudged ink. It is a lot better than it used to be, but is still far from 100% accurate — 80% accuracy is more typical. So the resulting scanned texts have a lot of errors! Here's an example: We  can read the top sentence of scanned type (This aged portion of society were distinguished from ...) , because us humans are fucking brilliant, but a computer h...