WordsMiscellany

My writings are not confined to books on open source, games, and home automation. I occassionally work in other fields...

Quizzes

I have never enjoyed general knowledge questions! I always prefer specific knowledge questions! This is why I always write questions with a sharp focus and, I like to think, an equally sharp wit.

• Only Connect (IMBD link) - I've been part of the regular question setting teams since 2018, writing questions for 3 of the 4 rounds
• Quiz books - In my guise as Mike Dugdale, I have written a series of quiz books about various films and TV shows along with other specialty subjects like classical music and the London Underground.
• Random puzzles - This is just a sample of questions I've produced over the years for various publications, such as Metro, which serve more as a reminder to myself that I don't need to only write genre questions.
• The easy Doctor Who quiz - I wrote this for Mensa, but thought I should share it here, as well! Despite the title, it is only intended for true fans!

Wordplay Puzzles

Many of my experimental sessions involve munging the English language in new and interesting ways. Sometimes they become questions. Sometimes not. Here are just a few of my discoveries:

• Word patterns by typing on left and right - Inspired by the traditional question, "What's the longest word you can type using only the top row of the keyboard?"
• Anagram dictionary - Created for fun, and originally sold, to help with some word puzzles I was created. Now available for FREE!
• Word trails - What are the longest words to contain consecutive letters of the alphabet? That is, all the letters "abcdef" are present in the word "backfield" Is this the longest word? What about "abcdefg"? And so on...

Mensa

Although it is rare to me to write for the Mensa magazine, it is something I get roped into a little more often than most! So far I've written full articles that include:

• Sir Clive Sinclair
• Magic
• Digital heritage
• Dr Who
• Linux
• Retro computing

I have also given the organisation talks and presentations on these subjects.

Museums

As an avid museum goer, I have written the occassional piece for the profession. There is a lot more work to come in this space, but I'll leave that as a surprise for now...