This Christmas, I printed a whole series of maze boxes as gifts for family members. After finding a gift maze model on Thingiverse, I felt like there must be a better solution to programatically generate mazes of varying difficulty, and so each person who gets one has a unique experience. Before writing such a program myself, I checked to see if it had already been done, and sure enough it had.

Every year, the exterior holiday lighting gets reluctantly set up. It’s part of McMansion life, a requirement to appear as though you’ve made an attempt to decorate for the season. Between the colored optical projectors, to strings of lights haphazardly strung around the front porch, it all ends up needing to be plugged in and turned on/off. For years, the solution to this was a mechanical timer, with on and off markers which could be inserted around the ring to turn the timer on and off at the right time.