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Goodreads is infamous for its terrible book ratings. Supposedly, almost all the ratings are between 3 and 4 stars. I take a look at what the actual range is, and see what could be done to improve them (including a userscript to show the percentile of each book). I also make an argument against using a Dirichlet distribution to model star ratings.
It's rather difficult to solve traveling-salesman type problems using real world locations and data. I was recently in a position where I needed to do so, to provide sample collection routes for a group of research biologists. Here I discuss the solution I came up with, which uses entirely open source methods and software, and provide some code that could be adapted to solve similar problems.
The video game FEZ contains a puzzle surrounding a broken QR code. I found a way to fix the code through a deep dive into the specification. It turns out that this is not the way that the game creators expected you to solve the puzzle.