borse is a terminal program meant to practice reading braille, Morse code, and semaphore, which are common encodings for puzzle hunts. Also supports A1Z26 practice.
uvx borseOr you can install from PyPI by using uv, pip, etc.
Configuration is stored in ~/.config/borse/config.toml by default, e.g.
progress_file = "/home/evan/.config/borse/progress.json"
words_per_game = 10
single_letter_probability = 0.3Your daily progress is also automatically saved and displayed on the main menu.
Actually this is a note-to-self.
For Grade 1 (just the letters A-Z),
the chart on Wikipedia
is helpful!
The trick is to memorize just the first 10 symbols for A-J,
which only use the upper four dots.
That's because K-T are the same as A-J with one extra dot,
while UVXYZ are A-E with one extra dot.
In real life, Grade 2 braille has some additional contractions. It might be nice to add these into borse at some point.
In Morse code, the most frequent letters are shorter. So I think it's a lot easier to remember Morse code as a binary tree, since the common letters will all be towards the top. I found this picture on the Internet:
I think the dot looks like 0 and a dash looks like a (rotated) 1, so it makes sense to me that dots are in the left of the tree.
Then you can just memorize the letters in each row in order. Here are some terrible mnemonics I made up that worked for me for the first three rows (you're on your own for the last one):
ET: Eastern Time, or a 1982 movieIANM: I Am Not MadSURWDKGO: SuperUser ReWrote DynamicKernel in GO
(Also, surdwkgo is also the name of a
Taiwanese CodeForces grandmaster.)
If you look at a semaphore chart,
what you'll find is that there are some groups of adjacent letters
that just differ in one hand rotating clockwise.
For example, the letters from A-G are obtained
by fixing one arm at 6 o'clock and rotating the other arm
all the way from 7:30 to 4:30.
So in my head, I organize the letters in "blocks", where each block starts with two arms at a 45-degree angle, and then having the other arm rotate clockwise. The resulting blocks are then easier to remember:
- A block:
ABCDEFG - H block:
HIKLMN(noteJis missing) - O block:
OPQRS - T block:
TUY(note the additionalY) - # block:
#JV(this is the weird exceptions one) - W block:
WX - Z block:
Z
I don't know if A HOT #WZ means anything to you.
Set up by cloning the repository and running
uv sync
uv run prek install # pre-commit hooksTo manually run the linter and tests:
uv run prek --all-files # run linter
uv run prek --all-files --hook-stage pre-push-
Where does the name come from?
From
Braille mORse SEmaphore. -
Should "braille" be capitalized?
No.
-
Why would you spend time learning this?
It could be a great conversation starter for a first date…