AoC Day 7 – Bridge Repair

Advent of Code

AoC Day 7 has us trying to figure out a slightly new kind of math. Our input is a multiline list. The list starts with a single integer, followed by a colon (“:”), and then multiple comma separated integers. Our goal is to find the number of lines, where it is possible to reach the answer (the first integer) using only addition or multiplication of the various other numbers. For example, if a line was 190: 10 19, we could reach 190 by multiplying 10 and 19.

AoC Day 6 – Guard Gallivant

Advent of Code

For day 6 of AoC, our input is a grid showing the setup of a room. Most of the space is marked with periods (“.”), but there are some that are marked with a pound sign (“#”) to denote some sort of obstruction. Also within the grid, is the starting location of a guard, whose route you have to map out.

AoC Day 5 – Print Queue

Advent of Code

Day 5’s input is broken up into two parts. Part 1 lists a series of “rules”. Each rule is a single line and is made up of two integers, separated by a pipe (“|”). The rule indicates that the first integer must be before the second integer in order for the series of pages to be valid.

AoC Day 4 – Ceres Search

Advent of Code

Advent of Code Day 4 was a bit of a word search on steroids. The puzzle input was a very large grid of X, M, A, and Ss. In part 1 we were looking for all of the “XMAS” matches in the puzzle going vertical, horizontal, and diagonal both forwards and backwards.

AoC Day 3 – Mull It Over

Advent of Code

Day 3 of AoC this year was the first day that honestly made me work. The first part of it pretty straight forward. You’re given a very long string input (mine was just over 18,000 characters). Within that string is a wide variety of alphabetical, numerical, and special characters. You’re looking for a sequence that is “mul(#,#)” where # is an number 1 – 3 numbers long (i.e. mul(123,1) would be valid). Whenever you find that sequence you want to sum the product of those two numbers in the parenthesis.

AoC Day 2 – Red-Nosed Reports

Advent of Code

Day 2 of AoC starts off with a fairly straightforward problem. Our input is a series of lines, with each line containing an arbitrary number of integers. The example data shows each line having 5 numbers, but the actual input has more or less depending on the exact line you’re on (so it’s not a one size fits all thing). Our task is to count the number of lines that meet three rules.

Advent of Code 2024 Day 1

Advent of Code

It’s Christmas time, which means once more, its time for Advent of Code (AoC). If you’re not familiar with AoC, you’re honestly missing out. I discovered it a few years ago, and have been hooked. In short, its 25 days of coding challenges.

WireGuard Configuration

WireGuard

I am off for the next two weeks (more or less) so my goal is to check off a bunch of crap on my todo list that has been sitting on there for a while. One of those things that I’ve wanted to do was connect my server on AWS that is hosting Signal-Chief to »

2025 Retirement Calculator

The NDAA hasn’t officially passed congress but it appears that it won’t have to many issues in the Senate despite some poison pills that the House attached to it. So, with that, I am happy to release version (200)5 of the retirement calculator. You can download the latest version at https://www.signal-chief.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Post-Military-Salary-Calculator-v5.xlsx