A Rube Goldberg inspired useless machine

Kind of a cool little box. This kind of sums up my activity today. Be better if it did something useful, like Matt's Remote Control:

I've been working on some number puzzles from MindYourDecisions and Michael Penn. They are relatively simple number puzzles that can be solved with a little logic and algebra, but today I wasn't feeling that sharp, so I decided to write a program to solve it. For me it's basically a mindless task. It wouldn't use any complicated logic, it would just execute a loop and test each number in succession until we got an answer. Or we ran out of numbers. We can only go as high as two billion without having to get fancy. You do have to put a limit on it or it will run forever. Once it gets to the maximum value, it will roll over to the negative value and just keep going, whether it makes any sense or not. I solved one of the puzzles using this technique. The other one failed because of a faulty instruction. Haven't figured out just where the fault is. It will probably turn out to be something obvious that I won't be able to recognize until I have left it on the shelf for a week or two.

Update minutes later - fixed the start time on Matt's video.

P. S. html stuff. I just realized that YouTube will calculate start and stop times for you. Pause the video where you want it to start, click Share then Embed. In the dialog box it will have a checkbox to start at the current position/time. It shows that time in minutes and seconds format (mm:ss), but when you click the box, it converts that time into seconds and inserts it in the embed code. Copy the code and paste it on your blog or wherever. Let the video play until you get to the end of the section you want. Now you can use the same trick to get the stop time (end is the parameter name).