A torrent is downloading at speeds a V.34 modem considers slow; a confirmation e-mail is taking ages to arrive; you’re on hold to a woefully inept customer services department at a woefully inept company because of woefully inept service.
Can you relate? Chances are you can; you have, at some point, been stuck at your desktop (or on your laptop) and had to wait a veritable ice-age for reasons out of your control.
And contrary to what our conditioned reflexes believe, tutting, sighing and drumming our fingers will not make a wait shorter, speed up time, or anything else. No, the quickest way to pass time is to ignore it — which means you need to distract yourself.
You could doodle on paper, you could (try to) sing, or you could admit defeat and say: “sod it, I will go and do the washing up”.
But I’ve got a better idea.
Install one of the following University of Procrastination-approved boredom-busting games instead. They can’t speed time up but they certainly help pass it…
Picsaw
“Woof. Woof. Woof.”
That’s the noise of my next-door-neighbour’s dog. I hear it day-in, day out. Honestly, it’s hard to work through it, especially if I’m already midway through my daily (self-induced) coffee-wobble.
But little (and literal) puzzle game Picsaw routinely restores my clapped-out concentration.
When the barking begins I open Picsaw, load in a blurry snap of Fido’s ill-focused snout (acquired using a combination of fence-climbing dexterity, a meaty cat chew on some string, and a zoom lens) and then re-assemble Monsieur dog piece by piece.
Talking of worrying psychology, something called science says puzzles are a great workout for your brain.
For added difficulty, feed Picsaw a picture with a non-definable pattern to it, such as a photo of a clear sky, a close-up shot of animal fur, or that plate of spaghetti O’s you snapped last night to post on Twitter.
sudo apt install picsaw
Tanglet
Tanglet is a single-player version of the popular word-game Boggle.
The goal is simple: try to create as many words as humanly possible by forming connections between the adjacent letters shown on the on-screen board.
Letters can be joined horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in any direction. As long as the letters are next to each other and the word you’re spelling is a word is at least 3 letters in length you’ll score points.
Tanglet offers 7 different game modes, each varying in difficulty. It also keeps track of your stats as you play, ensuring you’ll always be tempted to try and best your own scores.
And nothing is more time-sappingly-worthy than beating yourself.
Want to toggle with Tanglet? Install it from the repos!
sudo apt install tanglet
Gweled
No gaming platform is worth its salt if it lacks a jewel-smashing, pattern-linking, time-enveloping game of join-the-bleedin’-coloured-things-to-score-some-frankly-futile-points.
Okay, I’m overdosing on hyperbole. But Gweled does fill a popular gaming niche. Take a quick look at the top games on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc and all of them show that trivial little jewel-matching games are in hot demand.
But not on Ubuntu, it seems ;)
Alongside the traditional gameplay mode (essentially: ‘keep playing until there are no possible moves left’) Gweled offers two additional ones:
- Timed Mode – Achieve the best score in a given time
- Endless Mode – Never-ending game that doesn’t log your score
You can install Gweled from the Ubuntu archives:
sudo apt install gweled
OMG! Words!
What did the blanket say to the bed? I got you covered!
Did you laugh? No? Good. That means I can guarantee will get more fun out of the last item in this list: the award-winning[citation needed] OMG! Words!
This typing-game-with-a-twist (from back yonder) is simple to play: type the words on screen as fast – and correctly – as you can. The more words you ‘drop’ the sooner the game is over!
All of the words that appear in the game are pulled from articles published on this site.
But things aren’t overly easy. If you’re doing too well the visage of former OMG! Ubuntu! editor Benjamin Humphrey will slide across the screen and scramble every word it touches.
But me, Joey; I’m on your side: my face bandies across to unscramble each word it touches.
Short of a green bird icon dropping in (if you don’t get that reference, congrats on having avoided our comment section!), OMG! Words! is a faithful distillation of this blog’s irreverence, colour scheme, and my infamous typos.
Also, if you want to combine fun with usefulness then OMG! Words! is a also a great way to practice your writing prowess. For now, the game only works on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or earlier, and you’ll need to download the DEB installer to install it manually:
Over to you: what is you favourite five-minute boredom-busting game?