Necessity is the mother of kludge

For the longest time I've been meaning to do a code program at the library. I wanted an activity somewhere on the scale between "lemon juice invisible ink" (which we will do, natch) and "letter frequency analysis," so I settled on doing decoder wheels.

My first try was to use a compass and a protractor to construct decoder wheels. Well, if you want to squeeze 26 letters into 360 degrees, each one will need to be 13.84 degrees, and it turns out it's a bit hard to get an angle that precise by hand. I tried to get it as close as I could, but there was still enough of a discrepancy that I felt uneasy. Close enough for government work, right? But then the copier decided to stop working. So I thought, I could go home and use my scanner and printer instead. And then I thought, if I'm going home anyway I can use a graphics program and do it, can't I?

There may well be a way to use GIMP to construct a circle divided precisely into 26 segments, but if there is, I can't find it.

And then I realized something.

I was making a pie chart.

I could just use Excel!

Except that Excel decided to throw a fit when I was trying to format it the way I wanted to print it, so I ended up copy-pasting to Word, and then copy-pasting to Publisher, and finally I got it the way I wanted it.

I was really proud of myself.

It was somewhat after this that I realized that it's actually pretty easy to find decoder wheel templates online. [PDF.]