DENNYDEDMORE.COM

This personal web site was created in January 2026. I created it for making my cheesy Blasteroids video game available online for my friends to play. 

In the process I decided I might as well put some other important things on here too, things that I'm known for in this lifetime, which among other things are Rubik's Cubes and ToolBook.

Enjoy!

ToolBook

Back in 1996, I started working for Asymetrix, and began supporting a variety of products (3D F/X, Digital Video Producer, Compel, and of course ToolBook 3.0). The company may have changed names a few times along the way [click2learn, SumTotal Systems] and various products did come and go, but ToolBook stayed. I spent the next 25 years supporting it - eventually working on the development team to assist in adding features to ToolBook until it was officially retired in 2021. The ToolBook built-in language called OpenScript was fun to learn, and I became quite an expert in this language after all those years.

I was obsessed with all things ToolBook, went to all the ToolBook conferences as a presenter, and even wrote a few of my own books about ToolBook. Anyone who has ever called ToolBook Technical Support over those years will surely remember me.

In early 2021, I left the company, which was about 6 months before ToolBook was officially retired.

Since SumTotal Systems is no longer making any ToolBook information/resources available, I decided I should.
ToolBook Information & Resources

Games

Back in 2019, I decided to focus on learning JavaScript. I'd always wanted to and never got around to it. Well, I did try on several occasions but without an actual large programming challenge the ambition to learn JavaScript fizzled out.

I needed a real large task, something fun which would hold my attention. So, I gave myself the task of recreating the early 80s Asteroids video game - and called my new version Blasteroid.

Three weeks later I had a functional version of Blasteroid working, with a few bugs here and there. JavaScript was an interesting change from ToolBook's OpenScript language that I had been dealing with for the previous 20 years.

A year later I looked at the code again, and realized it was functional but the code was hideous to look at. I spent another week breaking all the logic into separate libraries, renaming variables, methods, functions, and properties. In the end it was well organized - and looked great, and yet still did exactly the same thing. The futility of that was not lost on me.

Now that I have this web site, I've pulled it out of storage and am hosting it here. I'd taken the opportunity to fix most of the bugs, and to add some additional features and more sound effects.

Once that was done, I decided to focus on creating a version 2.0 of Blasteroid with all sorts of cool new features, graphics, levels - as I figure out how to add them. This will be a work in progress for some time, but feel free to try it out.

Note that, for now, this is intended to run on a computer (not a mobile device) as a keyboard is needed for all of the interactions within the game. As a future goal, I'll see what I can do to add gesture/touch support, needed to allow it to work without a keyboard.

Rubik's Cubes and More

I was in high school in the early 80s when the Rubik's Cube came out, and I was obsessed. I carried it with me everywhere, and bought all the solution books to see how different people decided to tackle the challenge of solving the cube.

My fastest time for the 3x3x3 cube was when I was 17. I managed to get my time down to just 48 seconds pretty consistently. That was pretty good for back then but nothing compared to the recent 2025 World Record of 3.05 seconds - which is mind-numbingly fast. I rarely pick up my cube nowadays but when I do, I can still solve it, but in about 2 minutes.

In the mid 90s, for about 5 years, I really got interested in those cube type puzzled again. I used eBay to buy all sorts of puzzles people were selling from their collections, some of which I'd never seen before. In the end I created and hosted a VirtualPuzzleMuseum web site where I collected and cataloged all of the Rubik's style puzzles that were around at that time (hundreds). I ended up creating my own solution which is still circulating around on the internet.

Denny's 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube Solution

Yarn Projects

About 20 years ago I got bored and decided to figure out how to knit a hat and scarf. I'm not very artsy by nature, but I am very detail oriented, and love a challenge. So a few weeks later I had figured it out, and I had a hat and a scarf.

I don't wear either of those so I gave them away, and decided to branch out and see what else I could create. This lead to learning to crochet, and also how to weave.

I've created so many it is hard to remember them all, so I try to remember to take a photo of each as I finish. My photo gallery will show you some of the things I've managed to create.

Gallery:

PAGE LAST UPDATED: February 1, 2026

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