While playing with my Bluefruit Feather, I decided to build the Android app straight from the source code, so I could see the ins and outs of how it works. Unfortunately, when I downloaded the source code and loaded it into Android Studio, I noticed that it didn't compile the …
Fool's Mate Friday: Keeping the King on the move!

When it comes to king moves, the most interesting is castling, for which I did manage to find a few statistics on the web, based on official games:
- White castles kings side 80.2% of the time.
- White castles queens side 8.8% of the time.
- White doesn't castle at …
Connecting to my Bluefruit Feather from my Android phone!
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This Christmas, my brother was kind enough to get me a great new toy to play with: a Bluefruit Feather! It's a Bluetooth capable board with input and output pins for controlling objects, collecting information, or just about anything …
Fool's Mate Friday: Quickly created Queens

Ah, the most powerful piece in the game. The queen. She can move in eight directions over great distances, she can outmaneuver any single piece on the board, she is used in more attacks and mates (statistically) than any other piece. Very valuable. So valuable, that she is worth 3 …
Taking a screen shot of an Android phone while it is still booting.
I stumbled upon an interesting tidbit the other day. I was trying to take a screenshot of my Android phone while it was playing the boot animation. Of course I tried the standard adb tools:
adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/screencap.png
To which I would follow with an adb …
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas everyone! May God bless you and yours again today, as he already did so many years ago, as we can see in this wonderful song!
Good Christian men rejoice
With heart and soul and voice!
Give ye heed to what we say
News! News!
Jesus Christ is born …
Fool's Mate Friday: Building Bishops

Did you know that Bobby Fischer's favorite piece was the king side bishop? Well, at least it is according to Grand Master Mihail Marin in his book, "Learn From the Legends: Chess Champions at Their Best". On numerous occasions, Mr. Fischer will hold onto his king's bishop until the very …
Hourglass app: recurring timer option?

Last week I mentioned the changes to the Hourglass app in regards to manual time entry. As I looked over the commits, I realized that I forgot to mention the addition of a recurring timer option.
As you can see in the picture, there is now a little set of …
Fool's Mate Friday: A Rook-ie mistake!

The rook is believed to have once been the "rukh", which was some sort of tower shaped carriage that was placed on top of an elephant. Supposedly, the rukh was the actual fortification itself, and the elephant was the means of carrying it around. In the top of this tower …
Edited Hourglass app manual time entry function.

Last week GitHub user spaetz brought forward a great idea for the Hourglass Android timer app that I made a while back. He recommended that the manual time entry be adjusted so that entering any number without a colon (:) would be counted as minutes. Here you can see his issue …