February 15th, 2013
Flip it
This game board is an array of tiles. The tiles have letters. The game play involves flipping a pair of letters, as if the two tiles can move through the screen on the axis that connects them. In any case, they move switches them. The goal is to rearrange the tiles to spell words.
Move:
cat --flip c:a--> act
dog ------------> dog
cat --flip c:d--> dat
dog ------------> cog
The game can be played different sized boards, and with boards with cutouts.
Variation 1: Have the tiles have both color and a letter, to distinguish common letters.
Variation 2: Have the tiles be two sided, so that flipping them exposes the other sides.
What is interesting about this is that it is a class of games easy to implement in the computer but which is hard or impossible to implement as a physical game. There is a whole class of variations on pen and pencil or board games that haven’t been tried because of this!
Posted in Books, funny, hobbies, ideas, Software, Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 7th, 2013
Squish! released for Android devices! The free app can be downloaded from the Google Play store here.
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January 21st, 2013
Squish is a game where tiles are moved on a game board. The starting board has the tiles out of place. The player needs to move the tiles to match the goal arrangement.
Tiles travel in a circuit when a move is made. The player click on a tile to squish it out of place. The tile displaces an adjacent tile, and this follows along a loop until a tile moves to take the place of the original tile. If many circuits are possible starting from an original tile, the choices are displayed and the player picks the move.
To complicate the game, there is a hierarchy of tiles. Darker tiles can displace lighter ones, but lighter tiles can not move darker tiles. This limits the possible moves.
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January 13th, 2013
I run Ubuntu on my main home machine, but the latest 12.04 LTS release has a terrible, barley useable window manager.
I’ve switched to Cinnamon, following the instructions here. Now it all works like it is supposed to.
Posted in Computers, linux, Software | No Comments »
January 6th, 2013
Added Google Analytics to my first app!
Needed V2, PhoneGap code athttps://github.com/DoersGuild/Cordova-Android-Analytics.
Posted in Apps, hobbies | No Comments »
January 4th, 2013
Idea 1:
Laser level. Ther are apps that use the orientation sensor in the phone to turn it into a level. Take it a step further. Combine hte orientation sensor and the phone to show a live camera view but draw a level line on it.
This can be taken further (if the phone is accurate enough), to draw a ‘same’ height line on the camera view, useful for hanging pictures and checking the level of things.
Idea 2:
Novelty ‘which protein is your name in’. Check human proteome first for good matches, then orangatang, pig, rat, bacteria. Show the protein sequence with the name highlighted, and a picture of the organism.
Allow the user to send this in an email or post on FB.
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November 23rd, 2012
GDP: the US is doing better than Europe or Japan:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/11/long-slump
Unemployment: the US doing much better than Europe:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/transatlantic-divergence/
Different economic policies, different outcomes. Europe and Britain have run austerity programs, cutting spending while the US increased spending and cut taxes.
Not unexpected, given what happened during the Great Depression, with the US economy quickly improving as New Deal spending programs kicked in, then falling back into recession after federal spending was cut in 1937 when the economy was still weak:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth
Obama has done better than any other world leader during the financial crisis and the recession it caused. Not that he’s done super–unemployment is still at 8%. An extra $500 billion of Fed spending until the unemployment rate drops below 6% would be a much better policy than the current US policy to cut spending.
Posted in politics | No Comments »
