Grogmaster

(Not) Finding Citizens Bank with iOS 6

2012-09-20T10:16:00.001-04:00

I need to go to the bank! Let’s find it.

Here’s our reference, based on the Citizens Bank branch locator:

Featuring adorable “click to move map” technology.

Ok, I can go to my usual branch at 3rd and Cambridge St, and it looks like there’s one down near the plaza with The Friendly Toast and CBC.

Let’s ask my iPhone (on iOS 5) what it thinks…

This is pretty accurate.

Open question about the Binney St. location: is it in the plaza as Google says, or across the street the way the branch locator tells it? (I’ll find out when I go to lunch.)

UPDATE: The branch is indeed where the Citizens Bank map places it, which is a bit down the street from Google’s location. Still, beats not finding it at all.

Great. Now, if I check iOS 6 maps, let’s see…

Accuracy is for aluminum cases, not for places you want to go with your feet.

The branch at 3rd and Cambridge is there, though a little off (it’s right on the corner across from Sweet Touch; Google Maps gets it right). Then we have phantom branches at the T station, Kendall Square and halfway to Central.

Boom.

Putting the “Time” in “Time Machine”

2012-08-12T17:00:00.001-04:00

This weekend I had the pleasure of testing out my backup setup for the first real time. We do onsite backups to a 1TB Time Capsule that handles two laptops, and offsite backups of irreplaceable stuff (photos and documents) to CrashPlan.

Cait came home on Thursday complaining of her MacBook freezing immediately after startup, beach-balling and being otherwise unresponsive. When DiskWarrior said it couldn't write its replacement directory due to a hardware failure, I figured it was time to replace the drive.

(Side note: the drive that was in there was barely a year old. Blargh.)

I swapped the new drive in without issue. (I've learned how not to fry a logic board with a drive update, but only through trial and error.) Then came time to restore the hard drive to its last state.

Maybe it was being conservative, or maybe I really wanted to try out Time Machine, but I decided to restore from the backup rather than try to clone the failing drive directly.

The restore USB key I had made prior to this process couldn't actually boot the MacBook (it was Mountain Lion, which doesn't support “Early 2008” MacBooks) but I was able to dig out my old Snow Leopard DVD to do the Time Machine restore. I hooked the MacBook up with an Ethernet cable for maximum speed, and started the restore.

“Maximum speed,” it turns out, clocked in at a bit over 27 hours to copy 380GB. That's kind of a lot, more than 4 minutes per GB.

The worst of it, however, came later, when the new machine was ready to do its Time Machine backup for the first time. Rather than realize that it had been cloned from an existing backup, it tried to do everything over from scratch.

In order to do this, I had to delete the existing sparse image backup for this computer to make room. Thankfully I found a “trick” to do this via the command line, as deleting it via the Finder would have taken many many hours on its own.

Unfortunately I came across hacks to change the disk UUID associated with a Time Machine backup too late to use them. (The disk image had already been rendered invalid due to a partial deletion.)

So, back to Ethernet to ship more bytes. Uploading 380GB to the Time Capsule didn't take quite as long, only 15 hours or so. In theory Cait could have used her laptop during this time if she was able to stay in Ethernet range, but that wasn't really feasible.

All in all, between waiting for the new drive to arrive from Amazon and the two Time Machine delays, her laptop was out of commission for three days straight.

I'm starting to plan for retiring the Time Capsule's role as a backup server. Its health is too opaque, and these delays are barely tolerable (good thing it was the weekend, good thing Cait could borrow my laptop, good thing we were able to rescue files she could work on off the old drive).

Instead, I'm going to get an external dive, possibly a mirrored RAID setup, and connect that to the Time Capsule. That would give more space flexibility, and also allow me to directly use USB for restores and initial backups, rather than go through file sharing over Ethernet.

Eye-Fi Fun #1: Sharing with Dropbox

2011-04-24T22:48:00.000-04:00

When Eye-Fi announced that they were coming out with a feature to connect their Wi-Fi SD cards directly to iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, I lept to buy one.

My use cases were spotty; while it would certainly be cool to upload photos from parks, graveyards, or interstates, we’ve never felt particularly hampered by waiting until we got home to an Internet connection to make a blog post. Furthermore, blogging from an iPhone is a pretty bad experience even if you had nice photos.

I did have some ideas, though:

We sometimes liveblog taking care of Molly to create “day in the life” records. Getting photos off the camera can be kind of a pain, especially since Cait needs to dig up the SD card reader for her MacBook.
Technology is cool.

Home Eye-Fi Setup

The Eye-Fi is unfortunately somewhat limited out-of-the-box for use with multiple computers. For simplicity, a card can only have one destination at a time, I suppose so that it can have a clear, “did the current destination get the photo, if not, I’ll try sending again” logic. After all, network interruptions and abrupt power-downs are common, so handling them gracefully is paramount.

While we’ve informally designated Cait’s iPhoto library as the canonical one for pictures of Molly, and Eye-Fi does have an “import to iPhoto” option, I still use the camera from time-to-time enough that it would be a pain to keep switching settings, which is done by going to the destination computer specifically and changing a setting in the Eye-Fi Center application.

Two elements came to rescue our workflow:

This Mac mini I keep on all the time as a media server / podcast downloader / iPod docking station.
Dropbox

Since the Eye-Fi can save photos directly to a folder, and Dropbox looks just like a folder, it was trivial to make the Mac mini the destination and have it save the photos to Dropbox. (I made an “Eye-Fi” folder inside of “Photos,” and Eye-Fi makes date-stamped folders in there.) I could then share the Dropbox folder with Cait so that the photos would be available on both of our computers.

It’s not quite Rube Goldberg, but the workflow ends up being:

Take a picture with the camera
The camera connects to our wireless network and uploads the photo to the Mac mini
The Mac mini then saves the photo to the Dropbox folder
The photo is uploaded to Dropbox
Our laptops download the photo either from Dropbox or LAN-sync’d from the Mac mini
Either of us can upload to PicasaWeb or do whatevs with the photos
On her own time Cait drags a day’s photos into iPhoto and deletes them from Dropbox

Yes, it’s complicated, but there’s no human intervention between clicking the shutter and seeing the photos on the laptop, just a short delay. We shoot “Large” resolution at “Normal” quality on our D90, which comes out to about 3meg per image. It’s not instant, but the photos start showing up in Dropbox in under a minute.

When setting this up I did notice how sensitive the Eye-Fi card is to distance and obstacles. There’s not much room for an antenna in the SD card, so you have to have a reasonably clear line-of-sight from the camera to the wireless router to get acceptable performance. In our old house, where the router was high on a shelf on the top floor, sitting directly above a laser printer, uploading from the living room was a bit pokey, and from the basement, impossible. In the new house the router is on the first floor, one room over from the living room, and each photo can transfer to the computer in a matter of seconds.

So far, we’ve been happy with this setup. It at least works well for the “taking pictures of Molly around the house and blogging about them later” scenario, as eliminating the need to grab the SD card reader or worrying about whether or not to delete after import does perceptibly lessen the friction of using the camera.

It’s not as good for “coming home with a full camera and wanting to use it right away,” though, since transferring via the several services is significantly slower than just connecting the card to the computer directly, and there’s not a good way of knowing when all of your photos have transferred, if you’re waiting for a big batch to finish. We’ll have to see how things go for Cait when the Summer gravestoning season starts.

I was disappointed that our HD video camera, the Kodak Zi8, is not supported by the Eye-Fi. That being said, I’m not sure that waiting for videos to copy over would be a great experience. If we get another one (rather than just waiting to upgrade our 3GSs to iPhone 5s) I’ll make sure to verify compatibility before buying.

Summer Board Gaming: Long Distance

2010-09-12T22:33:00.000-04:00

I started a new job recently, which had me staying in San Francisco for two weeks. To stay connected, Cait and I tried playing some board games together online. We used Yucata.de because it has a wide variety of games that play asynchronously. Due to the time difference, it wouldn’t have been very practical to carve out a chunk of time to play in real time.

Asynchronous gaming has its challenges; not every game adapts well to the format. Certainly nothing where players are directly negotiating with each other, though at least that mechanic is rare in two-player games. The most fitting games are ones where:

One player can take an entire turn without any interaction with the other.
Turns are on the longer side, or at least have some interesting decisions.
Strategies are either obvious enough or non-existant enough (i.e.: pure tactics) that there isn’t anything to forget between play sessions.

Stone Age is our favorite of the games that Yucata has available, so we went with it first, but we gave up after trying a round or two. The game has so much back and forth each turn as you alternate placing your meeples. Since your actions over the course of the turn tend to be pretty coordinated, we couldn’t imagine playing it effectively with so much time between each move.

Thurn and Taxis was the next one we tried, and it fit the playing model perfectly. You have enough to do on each turn, you can play independently, and your current route is always there reminding you of what you were trying to get done from the last time. Unfortunately, playing asynchronously just highlighted how much Thurn and Taxis is multiplayer solitaire, a race to the end without one player affecting the other. Being non-realtime actually exacerbated this: at least face-to-face you can see your opponent take the card that you really wanted. With hours between turns, you tend to forget which cards were face up the last time you played, so you tend not to miss any that were snatched away before you could get them. We played two games of this, but didn’t think it worth starting another. There was no feeling of actually playing against the other person.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers was the best of the games we played. Though Carcassonne has low interaction (at least when we play it we don’t do too much stealing), the amount that it does have survives online, unlike with Thurn and Taxis. Though it requires many short turns to complete a game, each of those turns is nice and discrete: you look at your tile and play it. You know it won’t take you very long, and there’s nothing to keep in your head for when you next go back.

We really only had two problems with Hunters and Gatherers. The first was that we had never played this version before (we generally prefer The City), and so were not yet comfortable with its scoring or particular strategies. The second was that Yucata does a very poor job of informing you of the scoring that goes on, both during the game and at the end. You can watch the points go up if you remember what they were the last time, but there’s no “Caitlin scored a forest for 8 points” sort of message. Even worse, when the game’s over you just get an email about winning or losing. There’s no depiction of how the meadows or huts ended up.

Nevertheless, Hunters and Gatherers is something we’d be happy to play again online. Since it is going pretty cheaply on Amazon, we eve picked up an IRL copy to get more familiar with it. I also expect it to be very baby-compatible: as shown, it can be played in short, disconnected spurts over time, or it can be played with one hand holding the meeple, as it were.

Hunters and Gathers may even end up becoming our favorite of all of the Carcs. I particularly like how many of the tiles have unusual configurations, which is a definite advantage over at least vanilla Carcassonne. There also seems to be a greater ability to score meaningfully during the game, rather than everything being dominated by the scoring at the end. This may be because the quirky configurations tend to keep the meadows small.

Finally, we tried a bit of Egizia because it was available and we already knew how to play. Or, perhaps more accurately, we already knew the rules. It seems to suffer slightly less from the back-and-forth problem that doomed Stone Age, but definitely has some “where did these points come from” issues. Overall, we’re not taken with it, which isn’t really a surprise since the face-to-face version didn’t grab us when we first tried it. In fact, Cait hasn’t been interested enough to check back in to finish the game ever since our last Hunters and Gatherers round ended.

Bonus physical game:
I poked around in Games of Berkeley for a game I could play solitaire, and came away with Dungeon Twister 2: Prison. I was deciding between it and Space Alert and, I think it retrospect, I probably made a mistake. (I think I need to remember to apply a dampening function to all Tom Vasel reviews. The guy just likes everything.) Dungeon Twister looks like a dungeon crawl but is actually very puzzley. Your characters are trapped in a maze, and negotiating its traps and rotating (“twisting”) board segments is as much of the game as fighting enemies.

While I have to give the designer credit for putting a lot of work into the solitaire version, which cleverly gives the enemy characters realistic (if somewhat rudimentary) behavior, I wasn’t taken enough with the game to really tolerate the bookkeeping. While admittedly I played on the easiest difficulty level to start, there wasn’t enough going on that was interesting. I prefer fighting to negotiating the maze, but the fighting mechanic (each player chooses and reveals a card simultaneously) is the weakest adaptation to solitaire play, since the “opponent” does not apply a strategy that one could try to out-guess. It’s worth comparing to Ghost Stories, which plays very well solitaire (pure co-ops tend to), where there’s something you have to figure out how to defeat nearly every turn, and bringing about that defeat is a puzzle in itself.

My Blog vs. Cait’s on Google Instant

2010-09-08T21:23:00.000-04:00

I showed Cait Google Instant this evening, and, as befitting a blogger, her first search was a vanity one. Her blog title was picked up after just “vast pu,” which I think is fairly respectable.

Here’s my attempt:

Nope…

Wait for it…

That’s right: “Did you mean: frogmaster”

Summer Board Gaming: Newport

2010-09-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

When Cait and I vacation together, we’ll tend to get a comfortable hotel room (hot tub if it’s available), poke around a bit in whatever town we’re in, and spend the majority of the time playing games.

Our recent trip to Newport was just such an excursion, except that we also stopped in at The Game Keeper in Pawtucket to stock up. Though it’s exceedingly hard to find (you have to know it’s in the converted mill building; there are no signs) it may be the nicest game store I’ve ever been in. While it lacked the selection of, say, Games of Berkeley, or the obvious-that-it’s-hereness of The Games People Play, it had a friendly store owner and a nice depth of titles. Games were displayed facing front on nice racks, and were well-grouped (sometimes by theme, sometimes by mechanic). We had a lot of fun browsing, and walked away with a bit of a haul.

The clear favorite was Empire Builder, which is the first in a long-running series of “crayon rails” games. In these games, you have to develop a vast railroad network starting with nothing more than a few (million) bucks, a train, a crayon, and a dream. Over the course of the game you make money by moving goods across the country to fulfill “demand” cards (such as: $39 million to sell coffee in Los Angeles). The routes, however, are entirely of your own devising: the only track on the board is that which you buy and then draw with your crayon, making lines between dots laid out in a hex pattern.

One could consider Empire Builder as a much more advanced version of Ticket to Ride. It shares the building-routes-to-satisfy cards aspect, at least, and the getting-in-each-other’s-way level of player interaction. We enjoy the challenge of optimizing your routes to best meet your demands (pick up something in the east to sell in the west, then get something in the west you can sell in the south) and the constant balance between spending your cash to build new routes versus hoarding it for the $250 million win condition.

Credit goes to The How To Play Podcast for making me aware of this game. It was host Ryan Sturm’s favorite two-player game in the “How to Choose the Right Game” episode.

On recommendation from the aforementioned The Game Keeper proprietor, we grabbed Egizia because we’re worker-placement fans and it’s the latest hotness in that genre. We weren’t particularly taken with the first game, though. While Egizia has an interesting mechanic in that you need to place your workers along the Nile in the direction of its flow, the rest of it seems to be a bit of a mishmash of various elements. For example, there are five different places to build, across three different building sites. They all work differently.

At least with two players, there’s a scarcity of scarcity, the typical hallmark of the genre. As a consequence, play lacks focus. With five different places to build, which do you choose? It doesn’t seem to matter, unless maybe one of them fulfills one of your bonus cards, which is a potentially-unbalanced aspect on its own.

By comparison, Agricola flows naturally and brilliantly from its farming theme. Stone Age has a variety point-making mechanics, but they’re drastically different, so you can get a sense of how to choose one versus another. Caylus is still a mystery to me, but a compelling one. I know that its interlocking features are there for a reason. Agizia currently feels sloppy, with bits glued on in random places rather than joined together nicely.

I grabbed Hive because it is one of the most portable games around. There’s no board you have to find space for, and its Bakelite pieces are easily cleaned and won’t get blown around by the wind. I think it’s the only board game you can reasonably play on a beach. Unfortunately, gameplay-wise it’s not particularly appealing to us. We’re not huge fans of abstract games in general, and the tactical placement reminded Cait (unpleasantly, as you may remember) of The Battle for Hill 218.

We would have played more, perhaps giving Egizia another chance, but over dinner the last night we got to talking about designing a game, and spent the rest of the evening (and next few days at home) hammering out a prototype. The best description right now is somewhere between Careers and Guillotine. Hopefully this is a topic I’ll be able to return to as it’s farther along.

Summer Board Gaming: Maine

2010-08-31T23:01:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer Cait and I spent a week and a half in Maine with her family. We stayed in cottages instead of the usual camping (a concession to her pregnancy), so we were able to pack and play a wider variety of games than normal.

Ticket to Ride was the absolute breakout hit of the vacation, as befitting its “gateway” reputation. It was slightly surprising to me, since we were not a crowd that would shy away from direct confrontation in general, and none of the new players seemed to maliciously block (though there were instances of speculatively grabbing some valuable short routes, particularly the midwest north-south ones). The tension of getting everything built while not knowing how well your opponents are doing was enough to keep us engaged. It didn’t hurt that you can explain the rules in five minutes, either. We’re planning on picking up either Europe or Märklin for the holidays, though, as Cait and I are not sure how many more rounds of the USA map we’re interested in playing.

I was happy to try Nuns on the Run with more than two. That definitely improves it. We liked it well enough, though we had some trouble seeing how to win as the Abbess/Prioress. I worry that it’s a bit too fiddly given how much you actually do on each turn. The dice rolling, counting, and token placing dominates the play time.

We were subjected to an evening of Contract Rummy at one point, which I’ll admit was not the most exciting game experience ever. In later rounds it devolved into drawing cards one-at-a-time until you got all the cards you needed. My guess is that the game would be somewhat improved by jokers, since throwing wilds in there would reduce the number of times you’d need to draw to get what you needed, but I don’t see myself playing again to find out.

On the positive side of cards, we played a number of rounds of Setback, which could be considered the family game. I had only played with four before, and we had enough people to do both six and eight. Eight gets interesting because you deal out the entire deck. This guarantees that the Jack is in someone’s hand, leading to more aggressive betting.

Pandemic was ok, but I’m starting to think that four is too many. We like two players a lot, and maybe a third would add some depth to the puzzle-solving, but at four it’s too easy to split into leaders / followers. That being said, I’ve never played with four experienced players, which would make a big difference (or just lead to unconstructive disagreement).

The Battle for Hill 218 didn’t go over well with Cait, I think because it’s entirely tactics over strategy.

I remember Bohnanza being mildly successful but not jump-up-and-down, zomg need to play this again as I expected from its reputation. It may be that we’re not as sophisticated as we should be in deciding whether to make trades. It was rare that there’d ever be two offers on the table, so making an unbalanced trade was still better than nothing.

We had a five-player game of Risk (using the objective-based rules from the 2008 edition), which was possibly my first complete game with more than two players, at least since childhood. I won, though I think it had more to do with taking care to play to the win conditions than being particularly tactical about conquering. I also locked in North America early.

I suppose it’s nice that the objectives keep the game from going on forever, but some of them are a bit tricky, more like video game achievements than milestones on the road to victory. For example, taking over eight cities in one turn is something you have to plan for in the sense of preparing your forces, which is thematic, but also requires that you have left at least eight cities in vulnerable-enough places! If you took those cities on earlier turns, you’d be unable to make this objective.

Our game was also a lesson in the meta-game: look too strong or get too belligerent at the beginning and you’ll be the first one out. I huddled in North America while everyone else rallied against the player who had his sights loudly set on controlling Europe. A peace treaty to the south and strong forces in Alaska and Newfoundland kept me secure.

We used the new edition’s rules for drafting countries, which was a poor choice in retrospect. There’s not a lot of incentive to be the one guy who tries to keep another player from taking that last territory in a given continent, so some of us started at significant advantage over others. If we play again, I think we’ll use the random start rules. While it’ll make the game longer as everyone first has to fight their way to consolidation, it’ll be a much more even footing.

Evolution of a Python Programmer

2010-08-13T13:34:00.000-04:00

So I don’t lose it again, I’ll share The Evolution of a Python Programmer. Make sure you read to the JavaScript snippet. (thx, @banksean!)

The Rise and Fall of My Chumby

2010-08-04T14:06:00.000-04:00

I got a Chumby over a year or so ago. Internet-connected doohickey! Cute personality! Fun for everyone! I was excited.

Chumby unwrapped, set up, and put on my nightstand/lamp. Numerous Chumby widgets installed.
I find myself mostly just waiting for either Chuck Norris Facts or the current time, each of which comes around every five minutes.
Chumby upgrade includes Pandora as an alarm! Excitement builds again.
Pare down widgets to clock, weather, and news photos.
Captions on news photos are so truncated that they just become pictures of random strangers I feel like I should recognize.
Waking to Pandora becomes problematic, since if I don’t like the song I’ll turn it off and go back to sleep.
Decide to switch alarm over to NPR! I like NPR. Choose local NPR station.
Internet-connected doohickey reduced to functionality of a clock radio that I could poke for the weather / random strangers.
iPad becomes source of weather information.
Changing the time on the alarm is such a painful, multi-screen process that I leave it off and just use my iPhone.
Internet-connected doohickey reduced to functionality of a clock.
Chumby is crowding out nightstand / lamp room that I’d rather use for a tea mug. Chumby moved up one shelf level.
Chumby’s limited viewing angle renders its “Night Mode” unreadable from eight inches below, such as where my head is when I’m in bed.
Internet-connected doohickey reduced to functionality of a smooth piece of slate with a little rubber cloud hanging off of it.

“And the rocket’s red… oh dear God that’s close”

2010-07-04T23:50:00.000-04:00

The neighbors at the cottage we’re renting brought some fireworks, so I got a chance to do more long-exposure shots. These are also straight from the camera, except for one which I straightened because my tripod is kinda impotent.

Night Photography

2010-06-30T23:32:00.000-04:00

Discovering the fun of long (10–30s) exposures at night. Misplaced my Gorillapod, so these are from railings and tops of cars, straight from the camera.

Not for 2 Players: Nuns on the Run

2010-06-15T22:11:00.070-04:00

Third in my little series of games that say they play with two but really don’t is Nuns on the Run. It’s a chase game, somewhat akin to Scotland Yard, but in reverse: most of the players are moving secretly about the board, racing to pick up objects and return to their cell, while one player, controlling the Abbess and Prioress pawns, tries to catch enough of them to win.

Given that we’re fans of Scotland Yard, the mechanics of this game are very appealing to us. They could even be said to improve on Scotland Yard as they allow several players the thrill of trying to evade capture at the same time. Unfortunately, what would likely be a lot of fun when several novices are running about in the abbey is fairly lifeless when there’s just one.

Since the novices are typically hidden (players mark their location on secret notepads), the Abbess/Prioress player’s only hope is getting one of his characters near enough to a novice to overhear her or, even better (but less likely), see her. While there’s some strategy to getting the Abbess and Prioress into likely positions, there’s a lot of luck, too, especially since they have to follow paths visible to the novice player.

At higher numbers of players, the novices’ advantages are balanced out by there being more of them to stumble upon. A single novice is very much a needle in a haystack. While in our games she ended up being spotted once or twice, in the end it was too easy for her to slip away without getting caught.

I’m very eager to try this with enough players, since the core of the game is pretty solid and enjoyable. We likely won’t give it a go with two again, though, at least not with one of the proposed variants that gives the Prioress some freedom of movement. Otherwise, it’s far too unbalanced.

Not for 2 Players: Slide 5

2010-06-14T21:38:00.082-04:00

Slide 5 (a.k.a. 6 Nimmt!) is another recent game acquisition that somewhat falsely claims to be playable with two players. While Bohnanza mostly failed to live up to its promise, Slide 5 is just plain bad with only two.

I picked up Slide 5 because of its reputation as a good filler. It’s quick, it scales to as many as ten people, and its rules can be explained in about three minutes. I’m expecting that it may go over well during an upcoming family vacation (five or six players), but in the meantime it will sit on the shelf.

For a full rules description, watch Tom Vasel’s fairly positive review. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that players simultaneously reveal cards from their hand, which get played to the four stacks of cards on the table. If a player causes one of those stacks to exceed five cards, he must take it, which gives him points (which are bad).

From what I can tell, the joy of this game comes from the unpredictability of where cards will be played, and therefore which stacks will “avalanche” at six cards. With enough players, that could be any one at any time, but with only two cards coming out a turn it’s a rare, predictable, and annoyingly-unavoidable occurrence.

In his review, Tom Vasel mentioned that some players even claim that Slide 5 actually has no strategy, but they enjoy playing and tossing out random cards anyway. Cait at least felt that after five rounds she had no more idea of how she should be playing than when we started.

In a social setting, I can understand how the chaos and the laughter and the oh-no-I-just-got-screwed gameplay could be a lot of fun. With the right crowd at the right time, I’d definitely like to try it out. While I think that there are some plays that are better than others, the decisions are light enough and the deal of the cards is influential enough that two players are probably better off playing War. It at least won’t discourage them with the pretense of choice.

Not for 2 Players: Bohnanza

2010-06-13T21:38:00.000-04:00

The entertainment of choice around here has swung back to the tabletop, sparked by our recent hot-tub-and-board-games vacation to Newburyport, a weekend session of Battlestar Galactica, and some Amazon gift certificates. Cait and I have gotten a small handful of new games, some of which are listed as playing with two but, on closer inspection, really aren’t.

The first of these, and probably the best with two, is Bohnanza. I learned about this from the quite interesting Hobby Games: The 100 Best book, where it was described thusly by essayist Mike Selinker:

Bohnanza is the best card game ever written. And it just happens to be about bean farming.

Bohnanza is a set-collection game where your cards represent beans of various amusingly-illustrated types, which you plant and then harvest for money. (The money is tracked by coins on the backs of the cards, a dual-use mechanic that guarantees one or two points in Cait’s book.)

While the official two-player rules maintain some of the game’s distinctiveness, such as the requirement that you keep your hand in the same order you drew it, it eliminates trading between players that seems to be a core part of the game’s charm. Again, from Mike Selinker:

Bohnanza sets you up to be underwhelmed — “I’m sorry, the game’s about what now?” — and then overwhelms you with its simplicity, elegance, and lightning-fast interactivity. It’s everything that the classic Pit wanted to be when it grew up. If you liked saying “I’ve got two! Two!” as a kid, you’ll like saying “Who wants my kidney bean?” just as much as an adult.

The lack of trading is understandable for two-player rules: any trade will benefit one player more than the other (and enough information is public that it’s pretty obvious in each case), so the player getting the worse deal just won’t agree. Two-player Bohnanza tries to fill the whole with a draft to simulate getting cards you want, and an optional discard to get rid of cards you don’t, but it feels like a poor substitute.

With two players, Bohnanza offers some enjoyment, but enough is lost that it’s appeal for us stems largely from its novelty. Nevertheless, I look forward to trying it with three or more. Played as it’s meant to be played, with the wheeling and dealing that makes games like The Settlers of Catan so appealing, I think it will be a lot of fun.

New Fonty Goodness

2010-05-24T21:58:00.000-04:00

Vollkorn, by Friedrich Althausen

Just a quick update to note that I’ve changed this blog’s header and title to use Vollkorn, a new font from the Google Font Directory.

Installation on Blogger is straightforward if you’re up for Edit HTML (and the consequences of forking your template). It would be pretty silly, though, if we didn’t make it a bit easier one of these days…

Not blogging on account of iPad

2010-05-11T00:38:00.001-04:00

I posted recently about my disappointment in the available iPad-compatible blogging solutions. This has hampered my own blogging in two significant ways:

Since the iPad is still the shiny fun toy I want to play with, I haven't wanted to pull out my laptop in order to blog.
I've been spending a good deal of time and attention trying to rectify the problem by building a native client of my own.

This isn't anything official, and I might not even finish it, but for now it's been a fun way to develop Cocoa Touch skills and get some experience in engineering a client app in something other than JavaScript or GWT.

Things I like:

I can make apps that run on the iPad, which is, as previously noted, shiny.
The challenge of figuring out a new system and getting it to work.

Things I miss:

Java, Eclipse, and static analysis. The tools available for Java just seem to be able to do more: easier (in some cases real-time) refactoring, auto-filling of methods (e.g. to satisfy an interface), and syntax highlighting of uses and errors come to mind.
Open source everywhere. When a library is behaving curiously, I'm used to being able to Control-click in and poke around to see how it's doing things. Not so with Cocoa, and I've already been bitten by two bugs in the frameworks that have required trial-and-error workarounds.

Things that are annoying:

Indentation to line up colons. Really? The aesthetic value of this escapes me, especially when coupled with the maintenance hassle.
Xcode groups not matching the filesystem. More maintenance. If decoupling these is even ever desirable it should be an option, not the default.
Categories. I haven't seen how these are particularly useful in practice, and currently seem to do little more than fill up the auto-complete menu with random, out-of-context methods.
The thesaurus. Maybe I'm just not used to the terminology, but the API authors like to use verbs that are a bit on the flowery side, which keeps me from ever remembering them. Modal views are not "shown" or "hidden," but "presented" and "dismissed." Okay, it has more character, but at a not-insignificant learning cost.

Things I couldn't live without:

Stack Overflow. 'Nuff said.

Weekend Gaming: For Sale, BSG, ME2, &tc.

2010-04-19T21:43:00.000-04:00

Some friends were in town for a wedding, and we got a fair amount of gaming done. Here are some capsule highlights:

In a blaze of foresight, I brought Guillotine along on our trip to Providence to see the Circle finale. We had about an hour to kill after dinner, so we got in three games. Guillotine was ideal because we had played it at PAX East last month, so there was no learning curve. Nevertheless, I’m starting to slightly sour on the game. I wish there was either more strategy or more of a “take that” element to the mechanics. With four players, you certainly can’t plan ahead to your next turn. It’s also pretty hard to set up an opponent to get a bad noble, since the chances that they’ll have a card that weasels out of it is pretty high.

On Sunday, I introduced the King of Fillers, For Sale, to universally positive reactions. I had only played it once before, but now I’m definitely going to push it harder. For such a short, simple game there’s a ton going on. I love how the property buying in the first round has such a direct, intense consequence for how the second round will play out, but, with clever play and good reading of your opponents, you can still overcome your previous mistakes. This keeps everyone fully engaged through the selling phase.

We played our first game of Battlestar Galactica, a game that both couples had sitting on a shelf for a long time, waiting for enough people and enough time. It’s a game that certainly looks more complicated than it ends up being, so I feel good about introducing others to it, especially if they’re hooked by the theme. We didn’t have too much in the way of accusations, as we uncovered the Cylon pretty quickly. Unfortunately, that Cylon was president Baltar, who held on to his office from the Brig, and was able to do quite a bit of damage before we were able to elect the VP to take over. BSG seems like it will only get better with more plays and more familiarity. I also can see how a fifth person would add a lot.

In the realm of video games, we played a bit of 4-player New Super Mario Brothers Wii. The getting in each others’ way was both amusing and annoying, but what was really frustrating was getting through castle levels with anyone surviving. I remember this game got universally positive reviews, especially with four people, but it’s clear to me that those reviewers were all much better at Mario than we were.

On my own I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2. Its siren song pulled me away from my resolve to finish Dragon Age: Origins, and I couldn’t be happier. ME2’s improvements as a shooter are more than welcome, and I love getting back into role-playing my character.

The Dark Knight / Toy Story Trailer

2010-04-13T19:21:00.002-04:00

Apparently movie trailer mashups is a thing. This one is absolutely brilliant:

It's from space, and also the future

2010-04-10T13:23:00.001-04:00

Ok, I'm really not one for Apple unboxing porn, but the Magic Mouse packaging is amazing.

Great Moments in Tech Journalism: HuffPost’s iPad Review

2010-04-06T16:48:00.000-04:00

The review of the iPad published in the Huffington Post starts thusly:

I must admit I was skeptical about this product until I got my hands on it. I played with it for a good 20 minutes at the Apple Store yesterday…

I actually read on, convinced that this had to be the start of a satire, lambasting the habit of bloggers and tech journalists to form strong opinions about products with little-to-no experience with them.

Nope.

Good job, HuffPost. Crack team you’ve got there.

Blogging from iPad: Edit HTML, BlogPress, but not Pages

2010-04-05T22:38:00.003-04:00

The iPad is certainly a much better reading/watching device than an authoring one, at least in these early days. Still, its impressive portability makes me want to see how suitable it is for blogging. After all, the best blogging client is the one you have with you, and all that.

Also, I like to play with it. Magic space tablet from the future, take me away!

I wrote my last post in the Blogger editor (copying in bits that were written in iTunes), which was workable, but hardly ideal. Mobile Safari does not support rich text editing in HTML with contenteditable, so I had to settle for Edit HTML mode over Compose.

I'm happy to say that the toolbar works when you select text, so I didn't have to type in the bold or link tags myself. Scrolling, however, was pretty painful: though iPad often allows scrolling of overflow: auto elements using a two-finger scroll, this does not appear to work on a <textarea>. My only recourse was to drag-and-hold the insertion point at the top or the bottom and wait for the painfully slow scrolling to show me what I wanted.

The new editor's Edit HTML also lacks photo insertion, though with the lack of upload support in the browser I couldn't have done more than pick from Picasa Web Albums.

In all, the post editor is there, but you'd likely be happier e-mailing a post using Mail-to-Blogger unless you were really committed to a bit of formatting, linking, or adding an After the Jump marker.

I tried to make a post via Pages, since it has full image positioning and text formatting controls, which would make it an ideal editor, but its exporting is limited to its own format, PDF, or Word. Sadly there's no way to get an HTML-formatted e-mail out of it.

I'm writing this post in BlogPress, which has been updated with iPad support but is still only three or four bucks. (Sadly it appears that the Blogger-only BlogPress Lite, which was free as a present for our birthday, is no longer available.)

So far, it's ok. Certainly better than using Edit HTML, since the native text box is more pleasant than the one in Safari. Nevertheless, other parts of the app are rough: there's no text formatting at all (and writing HTML tags on this keyboard is far too cumbersome); draft posts are not saved to the server, and don't immediately appear in the post list after saving; posting images to Picasa Web Albums is available, but the app doesn't re-use Blogger credentials, which would typically be the same; HTML entities need double-escaping to be stable; my post got scheduled rather than published when it was made.

Still, any sort of image upload (which I hope you're seeing on this post right now) is worth having. Given BlogPress's near-impulse price point, I will hesitantly recommend it as the best available option, but I will likely pester Daniel Jalkut to make an iPad version of MarsEdit in the meantime.

Warning: BlogPress will link photos to their Picasa Web Albums pages, even if those photos are uploaded to unlisted albums. Unless you delete the links, your readers will be able to click through and see the entire album. This may not be what you want.

Are you blogging on iPad? What software have you tried? Developers: I'd be happy to try anything you have out or give a bit of feedback.

Update: Fixed entity encoding and spacing around the images, added "scheduled" note, and added labels (using Edit HTML).

Some iPad Software Reviews: ESPN, Marvel, Civ Rev, NYT Crosswords

2010-04-05T21:05:00.001-04:00

I've been playing with my new shiny (spoiler alert: it's shiny) and trying to "give back" to the "community" with some "user generated content" in the form of reviews on iTunes of some of the iPad launch apps.

In the interests of obeying Robb's Law, testing out how Blogger works on the thing, and writing something, anything for this blog, I've copied the reviews in below. For fun, I'm composing this whole post on the tablet using Blogger's post editor, to see what it's like, so forgive the lack of direct links to the iTunes store.

ESPN ScoreCenter XL: It doesn't load (1 star)

Tried yesterday and today. Nothing loads except for the ticker at the bottom.

Don't waste your money until they get the servers sorted out.

Marvel: Great presentation, small selection, high prices (3 stars)

This is an excellent app, but it's hampered by a store that's far too small and a bit too expensive.

The app's letterbox reading mode is possibly the nicest, most dramatic way of reading comics. It's better than holding paper in your hands.

The store's selection is too small, though. For example, they have only the first 12 issues of The Runaways, which doesn't even complete the first story arc. And, at $2 each, it's cheaper to buy the first hardcover collection from Amazon, which gives you the first 18 issues for less money.

Marvel should have a much larger selection (there are no comics from 2010 even!) and either price at 99c or offer discounts for buying an entire series or story arc.

Civilization Revolution: Almost perfect (4 stars)

Civilization Revolution on iPad is probably the best Civ experience there has ever been. What could fit the theme of the game more than to have the fate of the world literally in your hands?

It is almost as if the iPad was made for this game, and the rest is secondary.

I'm only giving this four out of five stars because there are some polish issues. Zooming out the map leads to polygon issues, and some flows (like choosing a new tech) could be streamlined given the larger screen size.

NYTimes Crosswords: Great puzzles, awkward interface (3 stars)

You obviously can't beat the puzzles, coming from the New York Times, but on the iPad the interface ends up being somewhat awkward. I found myself having to change hand positions all too often, as there's no easy way to skip past clues without manually tapping on different ones. The app could definitely use next/prev buttons of some kind.

Also, needs a way to turn off the music on the home screen.

What apps have you been using on iPad? Give me some recommendations.

The Circle: Episode 2

2010-04-03T11:33:00.000-04:00

Second episode of The Circle:

Episodes four and five are premiering April 16th!

“Mr. Fancy Pants” by Jonathan Coulton at PAX East 2010

2010-04-02T17:37:00.000-04:00

The most entertaining part of PAX East’s Saturday night concert was probably Jonathan Coulton playing “Mr. Fancy Pants” on the Distract-o-tron.

I’m very impressed by how he’s able to keep the drum beat going throughout just by tapping on that thing.

(Many thanks to uploader acmidgett!)

Finally, a Wireless Reading Device

2010-04-02T17:15:00.001-04:00

iPad hype (which I am absorbing as fast as possible) does nevertheless remind me of Ben Hoffman’s infoMania Tech Report on the Kindle: