CompTIA has come out with a new way to "stack" certifications together. Now you can combine certificates that are current to make several different "stackable" badges. I think the overall idea is to have a single badge to take the place of two or three certifications to simplify conveying your …
Fool's Mate Friday: Jin, FICS, and Correspondence Chess
Apparently, the earliest documented correspondence chess game was played between Henry I of England and Louis VI of France, but the earliest correspondence chess game in which all of the moves were recorded took place sometime in 1804 between F. W. de Mauvillion of Breda and an officer at a …
Getting permission to program the Bluefruit Feather board in Ubuntu

I am learning more every day by simply trying to play with my new toy: a Bluefruit Feather board! As I mentioned before, my brother got this little gadget for me as a Christmas present, and it has been a lot of fun to play with!
I was having a …
Fool's Mate Friday: Touching up the User Interface....

My uncle once told me that a good paint job will sell a bad airplane. He's right. As an airplane mechanic, he knew the value of the planes that he worked on. At the same time, he saw customer after customer get "swindled" on a plane that looks nice on …
Setting up the Arduino-IDE for the Bluefruit Feather in Ubuntu

There are a lot of neat tools available to program/hack/reprogram/work with this nifty little Bluefruit Feather board! One of them is the Arduino-IDE, a development environment that allows you create and then flash your new programs to the board. I was faithfully following along in the Bluefruit …
Fool's Mate Friday: Keeping the king safe!

The word “Checkmate” in Chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means "the King is dead."
While in the starting position, there are eight different ways to checkmate in two moves and 355 different ways to checkmate in three moves. Not to mention the countless other ways to …
Building a photon cannon tower....
Well, at least building one graphically! I was working with the Quiet Learner on his new tile tower defense game. He's only in a pre-alpha stage right now, so there isn't anything playable as of yet. If you are interested, you can check out his work here: https://qlfiles.net …
Fool's Mate Friday: Perilous times for pawns!

Did you know that the piece with the lowest survival rate is the white queen's pawn at d2? That's right, out of 2.2 million master level games, this pawn survives the least games at only 24.5%. Conversely, king not withstanding, the one piece with the highest survival rate …
Having trouble building Bluefruit LE app in Android Studio?
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 …
