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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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:

1. White castles kings side 80.2% of the time.
2. White castles queens side 8.8% of the time.
3. White doesn't castle at …

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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 …

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 …