Alejo's Tenuki

Ubuntu wins by resignation… I give up. Finally, after a few years as an Ubuntu fanboy, I resign. Having convinced my girlfriend and a few foes to try Ubuntu, I’m now realising the benefits of another operative system: Windows. Though this may struck some of you, my devoteness to Ubuntu isn’t enough as to sacrifice more hours trying to adapt it. For some reason, it seems like Ubuntu is designed for two types of users:
-computer-gurus: users who know exactly how to do whatever they want. Modifying the code is as easy as pie for these users, they can customize everything to match exactly their high-demanding needs. A go-equivalent for these users would be like high dan players.
-basic user: they only need some basic software like the office suite, internet browser, music player and some instant messaging applications. These would be low double-digit kyu players.

Inbetween you’ll find a huge amount of users who, just like me, try to modify the system to suit their needs. As a sample we could talk about Compiz, a basic user won’t go any further from the “none-basic-extra” menu while a computer-guru may actually modify the code of the program or write code directly embedded into the compiz-manager. The intermediate user will try to use the compiz-manager without writing code… with success rate varying from one attempt to the next one until it’s satisfactory – a couple of hours later. If we keep on with the go-equivalents, these users would represent single-digit kyu players facing tsumegos of increasing level of difficulty.

During the last month, I’ve realised there are some thing that just didn’t fit my needs. Openoffice is way worse than Microsoft Office, the same happens with Gimp and Photoshop and some other applications. In the end, windows had to be virtualized inside ubuntu so that I could get some stuff done.

This week, I received a new monitor. Trying to get two monitors working at the same time was a mess. Options:
-Twinview: cloning output, only available in nvidia, shows the same image on both monitors… with different resolutions. Useless
-Xinerama: extends the desktop to both monitors… Weird and useless with different resolutions.
-One monitor, one workspace: requires a new Xserver to be launched at the same time and would be troublesome, since I only have one keyboard and mouse.

Meanwhile, I decided to install Windows on a partition. Though I had already fiddled with grub in order to create a Ubuntu+Windows dual boot, I wasn’t aware of the terrible world of shadows I was about to enter… Ubuntu developers had “upgraded” grub to grub2. Oh my god!!!! If microsoft updating Windows Xp to Vista was bad, updating Grub to Grub2 was even worse. It makes everything much more complicated and hardly impossible to deal with if you don’t know how to write code and, moreover, understand it. A 4 pages long thread in a forum with computer gurus couldn’t solve it either. Is this tsumego solvable??

Hours went by, so many I can’t count them with my fingers and toes, trying to make Grub2 work with Windows 7 modification of Master Boot Record, till Proximo came into my mind saying:  ”I use Windows just because everything works right from the beginning”. I resign, you win.

Last week I decided to buy the KGS android client or, at least, give it a try. This fabulous idea was the result of the previous 4 long hours on the train which separates me from Barcelona. Now, I was on my way back home and I’d already seen the film twice, when I decided that KGS would bring me back from boredom.

Everything went fine -successful Google checkout, KGS client only weights 470 kb- so I was logging into KGS within two minutes. Unfortunately, my Only-Go-Anxiety (aka OGA) made my mind focus on watching games, so I’m still lacking the playing experience with this client.

I’ve got a HTC Magic, one of the first devices, with a low resolution, but the board, avatars and bowls still showed up nicely, so I guess the results on better devices should be somewhat nicer. After having watched 3 games on a row, it was time to actually analyse the app instead of just KGS games.

The lowest part of the screen includes the navigation buttons which, if pressed long enough, bring up some extra options, and the chat window.

While this app is the only -and, therefore, the best- KGS client, it disappointed me somehow. In fact, what worried me the most, was that games with lots of tenukis were hard to follow. While marking the stone on a normal PC with a circle is enough, it seems to fall short as a notification in such a small screen. Maybe some sort of double stone-blinking would be helpful.

One of the games I saw included a nice amount of peeping tesujis so I thought of sharing it. Unfortunately, there isn’t any “Save game to disk” option. The tactile function is weird while watching a game, as you can point on the board and make a square appear, but its utility remains unknown for me. The trackpad moves this square around the board instead of navigating through the game.

Though my hopes may have been to high, I’d say that, to sum it up and taking into account its 15$ price, I’m a little disappointed with the final result. Obviously, since these 15$ include two months of the KGS plus service, it may be useful for users who would like to give KGS+ a try, but I don’t think it is fair for users who wouldn’t use it. On the other hand, I must admit that I haven’t tried to play with it, since I got some deficiencies in my internet signal while I was on the train and I suffered my monthly OGA crisis.

During the last month I’ve started working on a full 24-hours shift but, as I’m only necessary from time to time, this situation leaves me with some lonely long hours. While studying takes most of my time, studying go seems to be more enjoyable.

Unfortunatellyl, I cannot connect to KGS from my job, so I had to look somewhere else if I wanted to learn Go -playing was discarded after checking the firewall-. Then I remember a site I used to visit when I was double-digit kyu.: The Go Teaching Ladder.

In fact, I found a couple of details I’d missed before, but I’ll only mention the Gold-and-silver awards given to certain reviews. Certainly, gold reviews are an extraordinaily good source of Go knowledge, even if the game is high above my understanding of the game.

In this case, I’d like to share  one specific review with you but due to copyright infringements, I’m only allowed to share the link so that you can download it from their site: LINK

6723

Hourousha

7 dan

StefanW

1k

SebastianH

1k

6.0

B+R

2008-05-24

Enjoy

-Which game should we play today?
-… dunno… you choose…
-… choose whatever you want.

Tired of having too many of these dialogues with my play-pals, I decided to fix it last month. There are a few boardgame randomizers available over the net, but I failed to find one suitable for my android phone. Though it would be awesome to have this feature included in the “BGG mobile” app, it seems we’re not going to enjoy it in a short term.

So here is my tricky solution… with some pros and cons.

1. To begin with you have to install the bbg2nanDECK application on your windows machine (or virtualize it). Once you’ve installed it, you’ll have to set it up properly so that it connects to your BGG profile.
2. Choose your preferred card style with all the information you’d like to have. If you know something about programming, you may want to create your own style or modify one of the availables. In fact, I modified Solamar’s style, but forgot to move the “Weight” on the upper right corner…
3. Run nanDECK. It’ll create a card for every single game you own on BGG.
4. Install PictureViewer on you Android.
5. Copy the nanDECK cards to your phone and make PictureViewer point into their folder.
6. While in PictureViewer, select random mode, just once.

Now, every single time you open PictureViewer, you’ll have a random game displayed from your collection; you can randomize again by sliding to the right side. As no doubt you have already guessed, this method is only possible for a BGG user, with a previously known collection (since it requires some work at home before actually using it) and some patience in order to understand how nanDECK works for the first time.

As you can see from the image above, this unknown game called Go is recommended for 2 players, takes 90 minutes on average, I’ve rated it 10/10 though BGG average is 7.7 and is ranked the 36th. It was created around -2200 and has a weight average -as game complexity- of 4.0/5. There is a short description, a list of categories where you can find it and its mechanics. Both BGG rating and weight are extracted from BGG users average

-Which game should we play today? -... dunno... you choose... -... choose whatever you want. Tired of having too many of these dialogues with my play-pals, I decided to fix it last month. There are a few boardgame randomizers available over the net, but I failed to find one suitable for my android phone. Though it would be awesome to have this feature included in the "BGG mobile" app, it seems we're not going to enjoy it in a short term. So here is my tricky solution... with some pros and cons. To begin with you have to install the bbg2nanDECK application on your windows machine (or virtualize it). Once you've installed it, you'll have to set it up properly so that it connects to your BGG profile. Choose your preferred card style with all the information you'd like to have. If you know something about programming, you may want to create your own style or modify one of the availables. In fact, I modified Solamar's style, but forgot to move the "Weight" on the upper right corner... Run nanDECK. It

It’s been a couple of months since I retook boardgame playing and, most important, logging it. Though the process of logging all my plays had been a laborious task till recently, I found “BGG Mobile” for Android phones made it ridiculously easy.

At first glance, it shows 40 plays from 24 different games, 10 of them being logged for first time. If we take into account the average time for each play logged on KGS, it sums up to 31 hours of boardgaming (plus KGS games).

-Go: 9 games on KGS and a few more of them on a real board. Since it’s difficult to actually tear each stats apart, I’ve decided to only log  my real board games. On KGS I’ve finally surpassed the 7k barrier where I was stuck at, reaching the 5k rank and beating a couple of players more, but I shouldn’t be overconfident on this levelling, as I’ve been given 2 stones in my last two games. Being my fuseki as awful as always, it’s just a matter of time handicap is reduced to komi and my rank decreased.

-New games in collection: Hansa Teutonica for myself and China, Thebes and TtR: the Card game for my flatmate. Furthermore, there were a few games left unopened from our last order from Germany, so we decided to open Maharaja: Place building in India.

-Gaming day: during July 7th, I played Go twice, Schotten-totten 3 times, Tantrix once, Stratego once and Maharaja: Place Building in India also once.

Well, it’s been a productive month when it comes to boardgames…  August will most probably be focused on Go.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a 360º panorama from the IT Crowd basement as he was aware of my enthusiasm towards this sitcom. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out images and objects… till I focused my eyes on the upper shelf behind Moss.

As you can see from the image above, they’ve placed 5 boardgames, in the following order: Memoir ’44 (is it the main game or an add-on?), Shadows over camelot, Mystery of the Abbey, Ticket to Ride and War onTerror. After checking the characteristics of every game I didn’t know, actually just 2 of them, it seems like the games were randomly bought and placed there. Obviously, these games would fit in a single collection but, taking into account the huge differences between them, it should be quite big. Mystery of the Abbey and Ticket to ride made me suspect about games driven by Hand Management but my theory failed against War on Terror, so that’s where I got my conclusion from.

I’m quite certain some of you wonder about the reason for posting. Easy: most Go players are somewhat nerds, who may enjoy watching this comedy and playing the same games I do. For the ones who didn’t know these games, I would recommend starting with Ticket to Ride, an easy family game with certain luck factor and lots of fun if played with 4-5 players.