Creative Work   Music • Code • eTexts

Chess Meister 1.0

October, 2014

Chess Meister is an App for the iPad that provides a simple and beautiful interface where nothing comes between you and playing chess. Share the board with another player, and the pieces turn to face the player whose turn it is. Few controls, endless possibilities. Tap the blue button, and the peaBrain moves for you.

Give the peaBrain a hard move - it'll think longer and harder. If you make a bad move, be prepared for the peabrain's rapid response. Use the unlimited undo-redo; or swipe left and right for the start and end of the game. Step through moves rapidly. Examine possibilities, develop your game and learn the names of the opening books.

Chess Meister is a challenge for new chess players and a companion for two people who need to share a chess board - inlaid with Morpho butterfly squares and Brazilian hardwood - a classic rendered in a modern parallax interface.

pChess 2.0

November 2012

A free chess programme for Macintosh OSX, with nice graphics and a built-in FEN Viewer. Uses a classic Shannon type MiniMax search with Quiescence extensions and Alpha-Beta pruning. It supports Fischer games, copy/paste of FEN positions, and SAN Notation. Cool Audio and Visual Brain features let you listen and see as it evaluates moves. Load and Save games, with unlimited Undo/Redo. The opening book includes over 10,000 moves from the ECO (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings). Runs at about 1500 ELO. Comes complete with FutureBasic 5 source code.

v2.0 is Faster Deeper Stronger with Hash tables and Iterative deepening, peaBrain can think deeper faster. A tuned evaluation function provides a more subtle evaluation. Support for enPassant has been addded to loading and saving of FEN. Clicking a square now shows only legal moves. Fixed some UCI bugs.

Download from:

Sternelicht

Ambient Alternative Music formented from the reincarnating Hollowmen — Making Spaces and Leaving Spaces — click to hear Sternelicht on BandCamp.

Between Frontiers (May 2016)

Red Moon Rising (October 2015)

Bell Weather (August 2013)

Detuned (March 12, 2010)

Carry On (February 14, 2010)

Goethe

Heard a lot about Goethe - Lily and the Green Snake.
So read his Theory of Colours, and Faust.

This was all very interesting, but for years I found it difficult to find a copy of this Lily and the Green Snake in print. Finally found one, and thought it may be of use for others, so promptly OCR'd it into a little file that now lives here (1999).

Steiner

Occult Signs and Symbols • Found this lecture at the world's biggest bookstore (Toronto), and it introduced me to the fellow of Rudolf Steiner whom I have found to be quite a genius. As it wasn't available on the web, typed in the text (60 pages), and is available online as of 1998. Please note, this text is Copyright ©1972 by Anthroposophic Press.

The Story of My Life • Located an original 1928 edition of Steiner's autobiography, which was out of print (as of 1999). Scanned and edited the text into electronic format; available online: 2000.

Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception • This book was also generally unavailable. Digitized, edited, and available online: 2004.

Goethean Science • Steiner's first Epistemological work, is finally available online: 2006.

Tesla

The Internet, power distribution, and everything that uses AC (alternating current) electricity owe their foundation to the father of electrification - Nikola Tesla.

Edison's DC (direct current) cannot sustain the long distances that alternating current can. Edison's system would have set back development of electricity by decades.

Tesla saved the situation by conceptualising 'the rotary magnetic field', making possible the AC induction motor. The generators Tesla designed and built are still in use today at the Niagara Falls generating station.

In 1994, I found a booklet titled, The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla. It was made with typewriters, and then photocopied and stapled. I spent the Christmas holidays typing this in, and it was the first electronic version of Tesla's autobiography available on the Internet. It duplicates the original six-part series published in Electrical Experimenter Magazine in 1919, and the original text has been republished in book form as: My Inventions, The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla.

Click to download a copy of Nikola Tesla's Autobiography.

Quote Genie Widget 3.0

Download: quoteGenie.wdgt.zip
(623Kb, June 23, 2017)

A collection of 2700 Hand-picked Quotes, wrapped in a handy OSX Dashboard Widget.

Click the Quote Genie for a Daily Quote - This collection has been gathered over fifteen years of finding great quotes from: Music, Art, Life, and Literature. Everything from Elephants to Einstein.

Older Stuff  (1992 - 1995)

A basic Tarot reading programme for the Macintosh (requires OS9!) with nice colour graphics, and both Celtic and Astrological layouts. It also includes a scanned copy of both the Rider-Waite and Thoth decks. The readings are done per-card, and don't take into account the inter-relationships between the various positions.

Although the Tarot can be a useful aid for understanding the dynamic archetypal forces acting within the domain of one's consciousness, one may question if you would trust your fortunes to the static output of the pseudo-random number generator in your computer.

The counter-pole to working as a Technical Writer during the day is this dreamlike existential poetry... lit by the gaze of your starlike eyes...

Ambient Industrial Gothic Music produced in a basement with an Ensoniq EPS sampler and a distortion pedal. If you'd like to inflict your ears with this youthful experimental angst, then click to download the mp3 files below.

01 • Where Light is as Water.mp3
02 • The Otherworld.mp3
03 • Edvard Munch.mp3
04 • The Colour of Love.mp3
05 • The Passenger Inside.mp3
06 • Effigies of We.mp3
07 • Avec Helene.mp3
08 • Living on Video.mp3
09 • Sin For a Season.mp3
10 • Wind Chant.mp3
11 • Stormy Weather.mp3
12 • Kants Gap.mp3