The Rip (2026)
I overall enjoyed it, the tenseness and plot kept me into it. But I think it's unlikely I come back to it again.
The Mountain is just so magical
The wife and I made our way down to Tacoma this morning and this view is just so magical. It's almost better that the mountain isn't as obvious as she can be.
August 7th, 2026
Automated Archives for August, 7th 2026
This post was automatically generated.
Chess For the Day
Record: 1-0-1
Net Elo Change: +1
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- August 7, 2025 (1 post)
- August 7, 2023 (1 post)
- August 7, 2022 (7 posts)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
I know, I know, I should have watched it earlier. Jesus Christ, what a masterpiece.
Hilariously, after the movie ended, Paramount recommended our next viewing should be: The Hangover, Part III. .🤪
August 2nd, 2026
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
Sadly disappointing given the pedigree and talent. A sequel which proves it didn't need to exist.
July 30th, 2026
Last night was a very short night of sleep, I'm going to need a nap midday. But on the upside, I spent some time this morning working on GuteBook.org with the first external user reporting some bug issues.
July 29th, 2026
Crazy to think August 3rd will mark nineteen years since I started making TCG content. Making a video podcast for iPods was a wild era compared to today.
July 27th, 2026
Introducing ChessHeat
Introducing my latest project to fiddle with. This is "ChessHeat." It is an app to play chess in against an engine. I'm using StockFish, though my own chess engine is a future project because why not.
ChessHeat though is a Python graphical interface for playing chess against another engine with one central core feature that others don't have (at least, not that I've seen.) The heatmap you can see on the board.
The intensity of the red represents how often a square is coming up in the lines the engine is analyzing. You may also notice some square's aren't entirely of their color, and that is to represent how immediate the engine is looking at that square. If the square is fully that color that means the focus is on it in the next move or two.
I am not yet convinced how helpful this is, but it is interesting. The system records the heatmap per move, so you can go back and see how the heatmap changes after every move.
I have a few other ideas I am exploring, which are things like "critical move" notifications. This is when the machine finds that you have only one good move and everything else is bad. I am still getting this feature right, but the idea here is that it stops and notifies you about this being a critical move, letting you pause and think more about it.
Some would argue this is bad or cheating, whatever.
The entire goal of this project is to improve how someone can learn from playing against an engine. And the critical move idea is one that, to me, helps me tap into the 'chess puzzle' thinking. Which, good players will argue should always be on, especially when your moves are untimed. And they'd be right, but I am not a great chess player. I'm a mediocre slightly above average chess player.
I've got a few more ideas of things to add to it, but we'll see how they go before I share them. But here's ChessHeat, another of my recent spate of projects to fiddle with in the evenings.
