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So, while I've always loved the idea of #chess, I've also always been spectacularly bad at it. Can anyone recommend any books or other resources that might help? I had an eBook (or was it a PDF?) on tactics once upon a time, but I don't know what happened to it.

I know that an important key is practice, but the problem is that when I lose, I don't know why I lost, so it's difficult to learn from the experience.

Sico Axial reshared this.

in reply to Wayne Myers

@conniptions I believe it’s lichess.org.

Building on this: learn to analyse your games using an engine. Only play 5-10 games per day, but analyse each one. At first, look through the game without the engine, try to observe the flow of the game. Try to see if you got outplayed positionally, or you missed a tactic, hung a piece, etc.

Then analyse with the engine. Don’t focus too much on absolute swings of the evaluation, but more on trends.

in reply to Sebastian Lauwers

@teotwaki Doh, of course yes, apologies, was v tired when I posted.

Agreed in re usefulness of using engine for analysis (and importance of analysing games) once there's a grasp of the basic value of material, basic tactics and so on.

Not yet mentioned - the usefulness of puzzles: simpler puzzles help you drill basic patterns and tactics - it's one thing to know what a fork is, but another thing to look at a position and quickly spot an available fork. Lichess puzzles v good for this.



rant about lies and masking

Some people's capacity to just straight-up lie to your face without skipping a beat astonishes me.

Take this conversation between Katy and an unnamed family member:

F: I need you to drive me to the clinic (because I've caught the cough that's been making the rounds in my household for weeks now).
K: Okay, but we can't afford to get sick.
F: It's okay, I'll wear a mask the whole time.
K: Okay.
F: Afterwards, we can go out to eat.
K: How are we going to eat while wearing masks?
F: It's okay, I'm not contagious.

(╯° □°) ╯︵ ┻━┻

Edit: typo

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

rant about lies and masking

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meta
With all this talk of #Bluesky vs. #Mastodon, I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone that the fediverse is bigger than just Mastodon.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

meta

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How much does the aurora borealis weigh?
It's pretty light.

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cult brainwashing (trigger warning)

I found some of my old notes from church. God, I really drank the Kool-Aid, didn't I?

Here's a sample:

When I negotiate my standards, I cheat myself of the blessings the Lord wants to give me.


🤮🤮🤮

"The blessings he wants to give me?" Isn't he supposed to be an omnipotent being? I had no idea I was so powerful that I could tie his hands like that.

#ExMormon #apostake #NotACult

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

cult brainwashing (trigger warning)

I also love how I was able to take down an idea, and then immediately contradict myself with the next one, e.g.:

- Heavenly Father did not put me here to fail.
- A failure is nothing more than an opportunity to learn.


This is the definition of doublethink.





Katy bought a bread slicer, so obviously I had to make a loaf of #sourdough #today to test it out.

Why does it have to take so long to cool?

screwlisp reshared this.



Trying out #Friendica's #Bluesky bridge. If you've been followed there by @jlamothe.bsky.social, that's me.

Let's see if this post actually shows up there.

Brian Pierce reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

For sure, I’d rather keep following you here. I just wanted to confirm your bridge is working but wasn’t sure if I was doing something wrong or your setup is somehow incomplete 🤷
in reply to ilyess

@ilyess It looks like there's a bit of lag in the bridge, but I guess that's to be expected.

in reply to Aziz

@Aziz @Jon's Blog Yeah, for me, it's about the auto-repeating tasks. I can't get that with pen and paper, otherwise I'd go that route too.

I'm trying to take the lowest tech route possible these days.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@me
"I'm trying to take the lowest tech route possible these days."

Exactly.



Just had a monitor fail in the most bizarre way posible. I got some weird screen flicker/tearing. I assumed that it was my video card doing someting wonky, especially since it would happen sporadically when playing Minetest, and would often persist for a while after. A reboot cleared it the first time it happened.

This time it was really bad though. The weird thing is that when I disconnected the HDMI cable, the distortion persisted on the OSD. Also, there was still very distinct remnant of the image that had been on the screen. It wasn't your typical burn-in, as it wasn't static. It was just... weird.



It's been over a year now since my last blog post. #Today I started working on a new one about my adventures with #org-mode. As an experiment, I'm trying to compose the post itself in org-mode, and then export to HTML for the site.

Depending on how reasonable the resulting HTML ends up being, this might be my go-to method of composing blog posts going forward.


in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Worse than back to square one. I can't access it through a browser either.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Hopped over to another server and all's well again. We'll see for how long.





Just got my sample ink pack in the mail, and I've got to say Diamine Ruby Blues might be my new favourite ink. The photos online don't do it justice. The ink changes colour depending on the angle you look at it from. Is this a more common thing than I realize?
#FountainPens
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

I really LOVE my Ruby Blues ink. The intense deep blue with unexpected subtle red flash in certain places. And that astounding bottle!
The color change in various angles and light is called 'sheening'/'sheen' and many sites that sell ink have the sheening inks sorted in a category or at least the ability to search for sheen in the description.
in reply to redbanjer 🪕

@redbanjer 🪕 My two suppliers of choice are Phidon (a local-ish brick and mortar store) and Goulet Pens. Though I've recently heard good things about Jet Pens (I think) but I've no experience with them.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Yes I have bought a lot of stuff from Goulet Pens. Also from FPR (Fountain Pen Revolution)... I love their Ultra Flex nib pens.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

P.S. Sheening ink...--> Not to be confused with 'shimmer'/shimmering' inks which have actual microscopic bits of sparkle glitter in them (which may cause clogging issues in some pens, depending on who you ask).



mh
Hit negative spoon territory. Didn't know that was possible. Calling it a night. Hopefully I don't start tomorrow at a defecit.




Just ordered an "inkvent" calendar because apparently they sell out fast. Now I just have to restrain myself from opening it until December. Fortunately I ordered a random sample pack as well, so we have something to keep us occupied in the meantime.
#FountainPens

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Unknown parent

Cynthia loves masks
thank you, I look forward to what you share.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Welp, I had hoped this would arrive before the Canada Post strike. I guess not.

That's unfortunate.




I think, for the sake of my mental health, I'm going to take a step away from the news and social media for a bit.

reshared this

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Use that time instead to connect w/ your affinity group(s). You will need them.






Every time papa cleans and re-inks his pens I must supervise. I don't know why he keeps trying to stop me.

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.



Broke my #LambdaMOO sushi bar by accidentally going over quota trying to add a requested item to the menu.

Don't have time to fix it at the moment, but I'll take care of it in the next couple days.

Sorry @screwlisp et. al.

screwlisp reshared this.



Typesetting question:

I've noticed that in many novels there will be a scene change within a chapter that is marked by a larger than normal gap between two paragraphs. Is there a way to represent this in a #LaTeX document?

in reply to Matthew Skala

@mattskala not internal,, as they are user level commands. But yes, it's part of #TeLaTeX without any package

NewDocumentCommand is the modern replacement of newcommand. (see `texdoc usrguide`)

The hook with OmitIndent allows to set the \noindent for the following paragraph, while \noindent has to be called at the beginning of that paragraph.(`texdoc ltpara-doc¸`)

Online links of the documentation:
texdoc.org/serve/usrguide/0
texdoc.org/serve/ltpara-doc/0

in reply to Marei

@mattskala Oh and I of course I agree there are document class which support that by default. Just sometimes one may not use those or can't or whatever. So I wanted to provide a general option. Of course you should check the documentation of the document class first.

memoir's plainbreak is defined similar. But what I don't like about it, that it does not have a default value for the size. So I'd still define my own \chapterSep to be like \plainbreak{1} to be able to adjust that globally.



ph
Of course, just as I'm starting to get this cough back under control I had to go and choke on my water again...




Cable Replaced


The failing ethernet cable that's been plaguing the server has finally been replaced. Things should be a lot more stable around here. Sorry for all the issues lately.
in reply to Jon's Friendica Node Notices

In other news, the Nextcloud server has gone from unusably laggy to just the usual amount of slow.


Just got a notification from F-Droid that my browser ( #Fennec ) has known #security issues. Looks like I'm in the market for a new browser on my mobile devices.

I know I'm gonna hate asking this, but what browser sucks the least on #Android these days?

reshared this

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

I saw over on Mastodon that an update is coming soon, so I don't think you need to be in a rush to switch.
in reply to Russ O ❤ 🇺🇦

@Russ O ❤ 🇺🇦 Yeah, I mostly only use the browser on my phone with trustworthy-ish sites, so I'm not in a huge rush. If they fix it before I find an alternative, so much the better.


Does anyone know if #org-mode has a way to specify a repeating scheduled item in UTC time? I have a few of these, and don't want to have to adjust them all when the clock changes. #emacs

reshared this

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Maybe a answer : org-mode utc
in reply to lann

@lann This is close to what I'm looking for. Ideally, I'd like to be able to do something like set a property on a headline that says "treat everything in this subtree as UTC".
@lann


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