I played Unconscious Mind twice before writing this. Both times were with one other player (2p games). Unconscious Mind is a medium‑to‑heavy eurogame with very little randomness beyond the shared tiles and cards available to all players. The game’s theme centers on treating and curing people receiving mental‑health…
Continue readingI just wanted to make a note of the Antikythera mechanism tree structure as it is currently generated in the Linkage (Mac) simulator. The code is not handling multiple gears on the same connector, so this is not completely resolved. But it is a good example of how…
Continue readingIn about 1994, I wrote software for Windows 3.1 that let me add icons over an image in the app window and then create timed sounds and effects using these icons to represent the locations of the outputs. I built a crude timeline editor that triggered items only…
Continue readingI watch a lot of TV, and I can suspend my disbelief quite easily. I’ll watch MgGyver (the new one) build an energy-beam weapon out of a junked microwave oven and a car battery. But sometimes a TV show is written in a way that totally breaks the…
Continue readingI was playing a complicated board game, Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, and I noticed something about another player that I’ve noticed before; They are Game Rules Optimistic. I’ll explain: The game has a map, and on the map are some tiles. The tiles are double-sided, with very different…
Continue readingI’ve been posting videos on YouTube () showing some working features and some failing features of the Linkage app for the Mac. Here is one of the latest: Even though this looks like a simple mechanism with a sliding quick-return that makes a link oscillate, thus moving a…
Continue readingA few decades ago, I remember, probably incorrectly, a court case where the police wanted to (or did) track people using GPS units that they stuck in the suspects’ cars. The case boiled down to this: a court order is needed to place a GPS unit on someone’s…
Continue readingWith the mechanism in the image, there are three sliding connectors affecting link 1 (on the left). This is an interesting mechanism to simulate. In this situations, the calculations are easy because D and E both have the same slide radius. With the same slide radius, we can…
Continue readingI have a Mac App Store “page” for the Linkage app. “Linkage” was a taken name so I opted for “Linkage CAD”. let me know if that’s a bad name. You can’t see the app yet because it needs to be releasable before I can submit to Apple…
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