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Windows 11 doesn’t let us place the taskbar on the side of the screen. Let’s count how much vertical space is taken up by things that are not the document that we are editing: title bar, tool bar, status bar, scroll bar, task bar, the measurement bar in…
Continue readingAnno 1800 is a board game designed by Martin Wallace (Brass, Rocketmen). It is a medium to heavy game that takes at least two hours to play. I played it for the first time a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Anno 1800 is a crafting game…
Continue readingI exchanged emails with a nice guy who was interested in the Linkage program. He had some useful feedback and also some suggestions and comments about an issue I had with triads. A triad, as I use the term, is a link with at least three link connections…
Continue readingI am not a mechanical engineer but one thing I understand is ambiguity in linkages. It may be because I have a brain that is good at analyzing mechanical connections or because so many people send me mechanisms asking “why doesn’t this work?” Either way, it’s fairly easy…
Continue readingI’ve been torn on changing the test software from using splines as a sort of decoration on links into actual links themselves. There is no reason to drop in a spline as a drawing element then add a slider to it to turn it into a cam when…
Continue readingWhen I implemented the gear feature in the Linkage software, I decided to make the gears be links. This was mostly hidden and whenever a gear needed to turn a crank or be turned by a crank, I opted to have the user “fasten” the gear to the…
Continue readingThe spline and cam features are working in the Linkage software. Above is a video with my first attempt at a tutorial. Since I haven’t used the software to create splines and cams much, I stutter and pause a bit while thinking about what to do next. It’s…
Continue readingAfter many more hours of work, I have a complete polyline editor. Each segment can be a Bezier curve or a straight line. Each node can be a cusp or have the control points smooth and optionally symmetrical. Nodes can be added and deleted and the curve can…
Continue readingI did some work this week on the cam feature for the Linkage program. Cams are found in many places including in car engines – they open and close the valves – and in many industrial machines. Car engine cams are all based on a similar shape and…
Continue readingFurnace is a board/card game by Ivan Lashin. The description at Board Game Geek starts like this: “Furnace is an engine-building Eurogame in which players take on the roles of 19th-century capitalists building their industrial corporations and aspiring to make as much money as they can by purchasing companies,…
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