A pretty day today. Pity about the bloody cold.
The streets have been sprayed with chemicals, so there’s apparently more wintry precipitation on its way. Joy.
A few months ago, while looking for Doctor Who desktop wallpapers, I found this amusing wallpaper — iExterminate. It is, exactly as you see above, a Dalek, wearing earphones and holding an iPod, in the style of the old iPod ads, with the caption “iExterminate.”
I think it’s funny that the Dalek appears to be listening to something Doctor-related, as there’s a TARDIS on the iPod’s screen.
I never owned an iPod. I don’t feel I missed out on anything by not owning an iPod. The wallpaper still amused me, though, so I downloaded it.
It was old. It was uploaded during the Obama administration, and the image’s resolution was an odd 1277×942, almost 4:3 (ie., 800×600, 1200×900, etc.), just a little wider. It was made for a different era. For my own use, I upscaled and widened it (I have a 2560×1440 monitor), then took “iExterminate” apart and rebuilt it to clean it up. The JPEG was “noisy,” there was a lot of artifacting.
The end result looks better, and I added it to my CTWM config.
I may tinker with it more; I don’t like the kerning from the original wallpaper. I think I have Myriad Pro here somewhere…
Recently I talked about playing Othello on a 12×12 board.
It turns out iagno can go up to a 16×16 board. Would this be a challenge? I thought.
No. It turns out, the board is too big. For example…
“Dark wins! (35-0)” it reads. That’s an absolutely ridiculous win.
What I’ve found is that if I can “trap” white inside my black pieces and keep white off the edges, white can be forced into making moves that are easily countered because I hold pieces outside of white’s moves. I’ll have to play a few more games and screenshot them to explain better. 12×12 is big but not too big. 16×16 is just too big.
And for a real challenge, play 6×6. Smaller is better!