{"id":35174,"date":"2026-01-31T17:44:29","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T22:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35174"},"modified":"2026-02-01T13:36:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T18:36:12","slug":"cold-enough-to-exterminate-your-winnebago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35174","title":{"rendered":"Cold Enough to Exterminate Your Winnebago"},"content":{"rendered":"

A pretty day today. Pity about the bloody cold.<\/p>\n

\"Looking<\/p>\n

The streets have been sprayed with chemicals, so there’s apparently more wintry precipitation on its way. Joy.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

A few months ago, while looking for Doctor Who<\/i> desktop wallpapers, I found this amusing wallpaper — iExterminate<\/a>. 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.”<\/p>\n

I think it’s funny that the Dalek appears to be listening to something Doctor Who<\/i>-related, as there’s a TARDIS on the iPod’s screen.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It was old. It was uploaded during the Obama administration, and the image’s resolution was an odd 1277×942, almost<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

The end result looks better, and I added it to my CTWM config<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I may tinker with it more; I don’t like the kerning from the original wallpaper. I think I have Myriad Pro here somewhere…<\/p>\n

\n

Recently I talked about playing Othello on a 12×12 board<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It turns out iagno can go up to a 16×16 board. Would this be a challenge? I thought.<\/p>\n

No. It turns out, the board is too big<\/i>. For example…<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

“Dark wins! (35-0)” it reads. That’s an absolutely ridiculous win.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And for a real challenge, play 6×6. Smaller is better!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 earphonesContinue reading “Cold Enough to Exterminate Your Winnebago”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[763],"tags":[5143,94,5401],"class_list":["post-35174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","tag-ctwm","tag-daleks","tag-ipod","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}