Croatian chess and other variants

As it’s usual way of unfolding (development) progress, I started work on Croatian chess variant long time ago. Then I concluded I might, at the same expense, add some other various variants. I progressed some, even posted screen shots, as witnessed by these pictures lingering in one of my galleries:

And then, development halted. There wasn’t any particular distraction or some personal turmoil to contribute to this. Rather, it was, as always is, lack of patience and prospect of climbing that mountain, which contributed to loss of enjoyment in this project. Personally, I don’t believe in self discipline. To me, it’s your own Big Ogre Club +5, with which you’ll be pounding yourself head-on every time you think you sinned. While it might work for some people, I see it as non-working in real world. Would you like more to contribute to project because you are forced to, even if it’s by your own self, or because you genuinely like it? If you really like it, you’ll work on projects just because you like it. And yet, most of our cultures are hard working, chest pounding, head clubbing cults.

Primordial enthusiasm, on the other hand, is the way to go, carefully nourishing it before and after each and every effort. Took me some time to realize this. Now, I took the project not to work on it, not to play with it, not even because I particularly like it, but just to train myself to successfully grow enthusiasm in the backyard of my mind. Since then, I even managed to do some progress, so I’ll be sharing with you screen shots of a few other variants of chess, and a document which describes it. First screen shots:

And PDF document is located here.
There is also ODT document, which can be downloaded from here.

Of course, I’d like to hear from you, your experiences and your opinion on described chess variants.

Why there is no B/W digital camera?

In the not so old days of film photography you had a choice of B/W film or you could use color film. Why not today? You could say that things in those days progressed rather slowly, and color film was not immediately available alongside with B/W film, so technology which appeared first was used first. And that image quality from color film was not on par with B/W one, especially at the beginning. And that color processing was much more expensive than B/W. And that towards the end every photo enthusiasts could afford own dark room for tinkering with B/W development to his heart’s content. And that you were choosing light response, tone, contrast, sensitivity, color or otherwise, with each film roll you put into camera. All true.

Still, think about it. With today’s technology all we got are color cameras, even if that means 2/3 of light available when shooting was discarded by typical sensor with Bayer filter, only to be interpolated much later by in-camera JPEG engine to come up with “full color” image. Shooting RAW does not help here either, you’re still left with just 1/3 of information in it. Not to mention that all those color cameras must have anti-aliasing filter to avoid moire, which further reduces resolution, per-pixel sharpness, … And Foveon technology, while excellent in theory, is still in its infancy and not widely adopted.

It is, however, customary to use B/W sensors in industry and medical applications, they exists for decades. Given all those advantages B/W sensors are carrying, one question naturally arises: why nobody dropped B/W sensor in camera instead of color one? One possible answer could be that notion prevalent in photographic industry is that customers will expect color cameras once color film was widely adopted, and that B/W cameras would be too much of a niche product to be worthwhile. Given that in existing segments photographic market gets increasingly crowded, with more and more fierce competition it might be advantageous to explore those new niches. On the other hand, it might be that it is not so niche product after all, looking at how much attention got new segment with breakthrough Olympus E-P1.

Heck, we might finally be able to  produce totally immersive, lifelike, monumental pictures with  DIGITAL technology.

New images, this time on deviantART

So far I put on deviantART just two images. More to follow. Enjoy!

Lamp hugging tree by ~mmlacak on deviantART

Old bench in winter by ~mmlacak on deviantART