Tuirgin

The Chunky Rook had a good idea. He is creating animated chess diagrams using the new UCI/Winboard interface, Aquarium. ChessOK sells the Aquarium interface bundled with various versions of Rybka—if you opt for the freeware version of Rybka, your price for Aquarium is only $25. That’s pretty affordable for the range of analysis and documentation tools it provides. In the remainder of this post, I’m going to show you my workflow for producing diagrams and animations using Aquarium and—for fancy stuff—an image editor.

Let’s get started! (continue reading…)

ChessOK has a long-running sales special where they offer an additional training software package (≤$25) if you buy 2 other training titles. They let me substitute ChessOK Aquarium Basic for the free training title. Aquarium has some great features for diagrams and documentation, as well as their new analysis features. I recently received my copy of Chess Tactics for Beginners from ChessOK. It runs just fine on native windows installs (including Vista x64 if you disable UAC—and please don’t comment about the dangers of disabling UAC: I don’t use Windows for its <sarcasm>magnificent</sarcasm> security features) and virtualized windows, but I want to run it in Wine since my primary operating system is OS X. The problem is that most users find that when they install it in Wine they get a 501 error with the explanation Cannot change Visible in OnShow or OnHide. This is a result of the title’s copy protection. It requires that the CD from which the program was installed be in the same drive from which it was installed. If you are actually using a CD, you’re fine, but if you purchase the download version and just mount the ISO you’re directed to make rather than burning it, you can run into some problems. It seems by default Wine treats a mounted ISO image as just another folder on the file system. But remember that Chess Tactics for Beginners is looking for an optical drive with the installer disc, and not only that, it’s looking for the disc to be in the same optical drive from which it was originally installed. Luckily there is a simple solution. (continue reading…)

For the last several weeks I’ve been trying to decide which site I prefer for correspondence chess—SchemingMind or Chess.com. I joined SchemingMind back in December 2006 when I was experiencing my first outbreak of Chess obsession. It’s a nice, very simple site. I’ve never spent any time on the forums. I haven’t joined tournaments. I just use it to play a few corr games, mostly with people I already know. It doesn’t have a bunch of busy advertisements, and it doesn’t have all the latest ad-on services requiring an ever more expensive subscription. Subscription mostly gives you more of what you already get—instead of 10 concurrent games, you can play unlimited games; instead of 1 mini-tournament every 6 weeks, you get unlimited mini-tournies; instead of only joining 1 team, you can join 8. You get the idea. Unless you are wanting to start your own teams and tournaments, you can do quite a bit for free—oh, and did I mention you can play your ICCF games at SchemingMind?

One of my favorite SchemingMind features is the mobile version of the site. (continue reading…)