Does anyone do self-assessments of how they’d quarantine people they share a living space with if they got sick? Doing one of these for family members, sort of like a drill to see how easy it would be to isolate someone. So far, identified several action items.

Simple Location 4.1.6/7 Released

I didn’t plan on doing another Simple Location run, or having to immediately release a fix due a mistake. This change was prompted by a new request to allow for saving maps locally.

For various reasons, I was reluctant to do that. But I came up with another solution. Adding a map provider that supports a custom hosted service. In this case, a fork of a Static Maps API written 6 years ago by someone I know. You can find my fork here.

By using a self-hosted but external static map API, I keep the option out of the plugin for now.  It will also work with anything that implements the same API.

In the same update, I also fixed a few bugs, and added moonrise and moonset calculations, which display along with sunrise, sunset, and moon phase in the Last Seen widget for now.

 

Rules for Bughouse Chess

Since I was writing about trying Four Player Chess, I wanted to note a four player variant I did play as a kid. Bughouse.

Bughouse involves 2 chess boards

  • Teammates sit beside each other playing opposite colors
  • Whenever a piece is captured, it is given to their teammate.
  • Teammates can use a move to place the piece on an unoccupied square.
  • Pawns cannot be placed on the ends of the board.
  • The first person to lose by checkmate or time loses for the team.
  • Bughouse is usually played with chess clocks.
  • When played without a clock, there is usually a rule preventing a player waiting for pieces (stalling or sitting) indefinitely. One rule states that players may not delay their move beyond the time that it takes for their partner to make three moves
  • There is no specific rule against verbal coordination.

Four Player Chess

Recently, I came across the idea of four player chess and decided I wanted to give it a try.

Four Player Chess is played with a standard board with an extra 3×8 section on each side. There are no official rules. Here are my notes based on a little research.

  • 4 Player Chess can be a partnership game, where the object is to checkmate both opposing players at the same time.
  • In other variants, you can have partnerships, every player for himself, or temporary alliances.
  • Turns move in clockwise order.
  • Queens must be placed on the same color..usually white

The most well known 4 player chess was created by Capt George Hope Verney in 1881. There is a copy of his book on the subject here

  • Option 1 – Verney’s original rules for 4 handed chess
    • The players who are opposite each other become partners
    • No communication is permitted between the partners.
    • The pieces of partners do not attack each other, therefore, their Kings can even be next to each other.
    • No player can make a move to place his partner in check
    • Castling is not permitted
    • Pawns can only move one square at a time, not 2 on the first move as in normal chess
    • For a pawn to become a Queen, it must reach the edge of the board of one of its enemies, not its partner.
    • When a pawn reaches the edge of the board of its partner, it may reverse direction until it reaches the end of its own side…after which it may do so again. It should be marked somehow appropriately.
    • The game is won when two of the partners are checkmated.
    • When one partner is checkmated, his pieces are not removed from the board, but remain in position. His partner continues the fight singlehanded, while the player misses his turns. His pieces cannot move or be captured, they merely block the board.
    • A partner can release his partner from checkmate by capturing pieces or forcing their move by the opponent.
    • An opponent, having checkmated a player, can release him, but cannot capture other pieces in the same move.
  • Option 2 – Hughes 1888 Variant. All of Verney’s rules except:
    • Pawns may advance two squares initially.
    • When a pawn’s move is obstructed by a pawn of its partner, it can leap over it, provided the square it moves to is vacant
  • Option 3- Variant of prior options where your partner is next to you, rather than opposite.
  • Option 4 -A Non-Partner Variant
    • Castling and en-passing are permitted. All standard chess rules, except as follows:
    • A player’s king must actually be captured to eliminate the player.
    • A player may move into a potential checkmate
    • A checkmated player may move any of his pieces
    • An eliminated player’s remaining pieces stay stagnant on the board (default), but may be captured.
    • Pawns can be exchanged for another piece on reaching any end row (ahead, or to the side).
    • The last king standing is the winner, or the last two kings standing if they declare a truce or an alliance (unless one of them decides to eliminate the other.)
For three years now, on and off, I’ve been working on a plugin for WordPress called Simple Location. You can see it on many of my posts(View All Location Posts here). It adds a location and optionally a map to posts on my site. It also will change the displayed time and timezone on those posts to match the location(this post is set for Manila, for example, instead of the default of New York).

It is the most mainstream of the plugins I’ve developed, but has only 30 active installations, which suggests location may not be important to that many people who have WordPress sites, or I haven’t made the plugin good enough. I’m working on the latter now. Anyone have any suggestions?

On my way to Manila, I stopped off in Portland, Oregon for the annual Indieweb Summit. It was actually the other way around. I was going to Portland, and it was suggested I should just keep going. This Summit was better than last years, which was a great event. Hosted by Mozilla Portland,

I got to attend the Leadership Summit, for community leaders(apparently I am one), where we agreed we needed to meet more often to organize our efforts…and got some Indieweb stickers. Despite my misgivings, we now have an Indieweb WordPress chat room as part of the Indieweb suite of chat rooms. So far, it has kept the WordPress stuff in one place.

My attachment to WordPress and involvement in the community seems to have made me an ‘authority’ on the current state of how Indieweb concepts apply to WordPress(which, by the way, runs this site). And we have accomplished a lot this month…with many Indieweb plugins seeing updates.

I always feel inspired to work on my Indieweb projects after meeting inspiring people, like the great Ryan Barrett, who maintains Bridgy, the software that translates likes and comments on Facebook and Twitter into comments on my site. It’s fortunate that I have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and work in Manila, because it has given me a chance to continue that inspiration.

Here’s hoping for more Indiewebcamps. Anyone interested in one in New York?

The Manila American Cemetary and Memorial
A Jewish grave marker at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. Time will not dim the glory of their deeds.

The Memorial is 152 acres, with 17,097 headstones, 164 of them are Stars of David like this one. The memorial includes 36,286 names of soldiers missing in action, and 25 ten foot maps portraying important World War II Pacific campaigns. The cemetery is the largest in the number of graves and the names recorded on the walls of those missing. The government of the Philippines granted the land in perpetuity with charge or taxation.