Sunday Sacchariferous Salmagundi

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) plays chess against Copernicus the dog in “Back to the Future Part III.”
Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainmen

 

Strong open source chess engine.

Stockfish is one of the strongest chess engines in the world. It is also much stronger than the best human chess grandmasters.

Did I mention that it is totally free?

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New Free Browsers that rock

My daughter in law is a genius browser power user.

My son complains that she always has a ton of tabs open when she uses the internet browser.

Here are two browsers that anyone who is a power user of their browser will totally appreciate. 

Vivaldi, an upstart browser launched in “technical preview” this year. Vivaldi has brilliant tab-management features, including a search box that lets you find an open tab by typing in keywords and a “tiling” view that lets you see several tabs side by side.

 The most interesting feature is the ability to display multiple tabs at once on large screens. First, you have to stack your tabs on top of one another. Once that's done, you right-click, and Vivaldi gives you the option to tile the tab stack. 

 This takes all the tabs you have in one stack and displays them simultaneously on the screen as either multiple columns, rows, or a grid. 

 Tab stack tiling will be a great feature whenever you want to view two sites simultaneously. During a live event on YouTube, for example, you can view Twitter and the live video simultaneously in the same window. 

 Vivaldi has now been in development for around 18 months, and the third version of the technical preview is available for download.

 "We're starting up now as a result of seeing a need in the market for a more advanced browser, and because we discovered ourselves that there are no browsers that satisfy our own needs." 

 " If you spend a lot of time online, view a lot of pages, want to remember where you found things and want to be able return to them, then we've got a lot of different ways to achieve that. Depending on how you prefer to manage that as a user, you'll find the method that suits you best. Whether that's bookmarks, open tabs, notes, tab stacks, or different sessions with a lot of open tabs."

 

The Russian firm Yandex is developing a new browser that uses the Blink layout engine and is based on the Chromium open source project.

 It can be said that Yandex is combination of Chrome and Opera.

It loads pages quickly, just shows you what you need and gives you plenty of space for viewing webpages.

 It understands what site you need, even without typing in an exact address. The browser can save you time by instantly open the webpages you need.

  The translucency elements of the Yandex browser concept are reminiscent of Apple’s iOS 7 design reboot from last year, which was aiming to lend a feeling of depth to mobile browsing. 

Yandex says its design aims are to reflect modern web user experience by emphasizing interaction and personalization.

 When you download the browser it automatically generates a series of tiles — Yandex calls this a Tableau — based on your most commonly visited websites. These are displayed on an animated backdrop, with very little other interface furniture to clutter up the look and feel of the page.

Other flagship features in the new browser are a search box that includes suggestions to answer your query — which Yandex calls SmartBox.

Again queries are displayed over a translucent background to make the browser feel like a layer rather than a destination in itself:



Below a group of TechCrunch tabs has been rolled up:


And now those same TC tabs are opened out:


Other features include a Turbo mode, based on Opera’s technology, which can be used to speed up web browsing on slow Internet connections by compressing webpages before serving them.

 The alpha version of the browser is currently available for Mac and Windows and is offered in 15 languages at this point, including English, Russian and Turkish.

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 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

Isaiah 5:20


21Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes And clever in their own sight!…

A very strange world indeed these days...

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This past Tuesday a plane went down in New York’s Hudson River.

The cops were called. Firefighters and emergency medical technicians arrived on the scene.
But instead of a frantic group of passengers floating in a downed Airbus A320, like 2009’s Sully Sullenberger “Miracle on the Hudson” moment, officials encountered a delighted group of reporters gathered to test out the Icon A5, a small seaplane that was using the river to take off and land.

 Everything was going fine, but unknowing onlookers were not used to seeing planes flying so close to the river, so they'd called for help.

 Firefighters and cops, realizing nothing was amiss, stuck around to admire the spectacle. Indeed, the only potential damage at the event was what the Icon A5 will do to the $219 billion private aviation industry.

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On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.

A film by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh
alexgorosh.com
wylieoverstreet.com
Copyright 2015

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.