I recently moved from Westpac to CUA. This guy pulled $190,000 out of Westpac (in $20 bills) and moved to a Building Society. I want to see ONE MILLION Australians pull their money out of the "Big Four" banks and move to either a smaller bank or credit society this year. We have the power to shape corporate behaviour, but we need to start using our power with focus and intelligence.
This is what Chrissy and I watched this morning in bed. Not your usual breakfast TV. It’s a terrific talk. (via Beyond The Fringe)
UPDATE DECEMBER 2012
These days I’m using SOCIAL CHESS on the iPad to play turn-based games. I highly recommend it however you can’t export your games to .pgn, which is a shame for those of us that like to study our losses. 🙂
I have also been checking out CHESS PRO. It seems like a great training app for people who are new to chess. It takes a slightly different approach to other training apps.
How does it work? It’s really simple: you just play! The coach shows you the moves a Grandmaster would pick. Not just one move, but the 4 best moves.
Comes in a free version as well as a $9.99 version.
UPDATE (September 2012)
This post gets a lot of traffic, so I thought I should update it to include the apps I am currently using on my iPhone and iPad as a lot as happened since 2009!
Here are my main chess apps:
iPad / iPhone
This is my main app for playing real-time games online. I’ve tried both the iPad HD version and the iPhone version and I’ve ended up using the iPhone version on my iPad, as it seems a little more advanced in terms of features and reliability than the iPad version. I can usually find someone to play against in a matter of seconds and the gameplay, at least on the iPhone version, is quite smooth. The apps themselves are free however to play online you need an ICC membership which costs about $5 / month.
On the iPad, I tend to still use Shredder (see below) to play and study, and Chess With Friends (see below) to play asynchronous games, however I’ve found another app that is better at allowing the importing of .pgn files for analysis, and that is:
t Chess Pro allows me to grab the emailed games from ICC, drop them into a .pgn file, and upload it to Dropbox. Then I can download that on my iPad and open it in t Chess for analysis.
ORIGINAL POST from 2009:
There are a huge number of chess applications for iPhone these days and, as I’m a bit of a chess nut, I’ve been trying to test them all out to find out which are the best chess apps for the iPhone or iPod Touch. There are apps suitable for beginners through to grandmasters as well as apps that will let you play a quiet game by yourself on a plane, through to games that let you play against other iPhone / iPod Touch owners online.
These are the ones I suggest you take a look at. Prices and ratings are from the Australian iTunes store.
Hard Core
If you’re an avid chess player, you probably already know about Fritz and Shredder from their PC apps which have been around for many years and are battle tested against world champions. You might not have heard that they now have iPhone versions.
The PC version of Fritz has beaten grand masters from Kasparov to Kramnik. Not enough ratings in the Aussie appstore for an average, but seems to be getting 4 and 5 stars so far, which isn’t surprising.
The Good:
The Bad:
Another chess app that’s been around on the PC for many years, Shredder claims to be “the most successful chess program ever”. It has an average rating in the iTunes store of 4.5 stars.
The Good:
The Bad:
Best Free Apps
What options are out there for people who want a serious game but don’t want to fork out the big bucks?
Deep Green Chess Lite provides a solid game of chess for beginner or intermediate players. Average rating 3 stars.
The Good
The Bad
iChess allows for online play on FICS (freechess.org) servers as well as standard play against the AI or human opponents. Average appstore rating 2.5 stars.
The Good
The Bad
Best Online Play
I’ve been using CWF since it first came out and it’s a terrific asynchronous chess experience. It will set up games for you with random players or allow you to invite friends via email. Average rating of 2.5 stars doesn’t do it justice.
The Good
The Bad
If you want real-time online play, then Cyber Chess might be your best option. It connects to both FICS (freechess.org) and ICC (Internet Chess Club) servers. Only one rating on the Aussie appstore, which is for 3 stars. Price $1.19.
The Good
The Bad
What’s Missing
What I’d really like, but haven’t found yet, is a chess app that let’s me play against another human iPhone to iPhone on the same network. The same way that apps like Bump set up a private network, I’d love to play chess against the person sitting next to me in a cafe without having a real board. I’d love it if we could both whip out our iPhones and start a real-time game against each other. If anyone knows of an app that has that feature, please let me know in the comments section or on Twitter.
A great summation by David Swanson on AfterDowningStreet on his post about all of Obama’s broken promises so far:
The lesson is not that you voted for the wrong guy, given the choices. The lesson is not that rightwingers who hate Obama are right about anything. The lesson is not even that Obama has betrayed you. The key lesson should be that change does not come from electing someone. Change comes from forcing our culture to change, creating better communications systems, and disrupting the pleasant existence of our representatives in Congress. But we’ll never stop cheering for nonviolent activists in other countries and become them ourselves as long as we believe our role consists of loving or hating an elected official, and one whose job was supposed to consist of merely executing the will of the legislative branch.
With the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I’ve been reading up on the conspiracy theories, for and against. I personally don’t think it *was* faked, although it’s an interesting idea.
What made me think of this lately was the incredible news that NASA taped over the original moon landing footage! And then they recently had Hollywood "clean up" copies of the footage, George Lucas-style. I wonder if this time, we’ll see Buzz Aldrin shoot first? Anyway, I read that and thought "OMFG the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news."
So I posted up a quick (and yes, badly worded) twtpoll today asking people what THEY thought about the moon landings – fake or not?
Yes, yes, I *know* it’s a small sample size (to all the haters out there) – when did you think a twtpoll was a scientific research methodology?
What’s interesting to me is how the attitudes of the Twittersphere differ from the general public. If this is an accurate sample of the Twittersphere in general (and not just my followers), does it suggest we are more skeptical of our governments that the general public? Or is it a product of the past decade since the Gallup poll? Or it is Australians (who probably make up at least 25% of my followers) are more skeptical than Americans about the event?
For all of the people who replied that the folks who think it might have been faked are morons, let me ask you – why do you believe so strongly? What evidence do YOU have that they DON’T have?
Let me also ask:
Do you think the USA *could* have faked it if it wanted to? Seems possible to me. People say "how could THAT many people keep a secret?" but how many people REALLY needed to know the truth? Let’s face it – the US has been doing LOTS of dirty shit over the last 60 years that they’ve managed to keep mostly quiet… who shot JFK again?
Do you think the USA had motivation for faking it? Sure – the cold war, space race, investment in the military industrial complex, etc. JFK said they were going to do it before the decade was out – how would it looked if they failed?
Do you realize all of the moon landings – ALL OF THEM – happened during Richard Nixon’s White House? Do you believe anything ELSE that came out of Nixon’s White House?
A few people asked me what evidence there is to suggest it was a hoax. I don’t have any and I don’t believe it *was* a hoax. HOWEVER… it got me thinking… if it WAS a hoax, what evidence WOULD there be? What evidence would we be searching for?
For that matter, it if was genuine, what evidence would it take to convince the skeptics?
I didn’t come up with any good answers. Do you have any?