Week 408

Fun times

On Monday we met up with Ben G again at the BFI to continue working on the chess soundtrack project and we continued this work remotely on Tuesday. The aim was to have something we could demo at the Show & Tell event on Wednesday evening.

We added sound effects for taking pieces, had the Stockfish engine play one or both players moves, and added the ability to play a historical game from a PGN file. We also added a sound effect for moving into check which became louder the closer the player got to check-mate.

Ben G made some good progress in implementing the Hough Transform in order to identify the lines bordering the squares on a chessboard.

Miscellaneous

• Chris & I chatted about a long-standing Mocha pull request about YAML serialisation. I’m still not sure about the best approach and we’ve agreed to schedule some time to pair on it at some point.

• We tried to find out more about the CMA Open Banking project, but to no avail.

• We made a commitment to GDS to work on the Manuals Discovery project in December; we wanted to wait for the meeting with Hookline about the Music Library project at the end of the week before committing to any work beyond that.

• I prepared a demo of the GFR Video project for the Show & Tell, although there were so many people, I didn’t get a chance to show it.

• As planned, we held Show & Tell 26 on Wednesday evening and it went off well; probably the most well-attended event we’ve had so far.

• On Friday morning we had a 3-way Skype catch-up with Hookline about the Music Library project. Afterwards Chris helpfully wrote up and shared some notes & actions. After the meeting we felt more comfortable with the idea of agreeing to some more GDS work.

• We belatedly realised that next week’s Megazord conference starts on Monday afternoon and continues on Thursday morning. Unfortunately the train tickets we booked in advance will mean we’ll miss these bits. We contacted Kayleigh & Rebecca to apologise for the misunderstanding.

• At the end of the week I ran into power problems with my MacBook Pro. Initially I suspected the power supply, but this was ruled out when I bought a new one from the Convent Garden Apple Store. So on Saturday morning I took my laptop back to MR Systems, because it was still covered by their 3-month warranty after the recent water damage repair.