Aart's Blog

It has been a while since the last update, since I have been a bit busy at work, but I finally had some time for two new features in Chess for Android, version 4.5 now available through the playstore or as direct download : Spoken chess text (option to announce all moves) Retrieve position function (direct link with Gerhard Roth's OCR app ) To enable the new chess speech feature, simply press the menu button, select "Options", and then enable the "Spoken Moves" option (see check-mark below). After that, Chess for Android announces the chess moves made on the board, as well as the final outcome of the game. For now, only the english language is supported. A follow-up posting will go into more detail on the OCR feature.

A few days back I got a very kind email from Branko with some pictures of Chess for Android running on a Galaxy Gear smartwatch. I never tested a much smaller screen, and was glad the scalable drawing methods displayed the board rather well. Thanks Branko for these pictures and your nice email!

Because the 26mm eyepiece does not fit in the Meade basic camera adapter, and the 9.7mm eyepiece has too much light loss in my modest Meade ETX-90EC, I purchased a 15mm eyepiece. This eyepiece fits comfortably in the adapter. Less magnification than the 9.7mm eyepiece, of course, but therefore also less light loss. Below already a quick result (taken at dawn) together with two pictures from the September 7 posting (taken during the day) for comparison. The slight curvature in the picture is a bit worrisome, still have to look more into that. Can't wait though to try some real astrophotography with the new eyepiece. prime focus (rear port) 9.7mm eyepiece projection (adapter) 15mm eyepiece projection (adapter)