This in an extract from my blog, I thought it might be interesting to post it here too:


As I already mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been working on the issue of recording my games while playing. Even if everyone claims that learning to memorise them during the game would help me improve, I’m not able to go all over a game by myself. So, ever since I found out about Photokifu, I’ve been trying to get it to work as automatically as possible. Did I already mention that Photokifu is free?

Today I replayed the “ear reddening” game and Photokifu detected most of the moves. I had to actually tune about 5 of them, but everything else was fine.  252 correct guesses out of 257 is good enough for me since the program will ask you whenever it encounters any abnormal situation and you can manually fix it. And yes, the game is longer than 257 moves, but by the end there is a long ko and I was tired so I decided to finish the test.



In order to accomplish this you’ll need a couple of devices:
1. Standing stick: this allows the phone to be stabilized on a upper position, with a good view of the board.
2. Remote shutter: this Bluetooth device allows you to remotely control the timing of the pictures.

My first attempt excluded the remote shutter and was made through a timelapse app for android. Handling hundreds of pictures and deleting the duplicate images was quite cumbersome. The results were not optimal.  The remote shutter allows me to shoot after a stone has already been placed and there is no hand over the board.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an app capable of taking pictures while the screen was off and remotely controlled by Bluetooth. So, mind you, the screen must be on during the entire game. My numbers on a One plus one: 257 pictures, one every 10 seconds (i.e. 42 minutes), on airplane mode, with wireless connection off, with Bluetooth on and screen brightness around 20%, the battery drain was around 10%.

Not that bad, I expected more battery drain. However, the remote shutter is somewhat noisy, with the classical click-click of cheap plastic buttons. And the stick is bulky…

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My blog about Go and Boardgames: Alejo's Tenuki

Go selfies!

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Yes, indeed.

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My blog about Go and Boardgames: Alejo's Tenuki