TrickJarrett.com

Introducing ChessHeat

Introducing my latest project to fiddle with. This is "ChessHeat." It is an app to play chess in against an engine. I'm using StockFish, though my own chess engine is a future project because why not.

ChessHeat though is a Python graphical interface for playing chess against another engine with one central core feature that others don't have (at least, not that I've seen.) The heatmap you can see on the board.

The intensity of the red represents how often a square is coming up in the lines the engine is analyzing. You may also notice some square's aren't entirely of their color, and that is to represent how immediate the engine is looking at that square. If the square is fully that color that means the focus is on it in the next move or two.

I am not yet convinced how helpful this is, but it is interesting. The system records the heatmap per move, so you can go back and see how the heatmap changes after every move.

I have a few other ideas I am exploring, which are things like "critical move" notifications. This is when the machine finds that you have only one good move and everything else is bad. I am still getting this feature right, but the idea here is that it stops and notifies you about this being a critical move, letting you pause and think more about it.

Some would argue this is bad or cheating, whatever.

The entire goal of this project is to improve how someone can learn from playing against an engine. And the critical move idea is one that, to me, helps me tap into the 'chess puzzle' thinking. Which, good players will argue should always be on, especially when your moves are untimed. And they'd be right, but I am not a great chess player. I'm a mediocre slightly above average chess player.

I've got a few more ideas of things to add to it, but we'll see how they go before I share them. But here's ChessHeat, another of my recent spate of projects to fiddle with in the evenings.

An amazing thread on Threads recapping the MCU since Endgame

Since the trailer dropped I've seen a lot of people who missed the last 7 years of the MCU post Endgame.

Don't worry, I got you.

I brought in the multiverse's best storyteller to get you a spoiler- filled recap of everything you need to know before Avengers: Doomsday.

Ready?

Disclosure Day (2026)

I was sadly disappointed with this movie. I truly just did not find it enjoyable.

I've had two failed focaccia bakes but this is a new recipe from my brother. Looks very promising going into the oven.

Coding updates

I recently leveled up my development process for web projects. Don't tell anyone but I've largely been operating without a dev environment. When you're coding for yourself and it's low risk, it doesn't really prove much of a concern.

Recently I finally began to implement the dev server on the local laptop within an Ubuntu WSL sandbox. And I've been slowly migrating projects into it. This blog was today's migration as I came back to working on some things.

5Flix was the first one I put in the WSL sandbox as I wanted a better ability to tweak its design and admin tools without risking messing up my friends' streaks and such on the site.

My latest personal project is one I'm calling 'Alchemy' - I haven't said anything about this one yet. It is a bespoke organization system that I use in my daily work, which combines a kanban board for my ongoing task lists, and then an Eisenhower matrix for my daily organization, with a few other aspects thrown in. Like Glowbug (my blog's homebrew CMS) I expect Alchemy to remain a personal tool and not be something I share more broadly, but we'll see.

Another small project that I have going, I call '2ndmon' as in 'second monitor.' I found I wanted a news hub for a second (or third monitor) and couldn't find what I wanted. So I put together a simple tweetdeck RSS reader for a few news feeds, then added some other small features like a set of global time clocks, and weather, etc. It's super lightweight and easy. Right now I use: NPR, Al Jazeera, and Factal. And before anyone asks it's because they are the best RSS feeds I could find without jumping through too many hoops or dealing with too much noise.

Lastly I have my ongoing personal tool for generating my top movie list simply called 'MovieRank.' It's an overengineered movie battler which puts movies into an Elo driven ranking system. It automatically pulls newly released movies in and if I happen to watch something not in it, it can quickly pull the movie in. It also lets me slice and dice my movie rankings into groupings by: director, lead actors, genre, release decade, studio, franchise, etc. It's largely stable at this point and I haven't made any sizable code changes to it in a few months.

As for how I program, these days I program inside VSCode and make use of Claude Code. Love it or hate it, it is very good at many things. I still review all changes and code and do a fair bit myself, but I cannot deny that it is helpful to me as a hobbyist coder.

In some ways Claude has changed how I enjoy coding as a side hobby, I compare it to someone who was a whittler buying a lathe or something. It gives me a lot more power and capability to do things faster than I could before.