Old magician who likes old cars, and old whisky
I recently found an old “Dream Lock,” a four-wheel combination lock with a unique feature: it can be rigged to open using only two of the four dials. This meant I needed a reliable way to make a spectator select my two target numbers out of four digits they would pick.
I decided to use the classic “Cut Deeper” Force from card magic.
Continue reading “The Dream Lock & The “Cut Deeper” Force”This is another Android app the I created using Claude.ai and Cordova. I started by asking the AI for some ideas for apps. One that it suggested was a “Ghost Card” app where the spectators chosen card magically appears on an image that was just taken with your phones camera. Two hours later I had a working app. Most of that time was spent in making tweaks and enhancements to the app.
Continue reading “Ghost Card: Another Android based Magic Effect”Imagine showing your spectator a deck of cards laid out in an app on your phone. There are two buttons, “Shuffle” and “Flip Cards”. You demonstrate how the buttons work. The cards are face up and you shuffle them several times. The spectator sees the cards are shuffled. You flip the cards face down and shuffle again. You set the phone down and turn away, telling the spectator to touch any of the face down cards. They do, and their selection is turned face up. You have them concentrate on that card and then you read their mind, revealing the card. You can immediately repeat the effect.
Continue reading “Mind reading phone app and more”The Future of Card Magic is Digital
You’ve just performed the perfect classic card trick: a spectator selects a card, keeps it secret, and you’re ready for the big reveal. But instead of fumbling through your deck, you pull out your phone, launch your QR code app, and hand it to them. “Scan this,” you say. “Yesterday, I had a strange feeling… that your card would be chosen.” They scan the code, open the dedicated webpage that pops up, and there it is: their chosen card, staring back at them from the screen. Forget the deck—the future of impossible prediction is now woven into the digital world.
Continue reading “New Android Trick App”If you’re serious about card magic or simply fascinated by the mathematics of card shuffling, understanding faro shuffles is essential. The Faro Shuffle Simulator is a powerful web-based tool that lets you practice, visualize, and explore the elegant mathematics behind perfect shuffles and memorized deck systems.
Continue reading “Faro Shuffle Simulator: Complete User Guide”Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using Claude (an AI assistant from Anthropic) to help me build several mobile applications using Apache Cordova. The experience has been eye-opening – both for what worked remarkably well and what proved frustratingly difficult. If you’re considering using AI to help with mobile development, here’s what I learned.
Continue reading “Building Mobile Apps with AI: My Cordova Development Journey”If you have been following my posts you know that I have been playing around with creating apps for use as a Magician. But I wondered what else I could do. I was out driving using a speedometer app that has advertisements and features that I don’t care about so…
Continue reading “I don’t need no stinking Google Play store”
One of the features I like about the Si Stebbins stack is that if you know the bottom card you can calculate the position of any other card in the deck using some “simple” math. Technically the math is simple, but it takes some practice. So I wrote a web page and also an Android app for my phone to help me train in the calculations.
Continue reading “Si Stebbins Trainer”The Si Stebbins stack is built on a simple, consistent cycle, meaning the distance between any two cards in the deck can be found with basic arithmetic. This method breaks the calculation into three simple steps that are easy to perform in your head.
The goal is to find the Final Position from the Top (1-52) for the Target Card, assuming the Bottom Card is at position 52.
(Note: I have a Si Stebbins Trainer page to help you practice this method. It is at http://robertjwallace.com/stebbins)
Continue reading “The Magician’s Code: Calculating the Si Stebbins Position”What is Cordova? Cordova wraps your HTML/CSS/JavaScript web app in a native Android container, allowing it to run as a standalone app on Android devices. Having suffered through getting this all setup via Claude.ai I thought I would ask Claude.ai to write this guide.
What you’ll need: