Old man, old cars, and old whisky
Another “find the aces” trick. This one is good for practicing your second deal.
Begin with secretly having the four aces on top of the deck. I typically have the spectator shuffle the deck, and then use my two-step cull to get the aces on top. Riffle or overhand shuffle to add eight more cards on top of the deck. I usually use two riffle shuffles to add four cards at a time.
Continue reading “Only a second”I stumbled upon https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player/wiki#what-this-is which gave me the information I needed to directly control my echo device, instead of having one echo command via voice another.
Read my post https://robertjwallace.com/creating-home-assistant-interface-to-alexa-playlists/ for background.
The difference between what I was doing in that post and what I am doing now is in the scripts.yaml file. The code to directly control my echo is:
Continue reading “Update: Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists”There are a lot of ten card poker deals out there. The basic plot is that for the final hand of the evening your opponent suggested playing a hand of five card poker with only ten cards, but the spectator gets to choose which cards they get. You, the dealer ends up winning with a pat hand, usually a Royal Flush.
Continue reading “Ten card poker deal”Use Home Assistant to use Amazon Echo to play Amazon Music playlists
Home Assistant Community Store – Alexa Media Player
Continue reading “Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists”I have a hybrid home automation system that includes some old X10 devices, Philips hue devices, wemo devices, and tp-link devices. Part of the system is some software that emulates a Philips hue bridge (ha-bridge) that lets me control devices by running linux programs and scripts. This lets me use old X10 radio frequency controllers and motion detectors in my home automation. So far this has worked great.
Continue reading “Controlling a tuya smart plug from the command line”Here is something I am playing with.
The starting position is two aces on top and two on the bottom. Shuffle the deck keeping the aces on top and bottom.
Continue reading “Finding the Aces – the hard way”A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “Finding the aces with Erdnase” where I used Erdnase’s system of overhand shuffle to stack the aces at know positions in the deck.
The positions I used were 10x cards, Ace, 1x card, Ace, 5x cards, and the last Ace. In this post I generalize that method to place the aces at whatever locations you want.
Continue reading “Texas Hold-em stacks”In the normal method of riffle stacking you start with the four aces on top. When you do the shuffles you hold back cards with both the right and left hands, dropping the cards held by the left thumb under the cards held back by the right thumb. At each shuffle the number of cards held back by the left stays the same, but those held by the right decrease.
Continue reading “Easy Riffle Stacking”I have been playing around with Home Assistant for just a little while now, and while I am impressed with what it does, I find the documentation and the examples to be less than helpful. One thing I wanted to do was simply add a “card” of web links to the UI. Since the Home Assistant interface (Lovelace) is web based you would think that this would be easy.
Continue reading “Adding links to web pages in Home Assistant”The largest U.S. manufacture of playing cards sells approx. 100,000,000
decks of playing cards per year. This can be expressed as 108.