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.
Continúa leyendo "Mind reading phone app and more"New Android Trick App
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.
Continúa leyendo "New Android Trick App"Building Mobile Apps with AI: My Cordova Development Journey
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.
Continúa leyendo "Building Mobile Apps with AI: My Cordova Development Journey"I don’t need no stinking Google Play store
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…
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Si Stebbins Trainer
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.
Continúa leyendo "Si Stebbins Trainer"Cordova Android App Development: Complete Setup Guide
Overview
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:
- A computer running Linux (Ubuntu/similar)
- An HTML/CSS/JavaScript web page
- About 1-2 hours for initial setup
- 2-3 GB of disk space for all the tools
How I Turned a Simple HTML File Into an Android App: A Love Letter to Complexity
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace 47 Dependencies
TL;DR: I had a perfectly functional HTML file. It worked in every browser. It was beautiful. Then I decided to turn it into an Android app.
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Three Card Mystery: Remote Performance Edition
What’s New in This Version?
I’ve updated the Three Card Mystery trick to support remote performance via a phone call. Here are the key improvements:
Continúa leyendo "Three Card Mystery: Remote Performance Edition"The Three Card Mind Reading effect as a phone app
First let me describe the classic Hummer Trick.
It’s a beautiful card trick that looks like genuine mind reading, yet requires no sleight of hand, no marked cards, and practically no skill. All you need are three cards and an understanding of simple logic.
Continúa leyendo "The Three Card Mind Reading effect as a phone app"The Hidden Cost of Friendly AI: When Optimization Becomes Manipulation
Have you noticed how AI assistants always seem to think your questions are “brilliant” or “insightful”? How they’re unfailingly supportive, never tired, always available? It feels good—and that’s precisely the problem.
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