I suggest an electronics sport with electronic players, a ball, two goals and rules somewhat like football rules.

Say you have a ping pong sized play ground, with borders. The players are round can sized robots.
In the first iteration of this idea the players can be remote controlled. In the more advanced iterations they can be self controlled, with or without a hive mind, robots.

This sport can be awfully fun to both play and watch. With 4 players in each team, or more players for a bigger playgound, it will allow for agility, cunning, strategy and precision. The speed should have a maximum, albeit the goal keepers can have their own maximum speed.

The speed(s) and sizes of the goals and play grounds should be iterated forth. One could also consider assymetrical cans to allow for more ball tricks.

Semelectronic tools for creating board games

I suppose designing a board game requires a lot of iterations.
To aid this I suggest small electronic modules, preferably with 3D printable form factors.

Say you have round markers with differenct graphics on, dragons, horses and eggs. Why not have small, marker sized, colour LCD displays?
Then when trying out a new game idea with 10 dragons, 10 horses and 10 eggs, you realise there should be 5 dragons, 10 horses and 25 eggs. Just change graphis on the markers. The result is the same as having card board tokens and drawing more eggs and throwing some dragons in the waste basket; but without the mental friction of throwing the markers with the sketched dragons away.

Say you redesign the board from a square pattern to a hexagonal. Why not bring forth your 3D printer with ready made blue prints for hex adapters ?
If the display has a known form it should be easy to pre construct all types of forms and shapes. Now printing takes a while so they should probably be printed in advance. But on the other hand they can be reused.

The board could be likewise adaptable. It could be a LCD screen, like a big ipad. It could be lego. It could be a piece of card board and erasable pens. But that is another idea.

Likewise more dynamic dice are another idea in another article.

The battery doesn’t have to last forever, this is just for designing a game and iterating its mechanics. Recharge everything every night.

If the LCD display is exchanged for e paper there is no need for a battery at all.

Another idea would be to have already made round, square and hex markers, more paper with round, square and hex outlines and sticky spray. Just draw the graphics inside the lines, cut, spray, and attach the paper cuts to the markers. Faster, cheaper and just as fun.
This idea also matches the cardboard-and-erasable-pens outlined above.

When listening to an ebook it is easy to fall asleep, either on purpose or by accident.

I suggest monitoring awake/asleep state and pausing the ebook reader.

Monitoring could be done through one of those smart watches that all seem to create graphs of how long you have run and for how long you have slept. It could also be done through listening to breaths or watching eye movemements.

The ebook reader could be paused or a book mark could be set.

Regular expressions can be hard to write and is hard to read.

I suggest coming up with a replacement for Regex, one that is easier to write, and absolutely easier to read.

Often when you create a calender entry everything goes the way you planned. But sometimes the event ends up on the wrong date. If you don’t happen to remember exactly the erroneous date you entered you have no way to find it again.

Alas – let the calendar have a way to show the last entries so you can find it there.

Jag föreslår 3 pepparkaksformar för att göra ett litet pepparkakshus.

En form är för taket, rektangulärt, en för gavlarna, 5-kantigt, och en för fram- och baksida av huset, rektangel igen. På så sätt kan man enkelt stansa ut ett drygt halvdecimeter högt pepparkakshus man kan limma ihop med kristyr (man bränner sig på socker).

Då kan alla barnen göra var sig och det blir mindre bråk om vilken dekoration som skall var.,

When making gingerbread one uses punches to create the shapes.

I suggest making 3 in the shape of parts for a small house. One for the roof, one for each side and one for the remaining two sides. With 3 punches one has a ginger bread house half a decimeter high. Glue it together with sugar paste.

This means every kid around the table can make his/her own house and not have to share/squabble over which decoration should go where.

Fiddling with commits and branches in Git requires googling.
If it doesn’t – you have done the above already.

There are tools like Fork to aid but I suggest yat (yet another tool).

Show the commit graph graphically with boxes and arrows.
Let the user pull the arrows between commits.

This way one can reorder (i.e. interactive rebase) the commits.

The user can also move arrows between branches. Possibly more complex for the application to sort out but a tremendous help for the user.

The issue of merge problems remains.

If the rebase is ok, just do it.

If the rebase results in a merge problem, let the user handle it in his/her preferred/normal way.

Throwing dice is nice but there are two areas of possible dispute.
1. When the die ends up not on flat ground, with one part lifted up. Is it a valid throw or not?
2. When the die/dice smashes into something on the board and moves a piece or two. Where were we at?

So I suggest a physical electronic die to solve this; and more.

I am aware there certainly are apps and web sites for what is to be described but with apps and phones you cannot phycially throw the device/die/dice. Which is part of the fun.

Let the form be a cube. It is a nice form and feels good in the hand and clearly shows which side is up.
This doesn’t mean it has to simulate a D6. It can be anything from D2 to Dinfinite. It can simulate many dice too, as throwing one D12 die is not the same as throwing two D6.

The randomness can be seeded by a built in clock and the g forces of throwing and bouncing.

When the die has come to a stand still, the top side shows the value.
Well… all sides can show the same value so it is readable from everywhere.

If the die decides it is not flat, the value instead shows an icon for rethrowing.
This means there is not any room for discussion. Flat or not, the die decides and the rules are the same for everyone.
Well… who cares if the die ends up slanted, the randomised result is the result. No room for heated discussion.

If the die notices it has fallen on the floor it is a dead throw and the rethrow icon is shown.
Or… it can be a valid throw and the die continues showing the same value regardless of how it is turned before returned to the table.

Throwing a die is done by either throwing it or putting it down on the table with certain force.
If the latter method is used for “throwing the dice”, the risk of pieces of the board being moved due to an unlucky throw is eliminated. When a throw is recognised the value is animated and then shown.

There is a blue tooth connection with phones and other dice.
The count of throws are counted. This means that if you are plagued by a cheeter, manipulating the dice is not longer an issue. If the dice are moved when everyone is taking a break they don’t change their value. And if they are retrown, a counter increases together with time stamp. The old value is retrieved from the history. The game continues. The culprit chastisised.

Since the dice are connected they don’t have to be passed around the table any more. Everyone can have his/her own dice and they can all show the value of the last thrown dice. Or if everyone has their phone by the table, they phone shows the value.
Personally I prefer passing the dice around as it is tactile, makes people interact and shows who’s turn it is.

All of the above, except for the 6 sided form factor and the throwing part, can be simulated in a phone or tablet or computer or raspberry or whatever.

Update:

The die can simulate more than numeric values. There are games with coloured dice, D6 with 4 different values and 2 specials. If the result represent something, like 1-2 is miss, 3-4 is boarding and 5-6 is sink, the die can simulate a D3 with nice icons instead of figures.

It can simulate a deck of cards. It can even remember what values are already thrown so to not randomise the same card twice. This mimics drawing cards from a deck.

It it not uncommon to mouse-click on a row and then press home-button to move the cursor to the start of the line.

I suggest having yet a button; that moves the cursor to the start of the line.

One way is to have a button on the mouse.

Another way is to have a home button on the left hand side of the keyboard. Or right side if you have your mouse on the left side.

The button does not have to be hard wired to just this but could be configured differently. Move cursor to end of line is not uncommon. Have it change behaviour depending on modifier keys (alt-shift-control-command).