Online Jigsaw Puzzles
Time yourself and challenge your friends to solve online jigsaw puzzles featuring the amazing photography of National Geographic. Puzzle pictures include animals, landscapes, plants & fungi, people, sunrises & sunsets, weather, cars & machines, and abstract art. There are over 2300 puzzles in all!
How to Solve Rubik’s Cube in 6 Seconds
The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Professor Erno Rubik. It launched worldwide in 1980 and became the world’s best-selling toy ever with over 300 million sold.
The Rubik’s Cube has 43 quintillion (43,252,003,274,489,856,000) possible configurations and only ONE solution. If you made a single turn of the Cube every second, it would take you 1,400 million million years to go through all possible configurations (or 100,000 times longer than the universe has existed).
The current World Record holder for fastest Rubik’s Cube solution is 17-year-old Toby Mao, who set a time of 10.48 seconds at the US National Championships in August 2006. Now Gizmodo has published instructions on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube in 6 seconds flat.
Make Money Predicting The Future
Here’s a site that pays you for correctly predicting the future. When I first heard of it I thought it sounded like an interesting way to collect marketing data and when I first saw it I thought it looked a lot like a site to bet on sports. Apparently lots of people care about the outcome in sports. You can also predict the outcome of a lot of interesting things in business, investing, court and even news stories. You can even predict how many UFOs will be reported in the U.S. this year. This site just raised over 4 million dollars from investors so they must be doing something right.
22 Arcade Games = 1 Big Party House
Brian Saur of Los Angeles has converted his family home into his own personal Funspot with 22 original arcade machines that he bought and restored. Naturally he throws monthly video game parties for friends and family.
In the age of 64-bit 3-D graphics, why is Brian still messing with these 8-bit relics? “I’m open to anything as far as the newest X-Box and PS3 games or whatever, but there’s something really neat about older, simplistic stuff. There’s something zen about it, mastering something simple.”
Virtual Magnetic Poetry
I’m sure you’ve seen these magnetic boards with assorted words attached as magnets that you can arrange to form poetic phrases and other messages. Here’s one that everyone can play with right in your web browser. When I first found this I was the only one online at the time and was able to put this phrase together which I was quite proud of considering the limited number of words available.
But shortly after this a few more folks showed up and competition for the ‘good’ words ensued. You can chat with other users which allows either some good natured word grabbing or more peaceful collaboration. If nothing else its fun to watch the words fly around the screen as other users practice their prose.
Menage-a-Trois Chess
In case the game of chess wasn’t challenging enough, there is a new three-way version. The rules are the same, the only difference is that pieces can move left or right when they hit the intersection in the center. Accordingly, half of the pawns will go to the left opponent’s board, and half will go to the right.
The first player to achieve checkmate on any other player wins. If two players gang up on the third player, he is doomed. What’s interesting is that two players must often compete and cooperate to checkmate the third player.
