People make robots that do the strangest things. Now I’ve found one that uses LEGO parts and solves Rubic’s Cubes. It’s an interesting application of LEGOs and software to solve a rather silly problem.

I’m not sure if I would have the patience to build something like this from scratch, especially since I don’t have any Rubic’s Cubes that I  desperately need solving. But I commend someone for doing what they think is fun, so that’s cool.

If and when I ever start soldering my own electronic gizmos, I’m sure I’ll end up needing a circuit board or two. I’ve found Pad2Pad, which I run across every so often, that lets you do custom circuit boards. The prices don’t look too bad at all, although they certainly are more than mass-produced boards you can buy in the store.

But, hey, they’re custom.

If you need more than just circuit boards, eMachineShop (no relationship to the computer brand) lets you create things like gears, brackets, decorations, etc.

The downside of these sites is that you must have Windows and not Linux to use their software. Pretty cool stuff anyway, however.

I don’t often go to IMDB. Usually it’s to look up a single movie or actor. I hadn’t realized that they had genre sections, such as their sci-fi section. With over 8 thousand titles listed, that’s at least 16,000 hours (at an average of 2 hours per title).

If you were to watch the movies continuously, it would take you approximately 1 year, 10 months, 1 day and 16 hours. That is… a lot of movies!

There are zillions of blogs out there (or a good couple million, at least). This makes it just a bit difficult for someone to find your blog in particular. How did you find mine? Technorati? A link from somewhere else? Search engine?

It’s too bad that there isn’t an easier way to find  sites and blogs that you like, but Google and Technorati seem to be the best way at the moment.

One thing that would be good, in my opinion, would be a toolbar similar to the StumbleUpon toolbar, only for just blogs. (If they have this, I haven’t seen it.)  You’d choose a type of blog you wanted to see (like technology related), click the button and find a blog.

If there is something like this already out there, I’d like to see it!

Scientists are now saying that we’re not from the Milky Way galaxy, at least according to one site. I haven’t seen that reported elsewhere, nor is there a date given for the article, but it’s pretty wild if true.

There is also something there about ’seeing’ the future, which is pretty interesting.

Of course, a lot of the stuff on that site seems to be pseudo-science, so take it all with a grain of salt.

Some time back, I purchased SAMS Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself — 24 Hours). Despite being somewhat thin, it’s been my favorite book. I also have access to ‘Instant PHP 4′ and the PHP5 and MySQL Bible. But I don’t like them as much as I do the PHP4 in 24 hours book.

It may be outdated, since it’s only PHP4, but I’ve still found it more useful many times than the much thicker (and more expensive) books I also use.

Unfortunately, it’s also the book I end up losing the most. Funny how that happens.

Software for a computer, especially a Windows computer, is not cheap. That’s why I like finding as many places to get free software, such as Freeware Home, as possible. I don’t even know how many times I’ve been ’saved’ by freeware.

I’ve just found a Sudoku generator. It may be awhile before I get back…

I’m trying to figure out what TWERQ is. It seems to be a tabbed search… And a bit odd at that. I’m not sure what the advantage is over searching in multiple FF tabs, maybe someone can explain it to me?

Oh well, it’s interesting anyway.

I file this under ‘programming’ and ‘toys and games’ since when you’re programming games, you often have to find sounds to go with your program. Logical, yes?

FindSounds is a great site for searching for various sounds in different formats. There is no guarantee that the audio files will be copyright free or GPL-able, but at least it’s a good start!

I know I’ve used this site before to search for sounds to use as sounds on my personal computer.

If you go to yugop.com, you’re greeted with… well, strange things. There’s something with clay, something with 2D balls… video capture… I’m not sure what this site is about.

If nothing else, it’s fairly interesting to watch, if a bit on the strange side…