If you have a Rubik’s Cube that you haven’t been able to solve and want to “clean it up,” you should check out the free online application at Wrongway.org. Wrongway is a blog run by Eric Dietz out of Minneapolis and includes some very helpful links, including those to solve the standard 3x3 Rubik’s Cube, the more advanced 4x4 Cube, and some general advice on solving the cube on your own. With the simple interface, you color the cube to match your exact configuration, click solve, and a page will be displayed with the step-by-step instructions to solve your cube. It’s quick, simple, free, and effective; all the hallmarks of good software.

Wrongway.org

There’s a great collection of videos on Youtube posted by StupidGSA, Stupid Game Show Answers. Each is between two and three minutes long, and contains a montage of funny moments from game shows.  There are clips from Wheel of Fortune, The Newlywed Game, Password, $100,000 Pyramid, Jeopardy, and many others.  Some, like the Newlywed Game clips are hilarious just to see the outfits that contestants of the 60’s and 70’s wore.  Others are funny for the unintended slips or gaffes, like the more recent one with Jeopardy king, Ken Jennings, a mormon. Check them all out and enjoy the laughs.

http://www.youtube.com/user/stupidgsa

I checked out Playwithyourmind.com tonight, a neat site with flash games, puzzles, and IQ tests. They boast over 100 mind games including intelligence tests like color or pattern recognition, numbers, multitasking, logic puzzles, and even card games. The site is arranged cleanly and simply and doesn’t bog down with advertisements. It’s really well organized.

Whenever I come across one of these kinds of sites, I always have to test my typing skills. My typing method is kind of a hybrid style between touch typing and mashing the keyboard. My fingers tend to hover in the traditional home position, but after years of coding, I’ve become accustomed to various home positions depending on the task at hand: over the numeric keypad, over the numeric keys, over the arrows, or over the WASDX keys. Sometimes, I preoccupy my left hand with handling Control, Shift, and Alt while the right has to do the work of two. Plus, I strike keys with the heel of the palm, side of the thumb, and the side of the hand in ways that I don’t think you’ll learn in the Mavis Beacon typing course. I use whatever is most convenient to the key. I also get into grooves when coding, especially if I’m doing a lot of code cleanup, where I sort of roll the keys and listen to the clicks to tell if I’ve made a typo.

I fly when I’m coding. It’s not the same as secretarial skills in typing because the vocabulary is significantly curtailed and you’re typing your own thoughts and not transcribing the thoughts of others. Even still, I’m also pretty quick typing letters.  So, I like to test myself every once in a while and see how I do in these tests.  PlayWithYourMind.com has a couple typing games so I went directly to the most obvious of them, The Typing Test.  In the practice game I scored 136,781 with 0 typos and 18 seconds left. I thought that was pretty good, so I went on to the next game, the first being only a practice. Unfortunately the game then reports an error and only after digging around the typing section could I manually select the other games and find that it requires me to register and compete for the real games to load fully. It’s a bit disappointing and not obvious from the outset, but the registration requirement isn’t really out of line. Although I didn’t register myself, I can still recommend the site as something worth checking out. If you find something you like here and register, post a comment and let me know your experience. At least it didn’t just close out my browser window like another typing site did.