Author: Ty Dunitz

My Rubik’s cube is sitting on my desk, to my immediate left, as it always does. I’ve been trying to solve it, developing algorithms, for months. I’m doing pretty well, but I’m by no means close to solving it. I’m sure hundreds of thousands of geeks around the world can echo this sentiment. That ErnÅ‘ Rubik could design a puzzle so simple, and so goddamn difficult to solve, is his legacy. And what a legacy. There are 4.33 x 10*19 permutations in a standard Rubik’s cube! If you wanna split hairs, that’s exactly 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations! And ONE of them is correct. For crap’s sake, ErnÅ‘….

Hey Zuckerberg, you’d better make way for Paul Ceglia. Who the hell is Paul Ceglia? Why, web designer / wood pellet distributor extraordinaire, of course. Apparently, Paul signed a contract in April 2003 to develop thefacebook.com, for which he would be paid $1000 and 50% share in the company, with an additional 1% share per day until the work was completed. All told, Paul Ceglia should (according to him) currently own 84% of Facebook. Yeah, Paul, and I should own 77% of Google. But I don’t. Because I didn’t design it. The fact that Ceglia is bringing this up seven years after the fact calls into question…

Oh, hey there, wanna hear some more about The Signal Issue? Probably not, right? Old hat. Apparently, Apple doesn’t wanna hear any more about it, either – a bunch of threads about Consumer Reports’ recent findings have been deleted from Apple’s official support forum. What did Consumer Reports recently find? That they could not recommend the iPhone 4 until and unless the signal issue is fixed. Bummer. Utilizing a radio frequency isolation chamber, CR purchased three iPhones from three separate retailers and put them through the paces, emulating AT&T’s signals and stacking up the results…

Y’know the horror that is Chatroullette? Surely you’ve seen your share of gonads by now. Fun, yeah? No? Well whatever, because you can’t stop this bum rush – the harrowing experience of Chatroulette is now available on the iPhone 4 as iChatr, an app with all the charm* of the site that spawned it. Utilizing the iPhone 4′s forward-facing camera, simply start the app, pop in your pretentious white headphones (for whatever reason, the speakers don’t work) and be greeted with the throbbing unmentionables face of a random stranger. Don’t like what you see? Swipe, and they’re gone, replaced with the…

These days, Big Steve (that’s Jobs, for anyone who hasn’t figured out my schtick yet) is considered by and large as magical as he likes to claim the iPad. What a handsome chin. What a dapper turtleneck. The guy’s gotta have a CHA score of, like, 18 at least. The turtleneck’s probably giving him a bonus, too. Hunkalicious. Over the last couple months, one easy out for blogfolk tapped for stories has been to report on random emails, from both consumers and fans alike, that Jobs has decided to cryptically answer. Much to his chagrin, though, said laziness on the part of the blogfolk has created an unrelenting…

Alright, this just kicked my netherparts right off my abdomen. Enter Leonar3do. Before watching the video, I was pronouncing it ‘Leonaredo’ and scratching my head. I think the 3 is silent. Regardless, it indicates the number of dimensions that are about to blow your mind. Surely you’ve heard tell of Zbrush – it’s a popular CG sculpting tool that allows you to, via mouse or preferably tablet (a real, traditional, Wacom-style tablet, not an iPad), get your freak on sculpting dynamically in real time. In its own right, it’s a big step up from traditional Rhino- or 3DSMax-style modelling. As if I just…

See that? Up there, in the headline? You see? I used not only a question mark, but followed it with an exclamation point, calling attention to just how goddamn ridiculous this concept is. It’s no secret MySpace isn’t exactly the belle of the social networking ball anymore, and as such they’re losing a ton of revenue. Hell, their ad deal with Google is up for renewal next month, and something tells me Google isn’t quite going to pay the $900 million they did last time. So on the one hand, I guess it’s understandable that MySpace would be scrambling to think of new ways to generate some scratch. But charging…

This is absolutely the coolest thing I’ve seen in days and I’m not letting you get away without seeing it. I kinda like how Super Mario Bros. is one of those things that gets used as a benchmark and/or guinea pig to test out other technologies and whatnot. What you see before you is no exception. As part of his thesis at the Hannover University of Applied Science and Art, student Andreas Heikaus has put SMB to the test in an exploration of applying familiar computer graphics to a new environment. I’m a LITTLE disappointed that he uses the warp zones and whatnot, and that the previous level gets deleted…

Today’s big thing: Google’s lights are back on in China after a longer-than-was-really-necessary-you-guys bruhaha that saw Google damn near shut down Chinese operations entirely. Long story short, Google has promised to end its auto-redirect from google.cn to the unfiltered Hong Kong site, which Chinese government officials have deemed ‘unacceptable’. At the time of writing it does still redirect (save for, like, text translation), so maybe that hasn’t gone through yet. But the good news for Google and millions of its Chinese users is that the government has approved Google’s application…

Concerned less with bettering mankind so much as revelry, the team at Willow Garage has spent what I can only assume must’ve been an enormous amount of effort creating a ‘beer-bot’: a robot that – surprise! – goes to the fridge and grabs you a beer. ‘Now, Ty,’ you say, ‘Ty, this beer-bot business is old hat!’ I hear that. Musty, crumpled stovepipe hat. Every time you turn around, everyone and their grandma is building a beer-bot. The market saturation of beer-bots is just getting ridiculous. Gee whiz, guys. Slow down. But this isn’t grandma’s beer-bot. The PR2 (Willow couldn’t be arsed to give the…