Neocubes mini review

I can't remember what I did before I carried a Neocube around with me. I must have waited quietly at doctor's offices, staring blankly at the walls or perhaps skimming the ancient magazines. Now, I simply pull my Neocube out of my pocket and begin constructing a polyhedron. If I don't have long to wait, I'll wrap the chain of spheres into a solid tetra- or icosahedron. If the other waiters are glancing at watches and complaining about the wait, I'll attempt a modular dodecahedron or a wireframe truncated icosahedron. I can fight off boredom for hours when I have my Neocube with me.

However, I'm not the only one to enjoy playing with a Neocube. Every person to which I've shown my Neocube, from little kids to my own Grandpa, has been mesmerized. Some people make jewelry, some construct flat shapes, and some just like coiling the chain of magnets, but everybody enjoys playing with them. My extended family liked playing with my Neocube so much that I purchased a big batch for gifts.

Neocube is one of the best pocket-sized time-waster I've ever seen, comparing favorably in wait-time compression with the iPhone and iPod Touch. If you want to have a 'cube of your own (and send me some pocket change), you can buy one from Amazon for only $16 (at last check). Don't miss this deal!

NeoCubes: Best. Toy. Ever.

When I find something I like, I tell people about it. When I get payed for every person I convince to buy that something, I tell more people about it. For those two reasons, I want to tell you about NeoCubes, my new favorite time-wasting toy.

Each batch of NeoCubes includes 224 neodynium BBs and a faux velvet pouch. It's shockingly easy to lose track of time when you're playing with these addictive spheres. You can form them into anything: bands and rings, geometric shapes, flat patterns, or complex models. I've built a new model each time I've pulled them out of my pocket, and I'm not even close to the end of my creativity.

Here are a few of the models I built:

Eight-pointed star

Four-pointed star

Truncated octahedron

Truncated tetrahedron

Large bomb

Metal chu (my favorite)

I'm not the only one who enjoys them, either. After Christmas, I let a couple of my family members play with my set of 'cubes. Big mistake. After only a couple of minutes, even a close cousin would begin hunching over his 'cubes, casting suspicious glances at me, and mumbling to himself. Everybody came up with their own use for the NeoCubes: a cousin about my age used them to fashion herself bracelets and earings, but two younger cousins experimented with the interaction of rings of magnets on a smooth table. Even my seventy-nine-year-old grandfather enjoyed manipulating them with his fingers.

I carry my NeoCubes with me everywhere, pulling them out when my fingers become restless or when some metallic objects must be stuck together. Being a geek, both of these scenarios happen quite often.

You can buy a set of 224 NeoCubes for only $20 at Amazon. Compare that to about $70 if you purchase spherical magnets in bulk (I did). Buy some for you, your geeky friends, and everybody else you know and make me a rich man! If you're still not convinced, check out the demonstration video for the competing Buckyballs, but don't be fooled by the slick packaging and marketing. NeoCubes came out two years earlier, and they're $10 cheaper.

Google Trends: A powerful market analysis tool

It's not often that I find something to do that's both educational and incredibly addictive. However, Google Trends fits that description perfectly. I could spend hours scouring the data for market trends and checking the health of websites and industries. Essentially, this free web services gives anyone free access to the market data of the most widely used search engine in the world.

After spending only five minutes gazing at all the pretty graphs, I found an interesting trend. When I looked at the data for "nintendo wii", I noticed that the graph was on a general decreasing trend. I know that the Wii's popularity has steadily increased from its release, so I was puzzled by this result. However, a look at the graph for "wii" showed a more predictable upward trend. I believe that this incongruity between the search terms is caused by the public's increasing awareness of the Wii. As more and more people learn about the Wii, fewer and fewer use its full, formal name. Of course, this conclusion is strictly speculation, but it's an interesting theory, nonetheless.

Google Trends can turn anybody into a market analysis guru with access to possibly the largest consumer interest gauge in existence. You could use this service to pick which field of interest to study in, find the next big web service wave to ride, or pitch your web service to venture capitalists. However, one thing you won't find on Google Trends is this blog. It lives up to its name.

Social networking for lazy bums

Although I greatly enjoy software development, I don't enjoy researching of social bookmarking site interfaces just to let people share my blog's content. Luckily for me, I found AddThis, an incredibly easy-to-use social bookmark widget that's compatible with more services than I could possibly imagine. It's free to use, but you have to sign up for an account at AddThis.com before you can use it. Fortunately, that free account supposedly grants you access to analytics on who bookmarks your site and how (I haven't tried it out yet).

This free web service is an incredibly easy way to add social bookmarking to your site: I had it set up on my blog in about ten minutes. Now I've got more time to devote to real programming challenges!

I love Remember the Milk!

Remember the Milk is a free task-management web application. When you start it up, it presents you with a series of lists on which you can post tasks. You can organize your tasks with priority levels, due dates, and tags or throw 'em in a pile and use the search function to find what you're looking for. The entire service can be operated through the keyboard, which makes adding and managing tasks incredibly quick.

If you would like to have your tasks on all your calendars, you can thanks to RTM's stellar integration with Google Calendar, iGoogle, your Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone, Twitter, or even through a bookmarklet (you remember those, right?)

Probably the most surprising thing about RTM is its general applicability. I didn't think I had much use for a task manager, but now I use it constantly to keep track of my school assignments, my work projects, and whatever ideas I want to save for later. Soon, I plan to write a quick-and-dirty widget to display my list of ideas on this blog.

If you want to organize your life, or you just want to keep all your notes in one place, Remember the Milk is the web application for you. Find it at RememberTheMilk.com.

MediaConverter.org

I consider myself a blogger, so I feel entitled to recommend services I've found useful to my reader(s). The other day, I was trying to embed a video file in a Power Point presentation, but the file was in the wrong format: .avi. I looked around for a free video conversion program, but most looked really shady and full of spyware. On a whim, I searched "online video converter" and stumbled across Media Converter.

Media Converter is a free online tool that lets you upload a video from your hard drive or off the internet, convert it to the format of your choice, and download it to your computer free, without registering. It worked perfectly for my short video, and it didn't take very long, either. I would highly recommend this site to anybody who doesn't want to take a chance on a shady freeware video converter or doesn't have the computer muscle to convert a video. Try it out for yourself at http://www.mediaconverter.org/.