Petaminx Dodecahedral Puzzle Will Drive You Insane

If you’re the kind of person who has trouble solving a Rubik’s Cute, then the following will probably turn you quite mad.

The Petaminx

The Petaminx is a face turning dodecahedral puzzle with 4 slices per face. It was completely custom-made by Jason Smith of PuzzleForge.com, who will be putting it for auction later this week on eBay. The Petaminx features 975 individual parts, without counting the 1,212 stickers that all had to be manually placed one by one. Overall, the puzzle took around 75 hours to create and assemble. Solving it will, of course, bring the Cenobites into our realm.

[Via OhGizmo]

Likaholix: new recommendation engine enters private beta

Two former Google employees, Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, have launched a private beta of a new recommendation site named likaholix.  You can request a beta account from the site.  It took 14 minutes for my invitation to hit my GMail account.

The sign up process was quick and easy, and the site is pretty responsive — much better than a lot of other beta releases I’ve seen, but then again “beta” seems to mean “production” in Googlespeak.

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HOW TO: Get back in Windows after losing your password

Lost your Windows Password?Hey there GAS readers! AskTheAdmin here guest posting on how to recover YOUR Windows password. This is not meant as a how-to hack your friend, girlfriend, dog or lover’s computer, but as a way to get you back into your Windows machine as a last resort. If you have another username and password on this machine, use that. If you can have your administrator reset it for you – do that. But when all else fails there is always a back door!

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Feature: The Boiler Bar – Like Thirsty Moths to a Flame

By Brian Boyko
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

They call it “oilpunk” – a sort of “post-Steampunk” aesthetic, championing the designs of the early modern era (around 1920s/1930s) rather than the Victorian attributes of the “steampunker.”

And what better homage to the era of the speakeasy than a bar?

Yes, the fireballs generated by the twin propane-fueled tanks on either side are impressive, but let’s not kid ourselves, what makes the “Boiler Bar” beautiful is that it serves alcohol. As inventor and blacksmith Jon Sarriugarte explains in the video below, you can pretty much set up anywhere, and draw in revelers by setting off a few fireblasts, and then when they get there, there’s a bar. It’s an “instant party” machine, really.

If that wasn’t enough, when it’s too light during the day to really make impressive fireballs, the Boiler Bar also has a theatre with 1920’s vaudeville themed performances.

If you’d like to see the video in full HD resolution, just hit this link, which will take you to the video’s high-def page on YouTube.

Though it wasn’t available at the time this video was filmed, Sarriugarte also has a device that uses 15,000 volts of electrical current to instantly age whiskey thirty years. It does, however, have the side effect that the whiskey then catches on fire.

If you’d like to get more information on Jon Sarriugarte’s other works, check out formandreform.com.

Oh, one last thing. If you’ve got $1200, you can rent the Boiler Bar yourself for a night…

Other installments of Crazy Inventions and Crazy Inventors:

[Picture Source: Make]

A Vision of the Future by Microsoft

This video, which shows what Microsoft thinks await us in the next decade, was presented a few days ago by Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop at the Wharton Business Conference.

Now a lot of you will probably think that the presentation is nothing but eye candy, but in this case, I disagree. I really do think that we will be seeing this kind of technology in the next 10 to 20 years. It may not exclusively be developed by our friends at Redmond, but I’m sure they’ll introduce several products that could fit in what you just saw. I mean, they’ve already started! Just look at what they’ve done with Surface. Everything you’ve seen in the video was based around the same concept: A miniaturized version of a multi-touch table.

[Via VentureBeat]