Featured Site: Kaneva.com
3D Chat Room and Online Community

In the world of chat communities online, it is hard to decide which of those communities is the best; keeping in mind that which is actually best, may be different than the most popular (at least at the moment). The bottom line is that most of us go to these sites to find friends - old and new, to network, and even to find love.

At www.kaneva.com, the norm of the typical online community is offered, but with so much more. As the first to take social networking, shared media, and collaborative online communities into a 3 rd dimension virtual world, the possibilities at Kaneva are endless. This 3D chat room is unlike any of the competition currently online today. The mission of Kaneva is one of establishing meaningful and real connections with others, and even going beyond the status quo by offering an online avatar maker and even free online Internet games. The online avatar maker gives those in the community an opportunity to express themselves through the avatar they create, showing their creativity and some of their character. The free online Internet games add another dimension to the service, unlike many of the competitors can offer their members today.

Virtual world websites are quickly becoming a phenomenon in themselves and having an opportunity on the ground floor to watch is priceless. Nowhere else can you find a 3D online community. To find out more, go to www.kaneva.com for additional details. Membership to this great site is free, but you must sign up in order to receive all of the amenities that Kaneva has to offer.

Daniel Kunkle can solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle in 26 moves. Or at least his computer can.

Kunkle, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, has proved that 26 moves are enough to solve any Rubik's Cube puzzle, no matter how scrambled. That's one move below the previous record. In the process of cracking the cube, he developed algorithms that can be useful for problems as disparate as scheduling air flights and determining how proteins will fold.

Rubik's Cube puzzle has approximately 43 quintillion possible configurations. Even a supercomputer can't search through every possible configuration to find the quickest way to unscramble a given starting arrangement in a reasonable amount of time. So Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed some clever mathematical and computational strategies to make the puzzle more manageable.

Read the full article Cracking the Rubix Cube Puzzle

Added a new section for web toys. These will generally be silly fun toys you can play with on the web.

The first toy is Upside down text

¿sǝop ʇı ʇɐɥʍ ssǝnb noʎ uɐɔ

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the classic Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom text adventure game the BBC (British Broadcasting Service) has put together a wonderful re-creation of the game using Flash. This version has added quality illustrations to the original text adventure.

The game, originally published in 1984, contains rare writing by the author and is - in Adams' words - "full of extraordinary ways of dying".

Users can play a number of characters from the book, collect over 40 items and read dozens of Hitchhiker's Guide entries.

The new version of the game will be illustrated by Rod Lord, who won a BAFTA for his graphics for the original Hitchhiker TV series

If you are interested in learning more about Douglas Adams visit his web site www.douglasadams.com

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CartoonDollEmporium.com is the home of online Dress Up Games [NOTE: link goes to site homepage] These games are the digital version of the paper dolls that my sister used to play with so much.

There are over 750 hand-drawn dress up dolls to choose from and thousands of clothing pieces. This means there are literally millions of combinations to choose from. The dolls are categorized making it easy to find which doll you want to dress up.

The doll in the top left of this article is an example of anyone can create. It is easy you just select the doll and then drag and drop the clothes and accessories on to the doll. No fuss no muss and best yet... no paper cuts!

Some of the categories are:

• Celebrity - Paris Hilton, Linsdey Lohan, Britney Spears and more.
• Political - Hillary Clinton, Rudy Guiliani and more.
• Characters - Harry Potter, Hannah Montanna, Yoda and more

The site also has chat forums for displaying your creations. One of the forms is dedicated to best dressed doll contests that you can enter and win real money!

CartoonDollEmporium.com is a carefully monitored environment that employs real, 24-hour-per-day, 7-day-per-week moderators, as well as automated scripts prepare to ensure the site remains a kid friendly save haven on the intent that mon and dad can feel save letting them visit.

Here is a song to play for when you play Sudoku Funny as heck but now I can not get the song out of my head :)

Dice Wars is a unique new turn-based strategy game. Using nothing but dice and a randomly generated territory map made of hexagons, the game is similar in gameplay to that of the board game, Risk, though much simpler and quicker to play. The objective is to conquer all territories and eliminate all your opponents by attacking them with dice.

The single-player game may be played with up to seven computer opponents. Simply choose a number and let the game begin. You always play as violet.

Each turn you may attack any opponent's territory from one of your adjacent territories as long as your territory has more than one die on it. You may attack as many territories as you wish. Your turn ends when you click the "End Turn" button.

he rules of combat between two adjacent territories are simple. All dice on the attacking territory are thrown and the total number of pips are added and compared against the total of throwing all dice from the defending territory. If the attacker's total is greater than the defender's, all attacking dice (minus one) move onto the defender's territory capturing it. The defender dice for that territory are eliminated. If the defender's total is greater than or equal to the attacker's total, the attacker loses all but one die for that territory.

No movement of dice is allowed between territories other than by attacking as noted above. At the conclusion of each turn, the greatest number of adjoining territories you have is calculated, and you are awarded a bonus of that number of dice. They are then automatically and randomly placed throughout all of your territories, up to a maximum of eight dice on a single territory.

Dicewars is both familiar and unique. It is amazingly simple to pick-up and play and yet difficult to master. The game relies heavily on the luck of the dice and yet there are definite strategies the more you play that will counter those seemingly random odds.

The game moves pretty quickly, so it may take a game or two to get used to. But play through a couple of games and you'll likely be hooked as I am.

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I just got a Nintendo Wii the other day. It is the most innovative game console that has come out since Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) The Wii joysticks are instantly intuitively familiar. It brings the game room out of the youg male teenager demographic and plops it smack square in the middle of the family room.

Since my teenage years are quite far behind me I need a little help to get past some of the harder parts of the games I bought. A simple google search for Wii Game Cheats and I found www.wiigamecheats.com which has both cheat codes and game guides for several of the Wii games out there.

The cheat section has a bunch of secret backdoor codes to get infite lives, powerups, god-mode and so on. Being able to start on any level on Far Cry Vengeance saved my sanity since going back to level one level over and over was driving me insane.

The guide section features several game guides that will walk you through some of the harder parts of games (if not the entire game) Their Zelda Twilight Princess Game Guide helped get me unstuck a few times. I'm not sure if I could have completed the game with out it.

A highlight of this site is that rather than just reading about the games you can actually watch videos instead. How easy can that be! Being able to watch how to bowl a 300 on the Nintendo Wii really improved my game. I have not been able to quite match that feat but I have come close on a few occasion. It is certainly a goal to shoot for.

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Play89.com is a place to play Online Pool
Play 89 features online version of 8-ball pool. They plan on releasing 9-ball and snooker pool in the near future.

The software is a windows download. The download does not contain any adware junk which is a no brainer in my opinion. I have played on other sites that use java/flash applets to do the same thing and the native software operates much more seamlessly.

One of the distinguishing features of this site is that you can play for real money in addition to playing for fun. Ironically this is not considered gambling as pool is considered a game of skill rather than a game of chance.

I was pretty impressed with how realistic software is. The cue ball bounces off the rails with a softer bounce than hitting the other balls on the table. You can also add english (ie spin) when making your shot - which is something I could never get right on a real pool table.

A big draw of Play89 is daily and monthly pool tournaments. There are small sit and go tournaments with as few as four people that can take about an hour to play. The tournaments scale up to huge tournaments with hundreds of contestants that can take the entire day to play.

Play89 is available in 15 or so languages including French, German, Italian, Russian and more. This helps insure that there are a steady stream of players to play with from all over the world.

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BackgammonMasters.com has released a second installment of their tiger mascot Jean-Claude.

Jean-Claude is a little fuzzy on the details of the battle of Barbarossa. However his mastery of backgammon strategy and philosophy will give you masterful insights into backgammon a deceptively simple game which masks it's deep underlying strategies. In this segment Jean-Claude teaches us the value of persistence in both backgammon and life.

BackgammonMasters is positioning Jean-Clause an unforgettable spokesman for the backgammon world. The first Jean-Claude clip was warmly received. This was helped by offering prizes for answering trivia questions.

To view all the Jean-Claude videos visit http://www.backgammonmasters.com/jc-barbarossa.html

If backgammon is your game then BackammonMasters.com for their very large tournaments which are held frequently. The cash prize promotions are just icing on the cake!

BackgammonMasters is also expanding their game selection To Perudi (a Spanish dice game), Poker and Blackjack (which is due in May) All the games are available from a single all in one game lobby which is quite convenient. It nice to have some other games to play for when you get burnt out of a particaular game.

If you have not played backgammon in a while you can brush up at Gammonish.com a comprehensive backgammon resource and information site. It is a great place to brush up on your backgammon basics and strategy. The players on backgammon are generally playing at a much higher level than your average player.