The Jigazo puzzle is both a simple and brilliant idea. A series of 300 completely compatible puzzle pieces, each represents a slightly different tone and is marked with a tiny icon. You take a photo and upload it to Jigazo, and Jigazo gives you a paint-by-numbers style icon map. Position each piece in accordance to the map, and presto, you've got yourself a customized puzzle.

The purchase would be an import, but we spotted the Jigazo on one retailer for about $50. [Ameba via Slashdot]

The box has a button and an LCD display on the lid. When you press the button, the display will show you how far, in kilometers, you are from the goal location. It doesn't give you directions, so you need to triangulate where you're supposed to go via trial and error. Oh, and you can only press the button 50 times.

There's a pretty sweet disguised back door built-in as well, just in case the battery dies or the GPS unit fails.

Spoiler: the box only opens when brought to Île-de-Bréhat, France. As for what's inside?

With all the electronics, there wasn't much room inside the box for anything too substantial. I put in a few local (US) gift cards to entice them to visit soon, a set of Kazuo Ishiguro audio books (on a USB key), and an overly sentimental card. And of course, as I pointed out in the card, if either of them fancies doing a little Arduino development, there's a perfectly good Duemilanove to play with, not to mention an LCD, a servo, and a GPS.

I guess the puzzle itself is present enough, really. Pretty cool stuff, no? [Arduiniana via Make]

Granted, this thing is milled from a solid block of metal and "precisely engineered for smooth mechanical manipulation," so it should be well made. But $120? That's a little too much for me to be spending on something I will get frustrated with inside 30 minutes and never pick up again. However, if you are up to the challenge, the Revomaze comes in three separate versions based on difficulty and requires users to navigate "an internal labyrinth full of dead ends, traps, and one way paths" in order to remove the metal core and solve the puzzle.

If you succeed, a code will be imprinted on the core that you can register on the manufacturer's website. Winners that appear on the leaderboard will be invited to participate in a live competition with thousands of dollars in prizes at stake. Yeah, good luck with that. [ThinkGeek via The Automata Blog via BBG]

Bram Cohen, known as the dude who allowed you to download cams of shit movies you don't want to pay for, has created Bram's Cube. It's basically like a Rubik's Cube, but it has gears inside that add another layer of difficulty. So much difficulty that I wouldn't even want to attempt this thing. It just looks too frustrating for words. But hey, if you're a glutton for punishment and feel the need to be taken down a peg or two, go for it. [Shapeways via Today's Big Thing]

"Mnemosyne," in Greek mythology, is the personification of memory, which you of course did not know, and that's why you'll never be able to afford this USB drive. We sort of understand the impulse to create a physical barrier to accessing data, but one of the many things about this product that's puzzling is that reassembling the puzzle is just as difficult as unraveling it in the first place.

Mnemosyne wants to emphasize the "value of memory," so maybe the value of money doesn't really show up on their radar. [Mnemosyne via Crunchgear]

The answer, even if you do attempt every possible combination, is no. But according to Microsoft Research, there's a way to "solve" the puzzle to within 1%, even if the board had 1000000 bulbs. The funny thing is, the algorithmic solution to the puzzle (originally built by Elwyn Berlekamp in 1960) can be used as a way to bypass brute-force computing in solving problems. The researchers at Microsoft are more interested in that whole thing, but I'm more interested in how some guy got to build this nice electronic board game as part of his day job, just for Show and Tell. Way to go, dude.

Here are the rules, in case you want to make your own home version (Phil Torrone, do you hear me?):

Update: This is also known as the Gale-Berlekamp lightbulb game—I'd hate for poor Mr. or Ms. or Dr. Gale to get left out of the credit. Also, I finally caught up on my Fringe from a few weeks back, and you commenters are totally right. Freaky. Wish I'd seen it beforehand.

Microsoft's TechFest is an annual jamboree of innovation and gadgetry from Microsoft Research, which means that while none of it is coming out as is in products in the near future, it's essentially what product development people use to add cool stuff to their actual releases. I'm here all day.

The TouchCube works just like its more antiquated brethren, but instead of grinding the actual spinning cogs (manual labor is for suckers!), a simple swipe of the finger in a straight line or an 'L' shape (for rotations) does the trick. There's an accelerometer built in that ensures only the upwards-facing surfaces respond to your touch, so you can still hold the thing.

And it wouldn't be a touchscreen Rubik's cube without a few improvements: namely, the TouchCube can solve itself as you watch, and even teach you, step by step, how to do it. So you can be one of those kids we all marveled at in school (Ben Shepple, this one's for you) who could solve a cube in a matter of seconds. Built-in memory will also save your cube's state if you need to take a break.

Techno Source has spent three years hard at work in their underground puzzle and wonderment factory to bring us the TouchCube, and now, behold, it can be ours. For $150 this fall. We'll try to do some hands-on solving later this week at NYC's massive Toy Fair-be on the lookout for more.

The new puzzle, called Rubik 360, is set for an official unveiling at the German toy industry fair on February 5. Like the original, the premise is simple. It's the execution that's going to cause people to lose 26 years of their lives trying to solve it.

Basically, players must get a number of colored balls from a clear inner sphere into their matching slots on the outer sphere. You'll do this by shaking the balls through a middle sphere that has only two holes.

Said Professor Rubik himself on the new puzzle that bears his name: "I feel that the 360 is one of the most innovative and exciting puzzles we’ve developed since the Cube – adopting elements of my original design, challenging the solver to use skill, dexterity and logic."

Quick question, since I'm still a bit hazy on how this works: Could this be the first Rubik puzzle that solves itself during the shipping process to retailers? [Sunday Telegraph]

After 26 years of trying, Parker finally managed to solve the Rubik's cube that confounded him. Now, you may be thinking that he only occasionally picked up the puzzle, slowing his progress—but the reality is that he obsessed over it day after day, night after night.

'I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally solve it,' the 45-year-old from Portchester, Hampshire, said. 'It has driven me mad over the years – it felt like it had taken over my life. I have missed important events to stay in and solve it and I would lie awake at night thinking about it.

'I have had wrist and back problems from spending hours on it but it was all worth it. When I clicked that last bit into place and each face was a solid color, I wept.'

Seriously. His wife claimed that it was like three people were in their marriage. When she met him, he was already obsessed with the cube. And she still married him? What a saint.

Oh, and you know this is a record. A spokesman for the World Cube Association, said it was 'definitely the longest it has taken' to finish the cube. Now that is a true champion. [Metro]

That's right, the UK branch of the Mensa society for smarty pants has released a brain training alarm clock that combines groggyness, loud noses and puzzles (a winning combination). Here's how it works: when the alarm sounds, you will need to memorize and repeat a random sequence of colored lights on one of three difficulty levels. If you get the sequence wrong, or you are too slow, the alarm gets progressively louder until you get it right (or hurl it against a wall). If you are up to the challenge, the clock can be yours for about $41 shipped to the US. [eBay via Craziest Gadgets]

Part of the joy of the original was that you could twist and turn it with your fingers, and then heartily fling it out of the window when your frustration levels got too high, and still most likely fish it largely intact from your yard when you wanted to play it again. You can of course do that with this version, but I suspect its myriad of buttons (required to let you twizzle each virtual "segment" around) wouldn't survive the impact.

You can at least play a couple of other digital games on this: a kind of Russian roulette minehunter for multiple players, a tic-tac-toe game and what could turn out to be a pretty difficult Simon-like game. But in general—nah. Some classics should be left undigitized. [RandomGoodStuff]

Puzzle Table [Yanko]

On a related note; you know what really grinds my gears? The fact that I still have a rubik's cube sitting on my desk unfinished, but a 3-year-old can do it in 114 seconds. Am I doing something wrong, or is this just a superchild? Stupid kid and its stupid super smartness. –Travis Hudson

Product Page [Via Coolest-Gadgets]

Please, don't invite me to any parties where I must somehow solve a puzzle to get to the precious wine. Only the most sadistic hosts would do such a thing. Maybe this puzzle's alternate purpose would be to serve as a sobriety test, to be placed on bottle number three...? – Charlie White

Don't Break the Bottle: sobering parties everywhere [Sci Fi Tech]