broken

Where exactly do most people accidentally ruin their iPhone?

If you guessed the toilet you'd be wrong, says a new survey.

According to device warranty provider Squaretrade, most people -- 21 percent to be precise -- damaged their device in the kitchen. The runner up, at 18 percent, is the living room, followed by the bathroom at 16 percent.

All in all, 51 percent of iPhone accidents happen inside the house instead of out in the wild, says Squaretrade. To find that out, the company tapped Survey Sampling International and asked 35 questions to 2,004 iPhone owners in … Read more

Ouch.

Is there a worse feeling than seeing your iPod Touch smack the ground and hearing the unmistakable crack of glass?

Just one: picking up the iPod and realizing the screen is shattered top-to-bottom. That was one expensive attack of gravity.

This happened to my daughter not long ago, resulting in a fourth-gen iPod Touch that, remarkably, still worked, but really wasn't usable anymore owing to the spider web of cracked glass.

As the household cheapskate, I figured it would be cheaper to repair the unit than buy a new one. After all, a current 32GB iPod Touch sells … Read more

Australia is know for big spiders, big kangaroo feet, and, now, big Legos. Broken Hill in New South Wales is sometimes referred to as the capital of the Outback. It is home to around 19,000 people and a temporary forest of massive Legos.

The Lego installation consists of 15 pine trees and flower sets that are 66 times bigger than a standard Lego. The iconic designs are installed in a flat area of red earth around an old hotel. … Read more

I've long been a believer in cases to protect cell phones. Too bad I didn't practice what I preach.

I picked up a Galaxy Nexus at the end of December. Within a week, it leapt from my shirt pocket to a Linoleum floor by way of a porcelain sink edge. The result: the shiny new flagship Android now has a display with two shatter points and a spiderweb of cracks.

Happily, everything else about the phone still works, and the cracks are thin enough that the display is still easily used. Sometimes letters are malformed when I'm reading books, and sometimes the rough patches are distracting to the touch on the edges.

But it's definitely a problem that's impossible to ignore. … Read more

As anyone who has broken a bone knows, keeping up with physical therapy post-injury can be painful and annoying, and without a clear way to gauge progress, the regimen is as tempting to avoid as a bland diet.

Recent Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design graduate Pedro Nakazato Andrade hopes to keep people motivated--and thus improve recovery time--via a prototype cast that employs electromyographic sensors, which measure the electrical activity produced by a muscle when it moves.

Called "Bones," his cast prototype can keep a running tally of how much the injured area is being exercised.

The idea behind the design is rooted in the idea behind weight loss programs such as Weight Watchers: people who can track their progress using real, hard data are more likely to stay motivated and keep doing what they have been told to do.… Read more

We install and uninstall a lot of software, so it's no surprise that our Start menu gets cluttered with broken shortcuts pretty regularly. Thus we were the perfect test subject for Broken Shortcut Fixer, a program that claims to locate broken shortcuts, repair them if possible, and delete them if not. Although Broken Shortcut Fixer didn't knock our socks off, it did seem to do its job as described--at least part of it.

The program's interface is plain and easy to navigate; from a drop-down menu you select the drive you want to scan, and then it'… Read more

What would you put in the Declaration of Independence if it was being written today?

That's an exercise that you and 499 other people could try out if you're one of the lucky few that will be chosen to take part in game designer Jane McGonigal's 100th anniversary ode to the New York Public Library, "Find the Future."

On May 20, 500 hand-selected gamers will get to spend the night in the world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building--otherwise known as the main branch of the city's library system--immersing themselves in some of the most special … Read more

Until a couple of years ago, the idea that games could make people's lives better was heresy. Everyone knew that games were a massive waste of time and that, if anything, they were harming those who played them the most.

But then word began to spread of new research that showed just the opposite: that games, and playing games, could have a positive impact on people. And while there was still plenty of skepticism, the woman behind the research, well-known game designer Jane McGonigal, began to attract a lot of attention with her new claims. Especially the idea that … Read more

BLT--Better Link Tester, formerly known as Braxton's Link Tester--is a fast, simple Web-development utility for verifying the quality of links (and avoiding "the dreaded 404 error").

Fitting for such a narrow-purpose app, BLT has an easy-to-use, streamlined interface: you just enter a location URL in the top of BLT's main window (by browsing, typing, or pasting), then hit Return. BLT will then automatically start testing links for that location, including in subdirectories and even within JavaScript. The results are shown in a long list (with status, from, to, and line number data), and a set of … Read more