plumbing

Rotate and reorient pipes to solve the plumbing puzzle

In Plumber for Android, your job is to rotate and reorient pipes in order to get a water line to flow correctly. It's simple to play, but challenging to complete.

To play, just tap a pipe to rotate it. Each level is filled with disconnected pipes scattered across your screen, so in most cases, you'll have to tap away at dozens of pipes in order to create a continuous line. And to make things a bit more challenging, not all pipes are used to solve each level, which can leave you concentrating on a bunch of useless plumbing … Read more

The most important open-source projects...to Google

Chris Dibona, head of Google's open source program office, sat down to talk with CNET's Stephen Shankland. In the course of that interview, Chris provided great insight into how Google views open source and contributes back to the various communities from which it derives benefit.

However, it was this response to Stephen's question - "What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?" - that I found fascinating:

The kernel, compilers--GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us....Java is very important to us, and that's become open-source now. We have some … Read more

A toilet for Inspector Gadget

Did you know the average person spends 11,862 hours out of his or her lifetime in the bathroom? That's equal to 1 year, 4 months and 5 days in what's usually a boring room, absent comforts like TiVo, video games and a stocked fridge.

Roto-Rooter is coming to the rescue! (Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing it out.) North America's largest provider of plumbing and drain-cleaning services is offering an online sweepstakes for its "Pimped Out John," a bathroom throne for the gadget junkie.

The fully loaded Kohler commode comes with a Philips 20-inch LCD … Read more

Try before you buy, the 20-key keyboard

The problem with trying to sell a new keyboard to the world is that consumers have to learn to use it. FrogPad, which makes a kooky one-handed, minimal-key keyboard, will try to get around that through an alliance with German software developer Giletech.

Giletech has developed a tutorial that lets you learn how to use the FrogPad in a few hours. It also serves as a simulator so you can effectively test out what it would be like to type on a FrogPad before you plunk down $120 to $150 for one of the keyboards.

I actually tried one out … Read more