I've had the Sonacom Experience site on my list of things to blog about for a long time, but could never really figure out how to describe it. It appears to be a front-end for a French design and production firm's website.

The site is a Flash-based web toy, where you click on floating globes to unleash visuals and sound stored inside of them. You can control the color of the globes, and the colors match up with feelings or themes. For example, red is Aggression, purple is Vibration, and blue is Imagination.

Sonacom Experience is intriguing and fun to play with, but there isn't really a point. And maybe the lack of a point is the point - Sonacom is more of an art installation than it is game or application, sort of a "look what we can do". It has the same addictive quality as popping bubble wrap; I keep thinking I'll just burst one more globe to see what's inside, then close the site. Just. One. More.

Ninja Roll 2 is a simple ball rolling game that has you drawing a line for your "ninja ball" to roll and bounce down. The goal of the game is to collect all of the stars on each level.

The game has a very sparse look, and the physics of the ball remind me of the superballs that I played with as a kid. It's actually frustrating how bouncy this ball is. Sometimes it's hard to maintain momentum because just as your ball is about to ascend a ramp, it hits some tiny bump and bounces off in an unexpected direction. To be fair, part of the fun of playing Ninja Roll 2 is watching the ball make crazy moves.

Some of the levels appear physically impossible at first, but that's where your ball's incredible bounciness becomes an advantage - you can make it perform moves that you would have never thought possible.

My only gripe with the game is that for some reason it was choppy to the point of almost being unplayable when running in Firefox, but in Safari it is perfectly smooth.

Downhill Snowboard is a physics game with a human dimension. You play the part of the snowboarder, and your job is to successfully navigate down the hill, while pulling off tricks over the various jumps you encounter along the way.

The game is very similar to side-scrolling car-based games that require you to maneuver over jumps and other obstacles, but in this case you do not have an engine, and must rely on the power of gravity to pull you down the hill.

My favorite part of Download Snowboard is how your character moves on the screen. Though you only have very limited control over his movements, somehow the developer managed to make the snowboarder's body move in a relatively natural way, particularly with how the knees flex when landing from a jump.

As mentioned, the controls in the game are limited; you can lean your snowboarder back and forth, jump, and grab either the front or back of the board while in the air. While the graphics in the game are simple and repetitive, there are a wide variety of courses ranging from shallow and long high-speed courses to steep and short hazard-ridden courses.

Neon Maze is a fresh take on maze games. The goal of the game is to reach the goal square with your spaceship, but to do so you need to navigate through a maze of variously colored neon barriers. The only way to pass through a barrier is to change your spaceship to the same color as the barrier, which can be done by passing over color pods spread throughout each level.

The puzzles are challenging, but not too challenging, and the way the spaceship moves when controlled with the mouse has a nice, springy quality, yet it responds in a very snappy fashion.

The game becomes more complicated once you advance to a certain point, and the neon bars become "locked". To open them, you need to have the key of the same color, which you can only get if your spaceship is that same color. If it sounds complicated, it can be, but it's also a good way of twisting things yet one more time to keep the challenge level up.

Try as I might, I just can't get away from the physics games. There's something so compelling about applying real-world movement to a game, even if sometimes the physics are only approximations of reality.

Collider, the game I'm into currently, does a fairly good job of approximating balls rolling down ramps and chutes, and otherwise reacting to gravity. There are three types of balls in Collider: positively charged balls, negatively charged balls, and neutral balls. The goal of the game is to get all of the positive and negative balls to touch, causing them to explode and disappear.

Complicating matters is that when two similarly-charged balls touch, they combine into a larger ball. Conversely, if a large positive ball touches a smaller negative one, the negative ball disappears, and the larger positive ball shrinks proportionally.

Your only control in Collider is to place the balls on the playing board, but you are limited by the "radiation line", which is at different heights on different levels. Once you choose positions for all of the balls (and you have to place all of them), you can press the Play button and watch the level unfold.

The first few are easy, but the difficulty ramps up fairly quickly. Luckily (for some), solutions are available for any level if you get stuck - just click the I button on at the top-left of the window, and amongst the options is a Show Solution link.

Kinetikz is a simple shooting physics game where the goal is to shoot discs at a ball and manage to move the ball into the goal tile. Getting the ball into the goal replenishes your limited supply of discs, while running out of discs ends the game.

Figuring the angles is reminiscent of playing billiards, but the variously shaped game boards coupled with hazards like small blocks and levers complicates matters somewhat. The levers in particular add an element of interest to the game; some levers are unpowered, and can be moved by shooting discs at them, while others are motorized and move of their own accord.

If I had to describe a recipe for this game, I'd go with one part playing the angles, one part timing, and one part frustration when the first two parts don't work out perfectly. That being said, this game certainly has a challenging, addicting quality.

While pretty graphics are nice, my favorite time wasters are those that have a great concept, and I'm particularly partial to physics games. Color Infection is definitely one of my favorites.

I was therefore very happy to discover that there is now a sequel, Color Infection 2. The concept and game-play is all the same, but this iteration is a little more challenging. In particular, the later levels start using multiple weighted platforms that have you counting on your fingers and backwards trying to make sense of it all.

If that sort of thing is your bag, you're going to like Color Infection 2. If not, I find I keep coming back to Learn to Fly; maybe that would be a good alternative.

Chain of Fire is a strange time waster for me to write about, because the goal of the game is to kill all of the people on each level by burning them alive. It's sadistic, sociopathic, and yet somehow compelling. I sort of wish the game had a different theme, since the gameplay could have been exactly the same if the game was focused around infection, or some other form of passing along a state.

In any event, it's not - it's all about burning cute little stick figures that are running around with no hope for survival.

Game play is simple - you can choose a person to set on fire by clicking them, then clicking the direction you want them to run once they have ignited. Any person or tree that person comes in contact with will then also ignite. The goal is to burn as many people or trees as possible with the least number of clicks to meet the point value listed for each level. Typically this means you must burn everything in one or two ignitions.

There's so little interaction after lighting off your first man, yet the game is sort of mesmerizing in the same way that the simple computer game Life is mesmerizing to watch play out. The main difference, of course, is that while in Life the goal is to preserve life as long as possible, in Chain of Fire it's the opposite.

Redstar Fall is a game that falls into the "balancing games" genre of time waster. The goal of the game is to carefully lower the red star onto the main platform without letting it fall off the side, by carefully removing the blocks that are supporting it in the correct order.

The game is definitely a no-frills affair, with an almost spartan look, but that's not a bad thing; the game play is very solid, and while the graphics aren't stunning, they're very functional and don't detract from the game's fun in the slightest.

Some of the later levels include blocks that can't be removed, exploding blocks, and multiple platforms, only one of which is the correct one.

The game is fairly quick to complete, making it a good choice if you're looking for something on your coffee break that isn't going to tempt you to continue playing into work time.

There's a certain style of time waster that I find incredibly addicting - those in the "see how far it can fly" genre. Two previous favorites include Shopping Cart Hero, and Air Voltare. If you like those games, you're going to love today's Time Waster, Learn to Fly.

In Learn to Fly, you play the part of a penguin who is not happy to be a flightless bird. Your job is to research the best way to achieve flight, which in this case involves sliding down a ramp and flying through the air with a glider strapped to your back and rockets strapped to your sides.

There are 4 increasingly harder levels to master in Learn to Fly, but as you go you can purchase power-ups for your equipment and your abilities. To beat each level, you must exceed set goals for height, distance traveled, length of flight, and top speed. To win the game you must travel at least 6000 feet, and you then receive a rating based on how many "days" (test flights) it takes you to get there. It took me 25 days to achieve flight.

I have to say, this sort of time waster often does not have an end goal, but rather continues on ad infinitum. It's nice to know that once you hit the 6000 foot mark, you've won the game. How many days will it take you to achieve flight?

Here's another physics-based time waster. In Roly-poly Cannon your job is to kill all the cute little Roly-polies, using as few exploding cannonballs as you can. The levels include exploding TNT barrels, moveable objects, and various materials like wood, rock, ice, and metal.

This one is on the brain-dead side as far as physics puzzle games go. If you get frustrated, just start shooting a stream of cannonballs, and in all likelihood you will succeed. Interestingly, it seems that if you shoot enough cannonballs unsuccessfully, you will be mercifully taken to the next level. This one is perfect for when you're up late at night and you don't know why but you can't or don't feel like going to bed but you can't really think anymore and everything's just getting to you and nothing's going your way and you just want to do something mindless and killing cute little characters makes you feel powerful in your pathetic and meaningless dreary existence. Or is that just me?

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

If you've ever played the classic game Pipes, then Colourshift will probably feel pretty familiar to you. In Colourshift you are presented with an invisible grid of squares that may contain various pieces. the idea is to pipe the correct colors from their color source (the colored squares) to their lights (the colored circles) of the same color.

Though the game is conceptually very simple, gameplay can get very complex very quickly. For example, there are times where you'll need to mix different colors into the same circuit to create new colors - for example, blue and red combining to make magenta to light a magenta light.

Making matters worse is that on later levels the concept of wrapping through the edges of the screen and dummy pieces (ones that don't need to be used at all) combine to make solving the puzzle even more confusing.

Colourshift is a nice take on a tried-and-true game concept that you can use to give your brain a little workout.

Tonematrix by AM Laboratory is a very fun and easy-to-use music sequencing toy. It's a 16 x 16 grid of grey boxes, and clicking in a box will turn it on. Boxes that have been turned on go white, and you will quickly see that each line of boxes has its own individual tone.

You can very quickly just click and drag all over the place to get a fast sense of how Tonematrix works, but the fun is in actually arranging your notes in a way that makes sense. Luckily, it's easy to make music that sounds good because rather than using a major or chromatic scale, Tonematrix uses a pentatonic scale. You may have noticed that if you play only the black keys on a piano, it's fairly easy to play something that sounds nice - that's because together the black keys make up a pentatonic scale.

What fun is making some music if you can't save it and come back to it? The makers of Tonematrix agreed, and built in the ability to copy and paste a series of comma-separated numbers representing each individual composition. For example, if you copy the following sequence of numbers and right-click on Tonematrix and choose "Paste", you will hear my first composition with Tonematrix:

36896,32772,33280,36868,32896,32772,33280,32788,16420,32768,33286,8192,32900,32768,16966,32768

Paste your favorite composition in the comments, and let's have some fun!

Last week, a Slashdot commenter took Microsoft's Family Safety for a test drive. After he had it installed, strangely, he wasn't able to visit Google. He then tried to add an exception to allow Google, and still couldn't get the site to load. Finally, he disabled the filter entirely, and was able to load the page again.

Over at The Register, they contacted Microsoft about the issue and were told that Google falls into a group of "unclassified portal pages" along with sites like MSN and Yahoo. According to the Register, that means you have to opt in to access Google if you're running Family Safety.

Not so fast, fellas.

Sure, it's easy to point the finger at evil old Microsoft when something like this comes up, but it's best to do a little testing first. On my own laptops (and I tested on two separate machines), a fresh install of Family Safety with all settings left untouched did not, in fact, block Google - as you can see in the screenshot above. It was even polite enough to leave the AdSense ad in place.

Sure, it's possible that the Live team worked a little behind-the-scenes magic in the past few days and corrected an error, but it's also possible that this was a coincidental occurrence. A weird one, I'll grant, but I've seen plenty of computer problems that were far more bizarre.

Got a minute? Try it yourself and report back! Yes, unfortunately you will have to put up with the Live installer.