The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that.

In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without waking them up. If you wake them up, a wakefulness bar starts to drop, and if it reaches the bottom, you lose at that level. The more blocks that wake up, the faster the bar moves, until they settle into new positions and fall back asleep.

The challenge in the game comes from the fact that you can only remove blocks of the colors given on one of the two indicator cards at the bottom of the screen. When one of the colors is a block that is sitting on top of a pile, it's not a problem, but soon you'll run into a situation when the only block you can remove will dislodge a bunch of other blocks, waking them up.

Sleepy is a cleverly-designed game with lots of replay value, a perfect distraction for your coffee-break or lunch time. And the soundtrack is perfect if you've got insomnia - just play Sleepy for a little while and you'll be headed back to bed.

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.

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.

Typically, when you're playing a game where the object is to keep the board from filling up with pieces, it's vertical.

Being used to Tetris and all its variants, it took me a second to adjust to Gridshock, a game where you match and eliminate colored lights on a horizontal playing field. It's an easy game to get the hang of, but the lights pile up faster as the levels go on, and it's tough to avoid getting overwhelmed.

As in Tetris, you only get one color to work with at a time. Your job is to decide where to put it for maximum board-clearing effect. Any combo of 3 or 4 matching pieces will disappear, and they can be connected horizontally, vertically, or an L-shaped combination of the two.

A meter on the side that shows you when more lights are going to be unceremoniously dumped into your grid, but there's hardly time to pay attention to it.

There are a lot of different interfaces for creating and using color palettes, but ColoRotate may be the one with the coolest visuals. It plots your colors on a 3D diamond as you blend, tint and change hues to form a palette. More experienced designers may not find it useful, and may prefer something more straightforward. Beginners, on the other hand, might dig how easily you can make a decent palette with this tool.

There's also an entire "learn about color" section of the site, giving a good overview of the theory and science behind color and color combinations. Adobe CS4 users will be interested to know that a ColoRotate plugin is coming in the fall, and it will allow you to use ColoRotate as your color picker in Creative Suite apps. It will also sync with your saved palettes on the ColoRotate site, but that's slated to cost you $2.50/month.

There are plenty of applications out there that will make the Windows Task Manager more useful or replace it altogether. Blue Task Manager isn't one of them. All this little utility does is change the default color of the graphs and text from green to blue.

The effect gives you a slightly more calming way of figuring out why your PC has suddenly become so sluggish.

If you just want to give Blue Task Manager a try, download and decompress the installation folder and then click on the executable task manager. If you want to permanently replace the default Windows Task Manager, you'll need to run the included Replacer application which lets you replace the default windows utility with the blue version.

[via Instant Fundas]

Back in July, Jay linked to the rather awesome Multicolr service that lets you select up to 10 colours using the colour-picker on the page [selecting a colour more than once to add some bias should you wish] and the Multicolr app goes away and does its thing. 'Its thing' was, back in July, a search of the Interesting photos that make it into Flickr's Explore pages.

How times have changed. Just three months later, the colour search has a 10 million strong database of Creative-Commons photos the Idée Inc. folks have indexed from Flickr using their own 'visual similarity technology' and Multicolr now presents you with a grid of 50 matching CC-licenced photos. And yes, you read it right: that's 10 million Creative Commons-licenced photos indexed.

After playing with this new version of the mashup I'm still astounded - both by how the mashup works now [with a far larger image pool that previously], and by potential further uses. Multicolr, with perhaps tag-refinement for helping you find just the right photo subject, would be image-search nirvana - no doubt Idée [and I daresay Flickr] must be aware of this.

If you're in the business of pirating colors from websites, then mooColorFinder is here to help you. Just type in a web address (say, your favorite blog) and mooColorFinder will return the colors used on that website. The colors are display as little tiles of color; which you can then mouse over to get the hex color.

Now, we should note that this web service doesn't seem to always work correctly on certain websites. We believe it has to do with the way in which the site was coded.

If you prefer desktop applications to web apps, you could always use DigitalColor Meter.app (Mac; found in /Applications/Utilities/) or Instant Eyedropper for Windows.

If you love Ubuntu Linux, but you're not so fond of its default brown theme, there's hope. You can find an assortment of alternate themes in the System->Preferences->Appearance menu. The themes will change the colors of your program toolbars.

But if you're looking for something slightly more comprehensive, you might wan to check out Blubuntu. It's a theme that gives Ubuntu a nice calm blue color scheme. It also comes with a suggested wallpaper.

You can install Blubuntu by opening a terminal window and typing "sudo apt-get install blubuntu-look." Once installed, you should find Blubuntu listed in your Appearance menu. In order to apply Blubuntu to your login screen, go to System->Administration->Login Window, and select Blubuntu from the "local" tab.

[via Tombuntu]

Have you ever wished you could easily figure out the HTML or RGB values for a specific color? Instant Eyedropper is a free Windows utility that will show you the HTML, RGB, Hex, or HSB codes that correspond with pretty much any color on your screen.

Once Instant Eyedropper is running, all you have to do is click on the icon in your system tray and keep your mouse button down as you drag your cursor to a spot on your screen. The program will display the color code whether you're hovering over an image, web page, or pretty much anything else. Note that it doesn't appear to work with videos, but seriously what were you trying to use it on a video for anyway?

Instant Eyedropper will also automatically copy the color code to your clipboard, so you can paste it into your image editor or web design application.

[via The How-To Geek]

You know those numbers that could change the world? No, not the ones on Lost, the HD-DVD key code that could lead to the end of Digg as we know it.

Well, the sixteen hexadecimal digits are just numbers when it comes right down to it. And you can do all sorts of things with numbers, like use them as a basis for web-colors and make them into a pretty picture that may or may not be illegal to share with your friends.

But why stop there when you can go one step further and design a T-shirt based on those colors and sell it for fun and profit? It'll be interesting to see if the T-shirt gets a cease and desist notice from the MPAA, or if they'll send out letters to anyone caught wearing the shirt in public.

[via Boing Boing]

Here's an ingenious way to create a palette of colors that work well together for your next design project - Color Palette Generator. Simply supply the site with an image that contains colors you enjoy, and it will select a set of colors from the image that are complimentary to one another, and match the image's colors. As stated on the site, this can be useful for design projects that rely on a central image, but I can imagine it could also be a good way to choose colors for offline endeavors as well. Maybe you can match your wall color to a color from your favorite painting or rug. Imagine the possibilities.

del.icio.us is at it again, and this time they've added site thumbnails to the popular links on the homepage. Unfortunately, this is the only place thumbnails exist, but it's at least a step towards catching up to some of their competitors in this particular department.

Also making (another) appearance on the homepage is the re-introduction of popular tags, along with (from what I remember) some minor new UI elements as well. Bookmark counts are now in a more striking blue box, and I just noticed the tag cloud now uses red to denote tags that you share with everyone else (is this new or not?). Finally, on their blog they also hint at "lots of plans" for the recently updated del.icio.us API, but they offer nothing as hints towards whether it'll be a kitchen sink or a bookmarking A.I. that 'marks things for me based on my mood and past bookmarks. I guess we'll just have to wait (im)patiently.