Almost three years ago, I posted about a puzzle alarm clock. Now Mensa is taking a crack at the same basic idea. To turn your alarm off, you have to solve a puzzle insuring that you are really awake. The puzzle for this alarm clock is a Simon-like puzzle as opposed to a jigsaw puzzle.

Here’s a silly item for the puzzle lover’s holiday gift list that I found on BoingBoing Gadgets.  It’s a toilet paper holder with a puzzle.  In order to gain access to the toilet paper, you have to solve the puzzle.  I guess that’s good motivation.

There was a little post on BoingBoing recently about a Japanese speed cubing kit.  By “speed cubing”, I mean trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube in as little time as possible.  Interestingly, this seems to have little to do with how well you can solve the puzzle but rather how easily your cube can be manipulated.  The kit comes with lubrication and mini screwdrivers (for loosening the cube’s screws.)

Want to get kids started out with puzzles at a young age.  This post at daddytypes.com is called Kid-Sized Tetris and features giant multicolored tetrominos for kids to play with.  These and other toys featured on the site could certainly teach kids spatial reasoning.

Found through BoingBoing.

Thomas Ball is a mechanical puzzle that looks like a little soccer ball. On a Thomas Ball, the hexagonal sections rotate around the pentagonal sections. The goal is to reach the proper alignment of the hexagonal sections. Currently, Thomas Ball comes in 5 levels of difficulty. For Level 1, the hexagons are one of three solid colors. For Level 2, there are three colored rings to complete. For Level 3 there are 4 colored rings. Level 4 has six interconnected circles (and apparently national flags.) Level five has the numbers 1-20 (with one number occupying a pentagon.)

Sticking with the theme of last night’s post, I found a puzzle on the Brookston Beer Bulletin. It’s a 3D puzzle that requires you to fit pieces together in a glass to form a glass of beer. Billied as an exercise for both your right brain hemisphere and left brain hemisphere. This puzzle comes from a Hong Kong based toy seller that also sells a 3D hamburger puzzle. (Along with other great puzzle products.)

Meiji, a chocolate maker in Japan, has made polyomino puzzles out of Chocolate.  Meiji’s chocolate polyomino puzzles come in two varieties: milk chocolate made from pentominoes and dark chocolate made from hexominoes.  The pieces fit together to form a rectangle.  Though, I don’t think that the point is to solve the puzzle.

The Beer Cage Puzzle goes hand-in-hand with the Wine Bottle Puzzle that I posted about a couple weeks ago. Put a can of beer in the cage and lock it in place. To get the beer, you need to solve the puzzle. Another great sobriety test!

On CrunchGear, I found a story about a new interface design for mp3 players based on the Rubik’s Cube.  The interface, designed by Hee Yong of Yanko design, involves rotating different layers of the cube to perform different mp3 functions.  The story also makes a big deal about the fact that you have to solve the puzzle to turn the player off.  But, as is noted in the comments, it seems that only the horizontal layers rotate, so this is likely not a difficult task.

It’s hard to see this design having much more than novelty appeal, and it will likely never see production.  Still, it’s a fun idea.

And the sodoku silliness continues. Here’s the link where you can buy sudoku toilet paper (found through Idiot World). I think they made a real design error here. Clearly there should be one puzzle per sheet, but one of the puzzles is clearly cut off at the perforation. I wonder if anyone has bought it just to solve the puzzles.

I’ve come across a couple sites recently that feature metal puzzles which are really cool to look at even if they are expensive. The first site which I found through digg is Diabolical Puzzles which sells laser-cut stainless steel jigsaw puzzles. The second site, found through Passion for Puzzles, is Maxton’s Art Gallery. The metal puzzles featured on this site are amazing. Each is made from at least a dozen different metals. The cost for the puzzles is in the thousands of dollars, but it’s worth stopping by the site to look at the pictures.

Through the minimalist weblog on thinkythings.org: Rubik’s Sudoku now available from the UK Amazon site. After reading the product description, I don’t think that there will be any new or interesting twists in the Rubik’s version of Sudoku. The only advantage they’re plugging is different colors for each of the different digits. There doesn’t seem to be anything else that you can’t do just as easily with pencil and paper.

The blog flickerbulb links to a page on the Jonathan Fong Style site that has some home decor tips that a puzzler might be interested in. The site recommends putting a word puzzle above your fire place. You’d think that only hard core puzzlers would want to decorate this way, but the site gives arguments as to why anyone might want to do it. From the site:

Visitors to your home will love finding the hidden words that can be found up, down, zigzagging and backwards above your fireplace.

On top of that, it’s not a terribly expensive project either.

Through a blog called Tease Tees, I found this new “Puzzler” t-shirt. The design consists of six blocks that each contain a pictogram to be solved. They’re cute little puzzles. I’ll be honest… I haven’t figured them all out. But I only looked at them very quickly. According to the blog, there should be solutions forthcoming.

A blog called Gen Art Pulse has an entry about a puzzle ring that recently won an international design competition. The puzzle has only a eight pieces and it’s symmetrical, making it easy to put together. I have to admit it’s a pretty nifty design though. I particularly like that the final key piece, which holds the ring together, fits nicely over your finger so that it’s impossible for the puzzle to come apart while you’re wearing it. Maybe something like this would be appropriate as an award for the World Puzzle Competition championship team. Kinda like a World Series ring or a Super Bowl ring.