With that in mind, you can begin to understand my excitement when the Unotron Washable Wireless Keyboard showed up for review. To a guy like me, the word "washable" doesn't mean what it means to normal people. To a guy like me, the word "washable" means "OK to sink and drown".

Heh, heh. This was going to be fun.

Wasting no time, I filled a tub with seven inches of water and dropped the keyboard into it. My plan was to let the keyboard sit at the bottom for a little while and then see if it'd still work.

My plan was foiled. The damned thing wouldn't sink.

Apparently, part of the way the devious folks at Unotron make their keyboards washable is by making the internal workings water-tight. That means there's air inside the keyboard. Enough air to make the thing float, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


It's not sinking. I wanted it to sink. Roll over picture for a larger image.

No problem. Plan B. I'll just get a couple of bricks and put them on top of the keyboard to hold it down.

Plan B was also foiled because I live in a brand new house. One not made of brick. There's not a frickin' brick anywhere on the block. There also aren't large rocks, cinder blocks, or anything else that I could push off the dock to sink the keyboard.

Have I mentioned I have a very tolerant wife? Standing in the kitchen, thinking my dilema through, I noticed the empty milk bottle I'd just left sitting on the counter. I'd left it there all morning. Like I said, Denise is very tolerant.

Having an engineering degree, I understand the concepts of buoyancy and displacement. I never thought I'd be writing about buoyancy in Computing Unplugged, but I grok the math. In this case, it was simple. Fill the milk bottle with water, shove the keyboard in the tub, and place the milk bottle on top.

As most of you might figure, the milk bottle doesn't add much weight, but because it prevents the water in the bottle from displacing, it managed to keep the keyboard seven inches under water, as you can see in Figure B.