Abstract: A mortar-less retaining wall apparatus is built from of a plurality of masonry blocks, each masonry block having four side walls and two end walls, two or more masonry blocks being abutted on respective side walls, at least one of the end walls of each masonry block having a split texture surface and a plurality of recesses creating a natural stone simulated surface. One or more of the masonry blocks each has a side wall that tapers from one end wall to the other end wall, thus allowing either straight or curved walls to be built by changing the relative orientation of the tapers of adjoining blocks.

Abstract: A mortar-less retaining wall apparatus is built from of a plurality of masonry blocks, each masonry block having four side walls and two end walls, two or more masonry blocks being abutted on respective side walls, one of the end walls of each masonry block having a mortar-joint simulating reveal portion. One or more of the masonry blocks each has a side wall that tapers from one end wall to the other end wall, thus allowing either straight or curved walls to be built by changing the relative orientation of the tapers of adjoining blocks.

Abstract: A retaining wall system is comprised of a plurality of courses of side-by-side parallelogram front face patterns, each parallelogram front face pattern formed by first and second rows of a plurality of quadrilateral face patterns. The first and second rows of the plurality of quadrilateral face patterns have the same width and collectively define a height of the parallelogram front face pattern, with each of the parallelogram front face patterns having the same height. The quadrilateral face patterns in the first row have a width different than that of the quadrilateral face patterns in the second row. Each parallelogram front face pattern in a first course overlies two parallelogram front face patterns in an immediately adjacent course. The combination of off-sets of the quadrilateral face patterns in each parallelogram front face pattern and overlapping of parallelogram face patterns in adjacent courses creates a retaining wall having a non-uniform appearance of a natural stone wall.

Abstract: A hand-held mouse has a base pointing unit with a movement sensor and a plurality of switches for selecting a visual object indicated by a location of the graphical pointer on the display, and an outer shell surrounding and removably attached to the base pointing unit. A user has to purchase only one base computer mouse in order to accommodate other users. The shells are easily switched since the users do not have to unplug the base computer mouse to switch to a different computer mouse, and they are relatively inexpensive compared to purchasing completely separate computer mice. Different shells can be used with a common base computer mouse for different computer systems, and the outer shell might accordingly have a fewer number of buttons than there are switches on the base pointing unit.