Remember the Space Invaders Scarf?

I think it’s been outdone by this beauty from Emily of Carolina Patchworks, a Galaga themed quilt! It can be yours for just US$475 on Etsy.

Relive the action, the excitement. Travel in space and time without leaving your couch! This quilt is fully compatible with the XBox 360, Wii, PlayStation III, all high-definition televisions, most models of fireplace, and a wide variety of good books.

See close-ups at Emily’s site, isn’t this thing gorgeous? I wish I had one.

[via Evil Mad Scientist Labs]

Technorati Tags: Galaga,retro games,quilt

The US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is investigating a key problem involving surveillance missions using remote controlled planes with a wingspan of about a meter. The challenge is they need a way to refuel the planes to extend their limited flight duration.

The solution? They’re developing an electric motor that can harvest energy by attaching themselves to power lines, this is form of vampire power that is bled out through some undetectable (or not easily detectable) means.

Think seeing a small plane dangling from the power lines would be a little too obvious and would be counter detected? You’re right, which is why they may also leverage some technology developed by DARPA that will allow the plan to fold in key parts of itself, effectively morphing to look like a piece of trash hanging to the lines.

Test flights are planned for 2008.

Check out NewScientistTech for all the details on this marvelous hack.

Note: the pic above is the Navy’s WASP micro air vehicle, I couldn’t find pics relevant to this program.

Some interesting tidbits on Perl as we acknowledge the breadth of this language’s impact on the IT world:

Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys and released version 1.0 to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18, 1987.

Perl was originally named "Pearl", but Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before Perl’s official release and changed the spelling of the name by simply dropping the ‘a’.

Perl is also sometimes thought to mean ‘Practical Extraction and Report Language’ which is really just a backronym.

The programming language Ruby was named as a joke, alluding to Perl’s name.

Pac-Man, the quintessential retro arcade game. Originally created by Namco in the early 1980s and has now been updated for the web by Neave.  I can’t tell you how many hours I lost in this game :)   Now here’s a chance to have a lot more fun in this web adaptation of an 80’s classic.

Use your arrow keys to move the Pac-Man. Press “M” to Mute/Un-mute sound, “P” to Pause/Un-pause the game, and “Q” to quit at any time.

Have a ton of fun!

From Blogscoped:

Technorati Tags: programming