A privately financed company launched a rocket of its own design successfully into orbit the other night, ushering in what the company’s founders hope will be a new era of spaceflight. The liquid fueled rocket called Falcon 1, launched a 5 foot payload into low earth orbit as part of a test to take on commercial operations as a space ferry.

For more information, see the NY Times or Wired.

Here’s a mosaic of photos from Flickr tagged with ‘Superhero’. My favorites from this set are #4 “Late for work” & #6 “Wonder Women”

(clicky for a closer view - 300KB)

1. Something about superhero’s, Muppetsâ„¢, whiskey, stuffed animals and pink slippers (062/365), 2. March 30 - My Story, 3. [ S u p e r m a n ], 4. Late for Work / Tarde pa’l trabajo, 5. Lápis…, 6. Wonder Women, 7. Batgirl Barbie-A Portrait, 8. A Hero is Part Human, Part Supernatural, 9. Portrait of a SuperHero, 10. 138 Phoenix

[Mosaic Web Tool courtesy of BigHugeLabs]

If you’re a gamemaster then you know how time-consuming it can be to generate city maps. The Roleplaying City Map Generator is a free utility for GMs and it does this work for you with just a couple of minutes of your time and a few mouse clicks.

Via their simple UI (check out the UI here), you just enter a few parameters or you can start with one of their templates. Parameters include the appearance of buildings, streets, parks, places, rivers and the city wall. You can also define the type of settlement such as villages, small towns, or big cities for fantasy, medieval, cthulhu or scifi campaigns. Throw in a little randomization and the tool builds the city map before you, if you don’t like it then starting over using the previous settings is simple until it meets your requirements.

The tool is remarkable from the standpoint of the details you can choose from. For instance, you don’t simply choose the number of streets and buildings and towers, but have control over things like thickness of the city wall, city gate size, distance to water, tree size, orientation of the houses to the streets and the winding of the rivers. But don’t worry about being overloaded with detailed decisions you have to make, the tool uses default settings to give you a decent stab at having a proper town right out of the gate that you can tweak from there.

You can download the small Windows utility from here.

Here’s a collection of thumbnail shots from a variety of towns (clicky).

I believe this is the first youtube vid that’s been turned into a game. The video is annotated, you advance to the next level through a properly timed click of the annotation.

Enjoy.

Triump International is known for its brassieres, especially its strange bras. Like its newest model from this year featuring a built-in solar panel. Triumph’s latest solar bra captures and redistributes the sun’s bounty and can generate enough energy to power a cell phone or an iPod.

Want more “interesting” bras? Check out Inventor Spot’s Best 8 bizarre bras from Triump Intl, including the No Smoking bra, the Post Office bra, the Chopsticks Bra (a feast for the eyes) and more.

Here’s a video demonstration of the eco friendly Solar Powered Bra :