Amber Bouman

The Space Invaders couch, as seen on the Igor Chak site.Hey, can I borrow $5,000? Please? Igor Chak's Retro Alien couch would look really good in my living room, and that bad boy of 80's yesteryear will set you back a pretty penny. This fine leather design joins the ranks of Space Invaders pillows, Space Invaders lamps, and Space Invaders ice cube trays as the ultimate in classy--and classic--geek fandom.

Making an improvement on the Space Invaders chair prototype that made the Internet rounds last year, the Retro Alien couch is all minimalist, Bauhaus-styling made in a “pixelated retro design,” and it also boasts memory foam cushions. Is it comfortable? Heck, who cares? This is less about a reasonably-priced, comfortable piece of furniture that will last you a decade and more about an homage to retro video games and nostalgia.

Along with the rise of smartphone adoption; faster processors; bigger, glossier touchscreens; and all the apps you can shake a stick at has come an unfortunate rise in crime. In December, a man on a bus in San Francisco was stabbed in the chest and robbed of his iPhone; in January, a thief shot a Bronx man in the back when he refused to hand over his phone; and this month (February), the cops have been searching for suspects in a string of iPhone robberies along the N-train in Queens and Manhattan.

So, what's a cautious, tech-loving smartphone user to do? Well, one option is the recently released SmartGuard: an iPhone case that comes equipped with its own tube of pepper spray. Perhaps the first case to weaponize the popular smartphone, the SmartGuard is made by pepper-spray maker Piexon with the rationale that if your pepper spray is attached to your smartphone, you'll never leave home without it.

[Photo: LOOS.FM]The town of Enschede, Netherlands allowed famed Dutch design firm LOOS.FM to create a 65-foot high spire out of Lego-esque bricks. Intended as a public venue for the week-long 2011 Grenswerk Festival, the temporary building was used as a public venue and held a variety of celebrations--including at one point, a mass. It also held town meetings, raves, concerts, an opera, a sports day, and of course, Lego building contests.

Although they're actually made from concrete, the blocks were constructed to look like Lego (or Duplo) bricks and make up the entire building, save for the roof, and were all painted the five primary colors found in basic Lego sets (red, blue, yellow, black, white). Roughly the size of pyramid stones, the “Legioblocks” are intended to be used (and reused) as stackable construction blocks.

Much buzz around the next major release of Windows has centered around the controversial ribbon interface for Windows Explorer. However, no ribbon appeared in a sneak preview of Office 15--World, Excel, PowerPoint--that Microsoft gave this week in a video about developing Windows On ARM (WOA).

The examples shown were early desktop versions of Office 15--not in the style of the Metro interface that appears in Windows 8--which may explain the absence of the contentious ribbon design, and provide a hint of what to expect in the next productivity suite.

[Photo: CelebrationGeneration]Math--it's what's for dinner! Sort of. At least you can serve up some tasty dishes--and make your kitchen a hit with all of your DIY- and math-geek friends--with this custom pi tile backsplash. As an added bonus, it will provide you with the opportunity to make endless pi/pie puns and jokes. It's also relatively simple to do, if you follow the online tutorial.

To achieve this, you'll need 2-inch-by-2-inch square tiles, so this won't exactly be rocket science (no, it'll be pi! Yuk yuk). Basically, get tiles in two colors so that you can create a contrast or checkerboard design, then begin to arrange them as though they were pixels or Tetris squares or digits of pi to create a design.

Google's motto of “Do No Evil” apparently extends to its environmental policies, as the company grabbed the top spot on Greenpeace's Cool IT Leaderboard ranking for overall green practices. Google climbed to the No. 1 position for the first time, ranking high due to recent disclosure of its carbon footprint as well as its investment in utility projects such as a large-scale solar project near Sacramento.

Other reasons it made the top of the list include the RechargeIT.org project, which Google designed to demonstrate the technology used in plug-in electric vehicles and to accelerate their adoption. Its other actions include increasing its renewable energy purchasing and creating a subsidiary called Google Energy.

Hey, times are tough, right? With everything that's going on, wouldn't it be nice to have some little reminder that you can deal, and get through it? There are so many wonderful quotes by remarkable men and women that can lift the spirit and inspire positive thinking.

In that vein, we have Feel-Goodies, an app designed by the curiously named L.H. Allgood. According to the company's Website, Allgood got the idea for the app while sitting in a fast-food restaurant and reading self-help books. Apparently she was inspired to "condense the books into fast nourishment for the spirit," so she developed Feel-Goodies to provide users with "digital packets of inspirational wisdom." Described as "fast food for your self-esteem," Feel-Goodies, I figure, is about as good for my self-esteem as fast food is for my waistline. That is, not good at all.

I'll cop to it: I'm not good at grocery shopping. So I was definitely interested in trying out Hungry, an app designed to ease the pain of shopping trips by making color-coordinated lists that are easy to share.

According to the video on its Website, Evernote "grabs your info from anywhere and takes it to the magic cloud of elephants," a wondrous place where pink elephants process your data, index it, and make it searchable for easy retrieval. Elephants aside, Evernote is a comprehensive, cross-platform note-taking application that integrates hardware, software, and other third-party apps. The free app captures text notes, voice notes, photos, or files and stores them in the cloud for easy retrieval.

Also available as a computer application and browser add-on, Evernote has partnerships with Canon, Nokia, Lexmark, Samsung, AP Mobile, Seesmic,and others to enhance its usability. The integration with Seesmic, for example, allows user to save Facebook and Twitter items into Evernote.

FxCamera is an easy, fun application that lets you take a picture with various effects including "Fisheye," "Polaroid," "Warhol," "Toycam," and "Symmetricam." There's also a "Normal" mode for taking regular photos. The app is easy to operate: When opened, it displays each effect option in a landscape slideshow. You simply tap on the camera icon at the bottom of each effect to access the camera function and take a photo with that effect.

The right-hand navigation has options for Shot, Auto Focus, Config, and Menu. Auto Focus--the stand-out feature here--is incredibly useful when holding a camera phone. Config leads you to additional options, depending on which camera filter you're using. For example, "Toycam" allows you to change color and size and has a vignette/pinhole option. "Polandroid" gives you faded or mono (black-and-white) color options as well as a film-type option. "Symmetricam" lets you alter the symmetric pattern from landscape to portrait, multireflection or inverted as well as switch the color to "sepia," "negative," "posterize," or "solarize." This doesn't entirely make up for the fact that there are only five filters. Unfortunately you cannot undo a selected filter, nor can you apply filters to photos you've already taken.

If you have an Android phone and need a Wikipedia browsing app, then try Wapedia by Taptu. Wapedia may be the only Wiki app you'll need.

Wapedia features stunningly fast searches, intuitive organization, and other powerful features. Users can either install the free application from the Android Market or steer their mobile browser to http://wapedia.mobi. Either way you get it, the app provides an impressive mobile Wiki browsing experience.

Jorte is a calendar app designed to replace your paper scheduling system. It emphasizes ease of use band replicates the real experience of a day planner. You can operate the scheduling, to-do and calendar functions of the app with one hand. It syncs with Google Calendar and is easy to view on-the-go.