Awesome Tech

The One Hacker Band is a robotic musical group that plays electromechanically-controlled instruments. They recently added a new member – a head that can sing. Here’s the latest line-up of the band performing the Tears for Fears hit Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Need more? Enjoy a little Radiohead.

Ironside’s unique, limited-edition PC features a stained glass side panel decorated with Yggdrasil, a sacred tree from Norse mythology that was said to support the universe with its roots. LED backlighting brings the colorful scene to life. On the front, you’ll find a Celtic hammer medallion, and inside choose from four different levels of PC performance.

We’ve seen an engineer build a robot that can paint giant wall murals. JBV Creative’s robotic painter is decidedly less precise in its approach to creating art, though its abstract paint splatters could still land its entirely randomized works in a modern art museum.

Dust off your CD collection and enjoy the early days of digital music once more. NINM Lab’s portable CD player can transmit audio to modern headsets and speakers via Bluetooth. Its clear cover lets you watch discs spin, while the snap-on cover adds a pair of speakers. It’s also got a magnetic back for sticking it to metal surfaces.

To celebrate 40 years of G-SHOCK watches, Casio has rolled out this limited series of stainless steel timepieces. They’re made using a recrystallization and deep-layer hardening process, which gives them a unique, crackled finish. Choose from the full-metal GMW-B5000PG in silver or gold, or the DW-5040PG in a mottled matte black.

The Konnected Joe ceramic charcoal grill and smoker features a pushbutton automatic fire starter, a digital display for setting temperatures from 225º to 700ºF, and Wi-Fi remote monitoring. A digitally-controlled fan helps regulate temperature and airflow, and its grill surface is big enough to cook 13 burgers at once.

These magnetic 3″ cube lights can display numbers, letters, animations, and fields of color. There are three kinds to connect: a dot-matrix, a diffused color panel, and a spotlight projector. They can react to games, music, and video, and can be programmed using mobile or desktop apps and are Matter compatible.

Flux aims to steal some thunder from the Finalmouse Centerpiece with their own under-keyboard display. Clear maglev keys float above a full HD screen, which can display key shortcuts, colors, patterns, and animations. Its keyframe can be removed for use as a touchscreen, and add-on modules include dials and media buttons.

Give your Mac a visual upgrade with Softorino’s Folder Colorizer. The app lets you combine images, icons, and colors on your Mac’s folders to help identify their contents. It can even suggest relevant images on your system based on the folder’s name. It’s also available as part of Softorino’s 15-app Universal License.

The Nintendo Gamecube hasn’t been produced since 2007, but it still can play some pretty great games. Maker and modder Peter Knetter took it upon himself to design and build a LEGO Gamecube. After sifting through a sea of blue building blocks, he filled the case with the console’s guts and built a matching LEGO controller.

This neat little gadget is a sampler and looper with a chromatic keyboard. The Chompi has 7-voice polyphony, records up to 6 hours, and has knobs for selecting start and end points, pitch, attack and decay, and effects like reverb, filters, and saturation. Its tape-style looping engine is truly magical. Coming soon to Kickstarter.

Most DoorDash and GrubHub deliveries are made using gas-guzzling cars sitting in traffic. Zipline hopes to change that with drones that hover 400 feet up, then lower a small delivery unit to quietly and safely drop off small packages. Mark Rober explains the tech and how Zipline has been saving lives with their existing drones.

Huion’s displays are created for artists and designers, with built-in pen support for drawing and painting on screen. The 24″ displays come in QHD (2560 x 1440) and 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) resolutions, and are Windows/MacOS compatible. Their battery-free pens have a 5080 LPI resolution, 8192-level pressure, and 60º tilt sensitivity.

One of the best pieces of gear to bring with you hiking, camping, fishing, or hunting is a GPS-capable device. And when you’re traveling light, a GPS watch is ideal. Everyday Carry picked eight of their favorite models, each capable of tracking your location and activity, with some packing weather, altitude, and health sensors.

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton star in this lighthearted dramatization of the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the company that created the Blackberry. What started as a pager on steroids became a worldwide phenomenon – then the business collapsed in a similarly spectacular fashion. In theaters 5.12.23.

Do you have trouble waking up? Mehdi from ElectroBOOM has the solution. He built an alarm clock designed to startle you from your sleep by blowing up capacitors. The trick is an alarm clock that triggers a rotating magazine that holds ten capacitors and applies a high-voltage power source.

LCD screens struggle with contrast because their crystals have to selectively block out a backlight. DIY Perks wanted to see if layering a second LCD panel could improve contrast. He combined parts from two identical displays, depolarized their screens, and upgraded their backlight. It’s a cool hack, but an OLED is still better.

If you work on multiple windows at the same time, you can never get enough screen real estate. And when you’re on a laptop, that’s tricky to do. Monduo’s clever 16 Pro Duo setup works perfectly with the MacBook Pro 16″ and other similarly-sized laptops, adding fold-out 2K/144hz screens to the left and right of your computer.

Engineer James Bruton loves to build robots with unusual drivetrains. For his latest creation, he designed and fabricated a remote-controlled robot that ambles along on 20 legs, like a giant mechanical centipede. Despite its complexity, it’s quite nimble. Now can we get a version with 100 legs, James?

We swear by our Keychron mechanical keyboard’s build quality and clicky Gateron G Pro switches. The Q11 QMK offers an adjustable split keyboard design with hot-swappable keys, a hefty machined aluminum body, and a rotary encoder knob. There’s support for MacOS and Windows, and QMK/VIA programmability.

The 1980s gave us computers that shared a case with their keyboard. Pentaform’s Abacus returns to that by attaching a tiny Windows computer to its keyboard. It has an Intel Cherry Trail CPU with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0/3.0, Micro SD, and HDMI 2.0 outputs, as well as a trackpad and a 40-pin GPIO connector.

Marques Brownlee aka MKBHD is very selective when it comes to responding to review pitches. But for one whole month, the tech expert said yes to every review request he received. This compilation clip includes reviews of a casket, a wearable air conditioner, an electronic hand warmer, and a Coca-Cola smartphone.

The vast majority of computer mice are made out of cheap plastic. Artist Uri Tuchman wanted to create something with a bit more substance, so he took the electronics out of a mouse and painstakingly crafted a new enclosure out of brass then engraved it with an ornate filigree pattern.