Hardware

LGR Fires Up Hasbro’s 1999 Easy-Bake Kitchen Keyboard Playset

By Bill Smith September 11, 2026

Storage still coughs up late-90s leftovers for Clint Basinger of LGR, and the latest one is a molded kitchen that sits on a PC keyboard and pretends to bake. Easy-Bake Kitchen, sold by Hasbro Interactive in fall 1999 for about $40, arrived as a CD-ROM plus a strap-on playset aimed at ages three and up. Box copy promised to turn a Windows 95 or 98 machine into a kitchen full of fun with no waiting and no mess. LGR found his copy years after a viewer named Ryan Kitty mailed it in, then pulled it back out after a hurricane soaked the downstairs collection room in what he calls storm juice. A scrub later, the plastic was ready for another shift.

Mac Nano Cyberdeck Consists of an M4 Mac Mini That Slides In Like a Game Boy Cartridge

By Jackson Chung September 10, 2026

Shing Solutions already had a name for a gutted M4 Mac Mini. Once the retail shell came off and the board sat in a printed sleeve with Apple’s original heatsink and blower still bolted on, that package became the Mac Nano. The new project puts that sleeve inside a second body, a handheld deck that treats the whole computer like a giant Game Boy cartridge you can pull and replace.

Lapis One Hands Your AI Agent a Linux Box It Never Has to Share

By Jackson Chung September 9, 2026

Pamir AI built Lapis One so an agent can stop borrowing the family laptop. This finished 85 by 85 by 28 millimeter computer weighs 227 grams and looks closer to a small consumer gadget than a development board you still have to case. Painted white aluminum or anodized black aluminum wraps a plastic top shell. A Sharp 240 by 400 monochrome memory LCD sits on the face, the same low-power panel family used in Panic’s Playdate, so status lines and task notes can stay visible all day without chewing through the 3,300 mAh battery.

Project Nomad Packs a Private Internet Into a Fold-Down Cyberdeck

By Jackson Chung September 7, 2026

Photo credit: The DIY Life
You can close the lid, grab the handle, and walk away with Wikipedia, street maps, a media library, and a local language model riding in one printed case. That is the brief Michael Klements set for himself when he wrapped Crosstalk Solutions’ free Project Nomad stack in a 3D-printed rack that behaves like a travel workstation. Nearby phones, tablets, and laptops join a private network and open a normal browser. Pages load from the box in the case, not from a tower somewhere else.

Lenovo’s Project AeroBlade Packs a Silent 14-Inch Laptop Into 830 Grams

By Jackson Chung September 6, 2026

Lenovo rolled Project AeroBlade onto the IFA Berlin floor this week as a ThinkBook-class concept that treats cooling as the last piece of bulk still worth removing. Shown at Innovation World on September 3, the 14-inch machine stays under 10 millimeters thick and under 830 grams, a magnesium-aluminum shell with a high screen-to-body OLED panel, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 7. Official copy frames it as full-performance computing for hybrid work, with every part of the board and chassis sized around travel rather than a traditional heat stack.

Hands-On with Pandora, the 2010 Pocket Linux Machine With Dual Nubs and a Full Keyboard

By Jackson Chung September 3, 2026

Forum regulars who had sold and played the GP32 and GP2X decided those machines left too much on the table, so Craig Rothwell, Fatih Kilic, Michael Mrozek (known as EvilDragon), and Michael Weston started sketching a successor, called Pandora, that mixed a proper Linux desktop with real game controls. Dave Cancilier shaped the clamshell case and keymat.

ZX81 16K RAM Pack Features Sixteen Kilobytes That Lived and Died by the Edge Connector

By Jackson Chung September 2, 2026

Sinclair shipped the ZX81 in 1981 with a Z80, an 8K ROM, and one kilobyte of static RAM. After the screen buffer and system variables took their share, a BASIC listing had only a few hundred bytes left to stand in. A black plastic box that slid onto the rear edge connector promised sixteen times that space. For a lot of first-time owners, that pack was the line between a curiosity and a machine you could actually write on.

First Look at Project DualPlay Mini, Acer’s New Handheld That Opens Into a Tiny Laptop

By Jackson Chung September 2, 2026

Acer used its next@acer briefing at IFA Berlin 2026 on September 2, 2026, to showcase Project DualPlay Mini, a Predator concept built around one stubborn idea: a Windows gaming handheld that can fold into a miniature laptop without adding a second machine to your bag.

PlotDrive Lets You Write a Floppy, Walk Away, and Then Watch the Printer Work

By Jackson Chung August 31, 2026

Lucky Bob handed Tech Tangents a beige lab box and a simple pitch. Printing is miserable. What if a job were as simple as writing a floppy? That box is PlotDrive, a CalComp serial and parallel print server that never needed Ethernet, a PC sitting idle, or a driver that still installs in 2026. You copy a file onto a 5.25-inch disk, latch the door, pick the file on a two-line LCD, and the machine streams the data out to whatever printer or plotter is plugged into the back.

Parco HUB-001SR is IBM’s Motorized USB Hub Radio With a Sliding Door That You Probably Never Knew Existed

By Jackson Chung August 30, 2026

IBM never sold this as a catalog item, yet the logo sits on the case all the same. Parco Pacified Limited of Hong Kong built the HUB-001SR as a compact speaker dock that also works as a three-port USB 1.1 hub and an FM radio, then someone stamped IBM branding on a batch and handed units out as corporate gifts or show swag. The same plastic shell later turned up with a Bisty mark tied to Japanese pachinko prizes. You end up with a desk object that looks official until you notice the generic Chinese tooling and the motor that slides a cover open when you press it.