Engineer James Bruton likes to create everyday machines that would only exist in an alternate reality. His latest creation, the SnackSync PC, takes a standard gaming computer and turns it into a pasta cooker. It watches your game for those inevitable pauses, like when a level loads or a match ends, and gets dinner started in the background. By the time you catch your breath, a pot of steaming carbonara is ready, complete with a spork to dig in.
Diorama111 has spent years bringing life to the plastic tiny worlds he designs. With him behind the wheel, a simple plastic shell is transformed into something that moves, turns, and even blinks back at you in an unsettling way. His most recent achievement transforms the 1/64 scale Suzuki Carry truck, an homage to Japan’s minuscule Kei automobiles, into a fully functional remote-controlled vehicle. This little hauler, only 53mm long and 23mm wide, packs an incredible amount of motor, steering, and lighting into a body roughly the size of a sugar packet.
Gustavo Valiente spent months bringing back the magic of Namco’s 1993 arcade classic on a handheld that really wasn’t meant to handle such a challenge…the Game Boy Advance. His RR Project crams the original Ridge Racer’s crazy tracks and adrenaline-fueled drifts onto Nintendo’s beloved handheld, even if it wasn’t exactly made to handle a game of this caliber.
Expedition trucks typically start as military surplus, but few end up feeling like mobile hotel suites. The Maniac takes that concept to the next level, with a MAN-KAT truck, one of those old German army beasts designed to move goods over mud and mountains. Turkish contractors at Sya Mobil spent nearly two years converting it into a people mover before delivering it to the Atik family in 2023. What they got was a 4×4 home on wheels that sleeps four but shines as a couple’s escape pod, with 215 square feet of living space in a shell that can withstand tough terrain.
Manual LEGO sorting has always been the barrier to endless building fun. Each piece requires one to look manually, make a decision and then drop into the right pile. Spencer is a software developer / engineer by trade, so he decides to roll up his sleeves and begin designing a machine that could change everything.
Star-themed coffee tables have long been a staple of design catalogs. But just a few of them have attempted to fit a whole planetary arrangement within, replete with a sun that simply erupts into view on demand. This one goes all out, transforming an ordinary piece of furniture into a small cosmic drama with stellar implosions and endless orbits.
Erik Spijk spent more than a year transforming a failed 2017 experiment into a functional drone that displays graphics in mid-air. He calls it Zippy, and it’s a small-scale tribute to Las Vegas’ gigantic LED-covered Sphere. A ring of 144 LEDs spins quickly enough to trick the eye into perceiving solid images, writing, or basic animations, while the entire contraption hovers on its own power.
Blytical wanted photos that looked like they were shot with a thrift store camcorder, not another phone filter. He created Retro Cam, a handheld device that records true analog video and converts it into blurry, flickering stills as well as clips, all without using a single digital trick. It fits in your hand like a bulky point-and-shoot from the early 2000s, but each frame has the smooth blur and color drift of an old VHS tape.
Budget-Builds Official never intended to get his hands on a PlayStation 5; instead, he wanted its internals, notably the graphics chip. Then, on a peaceful Friday in October, he receives a little parcel from Shenzhen and has no idea what to anticipate. Out comes a bare motherboard the size of a small book, wrapped in bubble plastic and topped with a gigantic copper heatsink the size of a dinner plate. The label reads AMD BC250, and it costs £96. The delivery letter simply reads “PS5 graphics card” – not exactly what he expected, but it did the job.
Play Conveyor never meant to win beauty contests, as he stared at the lump on his desk—an ordinary wired mouse—and decided the whole industry had been lying to him. Every curve, every rubber grip, every “vertical” or “ambidextrous” label still left his wrist aching after three hours of editing. So he cracked the thing open, kept the guts, and threw the shell away.