Weird

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.

Project Tube Shot Features Spark II Rocket and the Five-Foot Pipe That Gave a B Motor Extra Sky

By Bill Smith September 4, 2026

Con Hathy printed a stubby PETG rocket named Spark, loaded an Estes B4, and sent it up a launch rod. Jolly Logic Altimeter 2 data put the flight at 81 feet, 48 mph, and 6.4 G. He then wanted the same motor to do more work by firing it from a closed tube, the same idea that once helped the Arcas sounding rocket leave the pad faster than a rail ever allowed.

Fixing a Broken Amprobe AT-7000 Reveals How a $2,700 Cable Tracer Died in a Drawer and Came Back

By Jackson Chung September 1, 2026

Most people have never held an Amprobe AT-7000-EUR, and even fewer would guess a cable tracer can cost about $2,700. Electricians use this kit when a cable disappears into drywall, a ceiling, a floor, or a crowded panel and a cheap tone probe is not enough. One half of the kit is a transmitter you clip onto a circuit. That box injects a tracing signal, 6.25 kHz on live wires or 32.768 kHz on dead ones, in high, low, or clamp mode. The other half is a receiver with a color screen, a tip sensor, and a Smart Sensor array that shows where the wire runs and which way it is going, often to about two inches, and can pick the correct breaker instead of a handful of false hits.

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.

25 Inches of Imported Slosh, Techmoan Unboxes the Indian Wave Machine

By Bill Smith August 30, 2026

Techmoan already owned an 18-inch Hughes Wave Motion Machine that set him back about $500. He wanted something longer, so he paid $300 for the biggest model waveshop listed, a 25-inch unit shipped from India.

First Look at the Modern Mactini, a Palm-Sized Mac With One Button and No Mercy

By Jackson Chung August 27, 2026

In 2008 Peter Serafinowicz walked onto a BBC set in the role of an Apple store employee and introduced Mactini, the smallest computer in the world. One key. Press it once for A. Press it 26 times for Z. For a comma, hold four seconds, lift for two, then fire off a rapid little drum fill. The audience laughed. Apple kept making things smaller anyway.

Auto Enthusiast Recreates the Mazda Suitcase Car from the 90s

By Bill Smith August 24, 2026

In 1991, seven Mazda transmission research engineers combined a hard-shell Samsonite and a pocket bike to create something no airline would ever allow. Their submission for the company’s Fantasyard contest was a three-wheeled motorcycle that folded into luggage, weighed seventy-one pounds, and could reach speeds of nearly nineteen miles per hour with a 33.6-cubic-centimeter two-stroke engine. Assembly takes approximately one minute. The thing was highlighted on Oprah and at major auto shows, but just one original remains today.

BeanBot Robot Moves Like a Jumping Bean by Bumping Into the World

By Jackson Chung August 23, 2026

Mexican jumping beans have long intrigued people with their capacity to twitch and hop across a table when touched by a hand or exposed to sunlight. A little moth larva within a hollow seed pod is responsible for the motion. Heat drives the larva to pull on silk threads, propelling the entire pod into rolls, flips, and short hops in search of cooler shade. Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology’s Bioinspired Soft Robotics department have developed a robot that exhibits the same restless behavior without the usage of motors, batteries, circuits, or an onboard computer.

How a Decade-Old Samsung Laser Printer Became a Minecraft Host Server

By Bill Smith August 21, 2026

Office printers usually sit there doing their quiet job of putting toner on paper. One Samsung C410W now spends part of its time generating infinite blocky terrain and letting players dig, build, and chat across a local network. The project belongs to a maker known as vimpo, the same person who previously convinced a Wi-Fi light bulb to host a Minecraft world.