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.
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.
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.
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.
Nate Scovill decided the Red Bull slogan needed a proper test. He bought cans of the stuff, cleared space in his workshop, and set out to see whether an energy drink could actually launch something into the air. His recent video walks through three attempts, each more serious than the last, until one of them finally left the ground under its own power.
Emily The Engineer wanted something flashy for her smile and decided a store-bought set would never do. She set out to make her own removable gold grillz entirely with 3D printing, starting from a messy putty mold of her actual teeth and ending with two finished sets she could wear.
A steel figure nearly seven feet tall stands in promotional images that exploded across the internet in late July. Four legs support a humanoid torso. Arms end in quick-connect mounts instead of hands. A goat-like skull with horns and glowing eyes sits on top. In one view it grips a gas-powered chainsaw. In another it stares through a glass door as if waiting for orders. Millions of people saw the photos and reacted with memes, jokes about movie monsters, and genuine unease. The inventor behind it calls the machine Threehalves. He built it to keep people out of places that can kill them.
Photo credit: Reddit
Mark Russinovich spends his days shaping the future of Microsoft Azure. On nights and weekends he still finds time to make Windows do things it was never meant to do. His latest experiment turns Microsoft Paint into a living monitor for the original DOOM.
Johnzoid, the YouTube collector who spends his time hunting down the strangest electronics you can find, recently scored something that used to require a prison sentence. He ordered a JPay JP Mini 5 tablet on eBay, the same small device handed out free to inmates in multiple state systems. When the package arrived, it still carried the full institutional paperwork and a device ID that looks an awful lot like an inmate number.
A silver-suited hero once limited to Japanese PlayStation discs now races across any modern screen you point him at. Pepsiman Recompiled takes the 1999 cult classic, turns its original code into something a browser can run directly, and lets anyone with a legal disc image jump back into the chase at a smooth 60 frames per second.