Travelers know the routine all too well. A laptop brick that eats half a bag, a phone charger that never quite keeps up, and a tablet adapter that somehow always gets left behind. Anker’s 715 Charger, priced at $19.99 (was $30), also called the Nano II 65W, collapses that pile into one small cube that still delivers serious speed.
Valve opened SteamOS a little wider this summer. More hardware could run it. More people started wondering if their old machines might work as cheap Steam Machines. Michael MJD decided to test the limits on purpose. He began with an HP Pavilion from the P6000 series. Inside sat a 3 GHz AMD Athlon, 9 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB SSD. The computer had no business hosting a modern gaming operating system. He wrote the recovery image to a USB stick, plugged it in, and tried to boot. Nothing happened. The machine used legacy BIOS. SteamOS insists on UEFI firmware. That first attempt ended almost as soon as it started.
Cowabunga hits different when four people can actually stand side by side and mash buttons the way the game was meant to be played. A builder working under the name arcademinimalist just finished a commissioned machine that takes an old Arcade1Up cabinet, drops a Nintendo Switch 2 inside it, and turns Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge into a proper four-player arcade experience.
Fifteen years after its first snow fell, Skyrim still refuses to stay buried. A free fan project now lets anyone wander the entire province inside Unreal Engine 5, and the latest showcase from Digital Dreams captures that walk in striking detail. Greg Coulthard built the foundation. He wrote a custom C++ plugin that reads Skyrim’s original ESM data files and automatically generates the landscape and places most of the objects. Assets still needed manual import, yet the result is a complete, continuous map of Skyrim running natively in Unreal Engine 5. Digital Dreams then layered their own texture work and ReShade presets on top, producing the footage that has people hitting pause every few seconds.
Most cameras ignore a wide stretch of near-infrared light that plants reflect and certain materials absorb in unexpected ways. One maker spent three months turning three ordinary USB webcams into a single system that records that invisible band as full color video. Project 326 started with the same $15 modules many people already own. Each sensor already responds to near-infrared once the factory IR-cut filter is gone.