Summer heat has a way of pushing cooking indoors, and few appliances handle that shift as completely as the Ninja Foodi Smart XL 6-in-1 Indoor Grill and Air Fryer, priced at $229.99 (was $280). This countertop machine combines high-heat grilling with air frying, roasting, baking, broiling, and dehydrating in one unit, all while keeping smoke to a minimum and taking much of the guesswork out of cooking meat.
Drivers and pedestrians along Sunset Boulevard near Selma Avenue keep doing double takes this week. High above the traffic sits a billboard that looks less like an advertisement and more like someone’s actual living room, complete with a couch, curtains, shelves of books, and a bay window facing the street. Inside that elevated room, roughly 30 feet off the ground, a man in a robe has been going about his day in full view of everyone below. Netflix built the setup as a promotion for its new sci-fi thriller The Last House, which began streaming on August 7.
Clint from LGR Blerbs loaded up a mid-90s Popular Mechanics Car Guide disc on a Windows 3.1 machine and spent over twenty minutes poking around its menus, photos, and videos. The software, released around 1995-1996 for PCs that could handle Video for Windows, promised buyers a way to research new and used vehicles without leaving the house. It delivered pricing data, specifications, magazine articles, still images, and full-motion clips for thousands of cars, trucks, SUVs, and vans. A disc image sits on the Internet Archive now if anyone wants to try it themselves.
Scientists pointed the world’s largest solar telescope at our star and came back with the sharpest photographs ever made of its surface. Those frames, captured at a wavelength of 416 nanometers by the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Maui, resolve features only tens of kilometers across. What they show is a restless landscape of bright granules ringed by darker, corrugated edges that twist and fold into miniature vortices.
Sony’s PSP Go arrived as a sleek digital-only handheld with a sliding screen and a design that slipped easily into a pocket. Years later its built-in 930mAh battery remains the one feature that still limits how long people actually play. Tito from Macho Nacho Productions recently installed an open-source solution created by Slystral that swaps in an 8000mAh cell and a custom rear shell. The result stretches play sessions from a few hours into the range of 25 to 50 hours while adding noticeable bulk.