Luxo Jr. has been bouncing around in the hearts of animation fans since the 1986 Pixar short, and LEGO has now given everyone a chance to own a version of that iconic lamp through a new Ideas set (#21357). The 613 piece build, priced at $55.95 (was $70), comes together at a satisfying pace for an adult set, with most of the time spent shaping the lamp’s articulated arm and weighted base.
Billions of marshmallow chicks roll off a single production line in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the fact that each one once took 27 hours to make by hand makes the modern process all the more remarkable. An engineer in the early 1950s changed everything with a machine that collapsed that timeline dramatically, and today a finished batch of Peeps marshmallow candy takes just six minutes from start to shelf.
Swedish designer Love Hultén’s latest creation, the NES-SY2.0, is real nostalgia overload. On the surface, this object resembles a wooden mock-up of the Nintendo Entertainment System from the 1980s. However, opening the front panel reveals what it’s all about. This item is a full-fledged music synthesizer that nonetheless proudly wears its gaming roots on its sleeves.
NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines a $180.4 million contract to deliver seven science payloads to a carefully chosen site near the lunar south pole. The Houston based company will use one of its larger lander configurations for the mission, designated IM-5, with a target landing date of around 2030 at Mons Malapert. The location was selected for good reason. The ridge maintains fairly consistent line of sight with Earth, receives relatively steady sunlight, and sits close to permanently shadowed regions that may hold water ice, a resource that could prove critical to sustaining long term human operations on the Moon.
The Veehop 4WD Scooter is worth a look for anyone who wants to take a scooter somewhere a standard two wheeler simply could not handle. Four wheels, each with its own electric motor and independent suspension, give it the kind of all terrain capability that the name suggests, and with the stem folded down it is compact and light enough to fit in most car trunks.
Spray paint artists have long dealt with a frustrating problem. Getting the range of colors a single mural might need means carrying a heavy collection of cans and inevitably running out of one shade mid-project with a pile of barely used others left over. Sandesh Manik spent years as a mechatronics student building a solution he calls Spectrum, a compact machine that draws from four standard spray cans and blends them into hundreds of custom shades on demand.
Sony announced earlier this week that the PS5 is getting a price increase, with the new $649.99 price taking effect on April 2nd. Anyone willing to act in the next few days can still pick up the current 1TB disc edition at the existing $549.99 price from major retailers, which amounts to a $100 saving well worth acting on if a PS5 has been on your list.
An old Macintosh SE motherboard was sitting in a workshop gathering dust when its owner had a change of heart. Flipping through some early 90s magazines and a book that This Does Not Compute had held onto for decades, he found himself reading about mail order Mac builds that hobbyists had been quietly assembling from catalog parts, earning the nickname Cat Macs for exactly that reason. They offered a way to get into Apple hardware without paying full retail, and the idea stuck with him. This time around he would do something similar, but with a 3D printer doing the heavy lifting.
