Sixteen years after Apple discontinued production, a single 6th-generation iPod Nano currently stands in the center of a full workstation with three separate displays. The device, released in 2010 as the final iPod model Steve Jobs introduced, handles music playback, photo slideshows across every screen, and crystal-clear voice recordings all at once. A YouTube creator who runs the Will It Work? channel took on the challenge of stretching this tiny player into something far more capable.
Cars race down a nearly vacant stretch of highway. Two drivers grasp their phones tightly as a FaceTime video call continues between them. The speedometer reads 70 mph, but there are no cell bars in sight, nor do any familiar Wi-Fi networks appear. HaLow technology within each vehicle communicates with a handful of little boxes mounted on the dashboards. These units form a private wireless web that connects the vehicles, with each box essentially chatting to the one next to it, effortlessly passing data so the link never fails.
Players who swapped Game Boy Advance cartridges as kids will remember the thrill of returning to Hyrule for the final time in 2004. That was the year The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap was released, a game that many people overlooked but provided one of the series’ most original ideas to date. Fast forward to now: an unofficial native port allows you to run the game natively on Windows or Linux, without the need for an emulator or the hassle of an odd setup.
Researchers have found a way to mix bacteria into plastic so the material works normally but then disappears entirely when triggered, nicknamed ‘living plastics’. Engineers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology started with polycaprolactone, a polymer already used in 3D printing and medical sutures. They added dormant spores from two specially modified strains of Bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacterium.
Apple discontinued sales of its cheapest Mac Mini model earlier this week, raising the starting price of its compact desktop to $800 for a basic computer with a little more storage. Many people who had their eye on that small PC are now faced with a different decision, one that requires them to reconsider what they truly need and can afford. For them, the 11-inch iPad Air M4, priced at $519.99 (was $599), provides a viable solution for keeping everyday computing simple, light, and affordable.
Zach King, also known as FinalCutKing, has been a fan of the Star Wars franchise since he was a child. The re-release of the original trilogy in 1999 got his attention, and now he’s turned his passion for Star Wars into something truly unique: a full-fledged recreation of the 1977 film constructed almost exclusively of cardboard and a few other basic materials.
Over the past two weeks, those of us who spent hours mulling over the Strogg combat from Quake 4 have been in for a treat, a 10-minute clip of the previously unfinished expansion. The Awakening has appeared on the internet. That’s right, Justin Marshall has now produced a clean version free of the obvious watermarks that were muddying up prior versions of the footage. Anyone viewing can now see a truly raw early prototype build straight from the creators, with all of the bells and whistles intact as they were when the team ceased working on it.
Boston Dynamics engineers just released new footage of their Atlas robot being tested. The machine is shown lurching from two feet to all sorts of weird positions, challenging its balance with each stride. It is not uncommon to watch it shift its weight from both legs onto one while the other extends outward like a spear, arms waving in sync to keep its center of mass stable as it totters about. Atlas quickly puts both hands on the floor and throws its entire body into a handstand, smooth as silk.
Unbox Therapy’s Lewis Hilsenteger tore open an unassuming box shipped from China, and inside was a dummy unit of Apple’s purported foldable iPhone Ultra. In its opened form, it becomes a large tablet-like rectangular device, but when folded in half, it becomes like a passport that can fit into one’s back pocket. Its dimensions are 117mm high, 84mm wide, 11mm thin on its narrowest side, and 16.5mm where the camera sticks out.
Martini and Hansi of Nerdforge have long been splitting their time between crafting one-of-a-kind leather bound books and building custom computers. One day, they were wondering what would happen if they combined the two worlds into one project. The end result looks like a large, old book pulled from a dusty library shelf and placed on a desk.