TechEBlog -

A Closer Look Inside the 1996 Popular Mechanics Car Guide CD-ROM Reveals Woodgrain Vipers and Invoice Prices

By Bill Smith August 7, 2026

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.

NSF’s Inoyue Solar Telescope Captures Tiny Swirls Covering the Sun That May Explain Its Superheated Atmosphere

By Jackson Chung August 7, 2026

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.

PSP Go Gets a Power Boost That Nearly Doubles Its Thickness

By Bill Smith August 7, 2026

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.

Spring Loading the Screw, How a Maker Finally Stopped His Adjustable Wrench From Rounding Bolts

By Jackson Chung August 7, 2026

Most of us keep one of those adjustable wrenches around even when we know better. It sits in the toolbox because it covers a range of sizes without forcing a full set of fixed wrenches onto the job. Then the jaws shift just enough during use, the head of the bolt loses its sharp edges, and a five-minute task stretches into a longer recovery session. Someone Should Make That decided enough was enough. He walks through the exact problem that turns ordinary fasteners into rounded messes and the method he used to solve it on a small CNC mill.

3D Time-Lapse of Manhattan Showcases 1600 to 2026, Goes From Quiet Shore to Crowded Skyline

By Jackson Chung August 6, 2026

Christian Ivan worked for months within Blender, carefully creating a flawless 3D model of Manhattan Island, from a desolate landscape in 1600 to 2026. The final output was an 8-minute piece of work that scarcely claimed to be historically accurate. Ivan admitted to using ancient maps and atlas photographs from the New York Public Library to achieve the desired effect.