Dan Wood sat down with the same kind of machine that once filled university labs and design studios, the blue-and-white Power Mac G3, and rebuilt the exact setup he remembered from the early 2000s. Nearly three decades later the computer boots, runs its original software, and still feels purposeful in a way modern machines rarely do.
Retroid opened shipping on the Pocket Nova at the end of July, and the early reaction from people who care about older consoles has been unusually consistent. This is the one they have been waiting for if their idea of a good handheld starts with a screen that matches the games instead of forcing them into a modern widescreen box.
Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy of The Slow Mo Guys have spent years filling giant balloons with water and then filming the results at ridiculous speeds. Their latest outing takes the familiar setup and adds a slope. Dan, who stands six feet tall, climbs into a matching six-foot water balloon perched on a roughly five-foot ramp. Once inside, the balloon starts rolling. High-speed cameras running at 2,200 frames per second turn the brief tumble into something you can study for minutes.
Photo credit: MVRDV
Visitors to the Netherlands approaching the south bank of Rotterdam’s river Maas will soon meet a structure that looks more like a geological formation than anything built by human hands. Seven massive, rounded forms pile one on top of another, their surfaces broken by deep pockets, ledges, and irregular openings. Greenery will spill from those openings. Water will collect in them. Birds and insects will find shelter there. The whole arrangement rises from the edge of a new tidal park in the Waterkant district, right where a future third city bridge is planned to touch down.
Photo credit: NintendoWire
Kevin Braun runs OneStopWonders, a small retro shop in Waukesha, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles west of Milwaukee. Six years ago a man walked in with a plain rectangular box and sold it to him. The seller explained that his grandfather had operated a precious-metal recovery business. Nintendo had once sent the company old NES circuit boards so the gold contacts could be melted down and salvaged. This particular box never made it into the furnace. Instead it sat in a garage for more than twenty years before landing in Braun’s temperature-controlled storage unit.