DSI Electronics put this thing out in 2001 and called it the eBrain Talking Personal Electronic Companion. Model 69006. Silver plastic shell that folds open like some kind of sci-fi prop from a low-budget space show. Three AAA batteries keep it alive. No internet connection of any kind. No cloud. Just a little speaker, some buttons for mode and select, and an optical sensor that only understands light patterns from a CRT monitor.
Yeast spends its days chewing through sugar and splitting the leftovers into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Most people chasing homemade ethanol treat the second half of that reaction as pure waste and let the gas drift away. One maker decided the gas was too useful to ignore and set out to trap every molecule, dry it, chill it, and pack it into the same kind of high-pressure bottles that drive paintball markers and soda siphons.
Forty years after Optimus Prime met his end on the big screen, Robosen has built a machine that freezes that exact moment in metal, plastic, and motion. This limited Flagship model arrives finished in worn gray and black, complete with burns, bullet holes, cracks, and scratches that look like they came straight from the final fight in The Transformers: The Movie.
Travelers know the routine all too well. A laptop brick that eats half a bag, a phone charger that never quite keeps up, and a tablet adapter that somehow always gets left behind. Anker’s 715 Charger, priced at $19.99 (was $30), also called the Nano II 65W, collapses that pile into one small cube that still delivers serious speed.
Valve opened SteamOS a little wider this summer. More hardware could run it. More people started wondering if their old machines might work as cheap Steam Machines. Michael MJD decided to test the limits on purpose. He began with an HP Pavilion from the P6000 series. Inside sat a 3 GHz AMD Athlon, 9 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB SSD. The computer had no business hosting a modern gaming operating system. He wrote the recovery image to a USB stick, plugged it in, and tried to boot. Nothing happened. The machine used legacy BIOS. SteamOS insists on UEFI firmware. That first attempt ended almost as soon as it started.