Michael Rechtin spends his days as a full-time aerospace engineer and his evenings turning filament into machines that most people would still expect to come from a factory. His latest project takes an ordinary electric ducted fan and adds a combustion section behind it, creating a functional afterburner that he then put on a thrust stand to measure what actually happens when fuel joins the airflow.
Amazon spent years selling cheap plastic tablets that locked you into a limited app store and showed ads on the lock screen. The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro marks a clear break from that pattern. It ships as a full Android device with access to the Google Play Store, an aluminum body, and a 12-inch screen that reviewers have called one of the strongest reasons to consider it over more expensive options.
Photo credit: Ben Rowlands
Microsoft’s all-digital Xbox Series X in Robot White, priced at $599.99 today (was $749), removes the disc drive while keeping every bit of the original hardware performance intact. An eight-core custom Zen 2 processor runs at 3.8 GHz, paired with a custom RDNA 2 graphics processor delivering 12 teraflops across 52 compute units. Sixteen gigabytes of GDDR6 memory split into high-speed and standard pools handle the load, letting games target true 4K resolution with frame rates reaching 120 on compatible displays.
Australian YouTuber TrashBench decided an old outdoor air conditioner unit sitting in the trash deserved a second life as the biggest radiator his test bench had ever seen. He took the outdoor half of a discarded Fujitsu split-system rated for four kilowatts of cooling, emptied the refrigerant, and kept only the parts that matter for water cooling: the large finned coil, its axial fan, and the pump.
Eden-NX2 appeared on October 29 as a pre-release fork of the Eden emulator, created by a developer known as Takoroka and hosted on the Eden project’s own git server. It adds experimental support for Nintendo Switch 2 software on Windows machines, and early tests already show Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza starting up and moving through their opening sections.