Apple put active noise cancellation on the $149 AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case last month, and the price gap with the year-old AirPods Pro 3, priced at $179 (was $249) for early Prime Day, suddenly looked harder to defend. Shoppers who only wanted a little quiet on a train now have a cheaper open-ear option. People who sit with both pairs still reach for the Pro 3 when the room gets loud.
Sally Gray flew to San Diego in December 1996 for a children’s science show with a name that already sounded like a dare. It’ll Never Work had sent her to the visual arts department at the University of California, and the brief was odd even by the standards of that series. She was supposed to meet one of the most important young painters alive. His name was AARON. He was 23. His work had already hung in serious galleries. He was also a computer program, and Gray introduced him that way on purpose, as if the hardware were a student who had grown up in the department.
Electronic Arts shipped The Simpsons Game in 2007 across the Nintendo DS, Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PSP, and never put a copy on a personal computer. Nearly two decades on, a solo developer going by YesterMester has rebuilt the Xbox 360 version so its own code runs on Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck. Version 0.0.6.2 of The Simpsons Game Recompiled landed on GitHub in early October 2026, and it already boots, plays its videos, saves, loads, and runs its levels.
Used copies of the HP 35s now clear two hundred dollars, and the SwissMicros machines that carried the reverse Polish habit forward sit even higher, around three hundred ten dollars for a 42n. Inevati Systems wanted that kind of calculator back: programmable, comfortable on an engineering exam, able to graph, handle matrices, store expressions, solve equations, and take input in reverse Polish notation or ordinary algebraic entry. Buying one was out of reach. Building one became the project, and this first video is the hardware half of that work.
Back in the middle of 2006, a small company called Chip PC Technologies started shipping a computer that vanished into the wall. Jack PC occupied the same opening as a standard network jack, behind a faceplate barely larger than a light-switch cover, and every port a desk worker needed sat on that plate. Offices were paying for floor space by the square foot, and a tower under every desk ate room, power, and repair hours. Chip PC, founded in 2000 and based in Ness Ziona, built thin clients for companies that already ran Citrix or Microsoft terminal servers.