Block’s Retro Repairs picked up a used Red Rabbit CT-606 cotton candy vending machine for three hundred dollars. New, these units sell for around six thousand. The exterior looked custom and ready for an arcade floor, yet inside it still ran a full Android 7 system on a Rockchip industrial board wired straight into stepper drivers and control boards. What arrived was broken in more ways than one.
TrashBench decided ordinary water blocks were optional. In a recent experiment the channel stripped everything away and simply pumped water across the exposed dies of a graphics card and a processor. A 3D-printed plastic fitting, some epoxy, and a willingness to risk hardware produced results that surprised even the person running the tests.
Photo credit: Khyzyl Saleem
Digital artist Khyzyl Saleem, better known as The Kyza, took Ferrari’s brand-new 849 Testarossa and gave it the 1980s face so many people felt was missing. Ferrari revived the name for the SF90’s replacement, yet the production car’s sharp modern lines left fans wanting stronger ties to the wide, straked icon that defined the decade. Saleem answered that quiet frustration by reskinning nearly every panel while keeping the greenhouse and the rear window that doubles as an engine cover.
Summer heat has a way of pushing cooking indoors, and few appliances handle that shift as completely as the Ninja Foodi Smart XL 6-in-1 Indoor Grill and Air Fryer, priced at $229.99 (was $280). This countertop machine combines high-heat grilling with air frying, roasting, baking, broiling, and dehydrating in one unit, all while keeping smoke to a minimum and taking much of the guesswork out of cooking meat.
Drivers and pedestrians along Sunset Boulevard near Selma Avenue keep doing double takes this week. High above the traffic sits a billboard that looks less like an advertisement and more like someone’s actual living room, complete with a couch, curtains, shelves of books, and a bay window facing the street. Inside that elevated room, roughly 30 feet off the ground, a man in a robe has been going about his day in full view of everyone below. Netflix built the setup as a promotion for its new sci-fi thriller The Last House, which began streaming on August 7.