TechEBlog -

AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case Makes Everyday Open Ear Buds Into Apple’s $149 Quiet Option

By Jackson Chung September 20, 2026

Photo credit: Macrumors
Apple just put Active Noise Cancellation, Adaptive Audio, and stem volume swipes into the open ear pair that costs $149, and that price is the whole story. AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case arrived in stores on September 18 at the same starting money Apple used for AirPods 4 two years ago, except ANC is now standard instead of a $50 upcharge. You still get the familiar short stem and the same 4.3 gram bud that rests in the bowl of the ear with no silicone tip. A redesigned multiport acoustic layout and next generation Adaptive EQ are meant to add depth and detail across a wider range of ear shapes, while Personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking keeps music, movies, and games moving with your head.

Whatever You Asked For, Slate Auto’s Electric Pickup Truck Did It Across Eight Cities

By Bill Smith September 20, 2026

Two weeks, eight-ish cities, and one pre-production Slate pickup rolling from Indiana toward California with no script and no spare day to get ready. Slate Auto framed the You Asked For It Tour as a working road trip rather than a victory lap. Followers sent tasks by comment and direct message. The crew took the next one that landed, loaded the truck, and left.

Making LEDs at Home From an Online Wafer, a Shed Cleanroom, and a Laser Bought on eBay

By Jackson Chung September 20, 2026

Dr Semiconductor already had working DRAM cells from a class 100 cleanroom built inside a home backyard shed. Packaging those silicon chips onto a circuit board was the next problem, because silicon is opaque and lining up pads by eye is a guessing game. Gallium nitride grown on sapphire is transparent, already contains the layers that make blue light, and happens to be the same material used in commercial LEDs. A two-inch epiwafer costs about $160 and lasts a long time once you dice it.

Dusklight Patch 2.0.0 Turns Zelda Twilight Princess Into a Native Port You Can Mod and Randomize

By Bill Smith September 20, 2026

TwilitRealm shipped Dusklight 2.0.0 earlier this week, and the build is the first time this unofficial Twilight Princess port feels finished as a platform rather than a careful reconstruction. Dusklight is a reverse-engineered reimplementation of the 2006 GameCube and Wii adventure, grown out of the zeldaret/tp decompilation and the Aurora framework. You still supply your own legally dumped disc, usually converted to a compact .rvz file. Nintendo assets are not in the download. What arrives from GitHub is original code, licensed CC0, that compiles natively for Windows, macOS, Linux, Steam Deck, Android, and iOS.

Whisplay HAT+ Rebuilds Google’s Offline Gemma Translator Into One Compact Pi 5 Slab

By Jackson Chung September 20, 2026

Google Creative Lab published Gemma Translator back in August 2026 as a voice box that never phones home. Alan Yam, Shashwath Santosh, and Dan Motzenbecker built it with help from Google Antigravity, then posted the code, model scripts, and 3D-print files on GitHub under Apache 2.0. You talk into a microphone. Moonshine turns the recording into text. Gemma 4 E2B, running locally through LiteRT-LM, translates that text. Moonshine speaks the other language from a speaker. After the first download, the radio can stay off.