TechEBlog -

Tito Restores Sharp’s Twin Famicom, the Licensed Console That Nintendo Never Sold Itself

By Bill Smith September 11, 2026

Nintendo almost never hands another company the keys to its hardware. In July 1986 Sharp walked out of that arrangement with a Japan-only console that stuffed a Family Computer and a Family Computer Disk System into one box and charged ¥32,000 for the privilege, more than buying both Nintendo units separately. Sharp already had a working relationship with Nintendo through Game & Watch production and a Famicom built into a television, and Sharp even held an older “Famicon” trademark from a convection oven. That history, plus a license, produced the Twin Famicom: a 60-pin cartridge slot, a disk-card slot with a yellow eject button, and a switch under the cartridge bay that locked one format while the other ran.

Webb Showcases How IRS 3 Still Makes Dust and Water 0.55 Light-Years From Sagittarius A*

By Jackson Chung September 11, 2026

Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI cameras filled a 2.5-by-1.8-arcminute frame with the inner parsec of the Milky Way, a packed star field 26,000 light-years away in Sagittarius. IRS 3 sits in that crowd, a cool, luminous asymptotic giant branch star only 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the galaxy. NASA posted the composite on September 10, 2026, from data taken August 11. Mid-infrared light from the same field had already given astronomers something they had never measured cleanly for this object: oxygen-rich silicate dust and water molecules in the star’s own envelope.

Sparse 3D Traversal, ETH Zürich’s PM-01 Humanoid Swings the Monkey Bars on Raw LiDAR

By Jackson Chung September 11, 2026

Humanoid robots can now handle monkey bars. Researchers at ETH Zürich’s Robotic Systems Lab showed an EngineAI PM-01 leaping onto a sparse overhead ladder, swinging hand over hand from one thin rung to the next, and dropping cleanly to the floor in a single unbroken sequence. The work, titled Learning Agile Perceptive Traversal of Sparse 3D Structures for Humanoids, treats the playground classic as a hard test of seeing thin, hanging geometry and then moving the whole body with split-second accuracy.

LGR Fires Up Hasbro’s 1999 Easy-Bake Kitchen Keyboard Playset

By Bill Smith September 11, 2026

Storage still coughs up late-90s leftovers for Clint Basinger of LGR, and the latest one is a molded kitchen that sits on a PC keyboard and pretends to bake. Easy-Bake Kitchen, sold by Hasbro Interactive in fall 1999 for about $40, arrived as a CD-ROM plus a strap-on playset aimed at ages three and up. Box copy promised to turn a Windows 95 or 98 machine into a kitchen full of fun with no waiting and no mess. LGR found his copy years after a viewer named Ryan Kitty mailed it in, then pulled it back out after a hurricane soaked the downstairs collection room in what he calls storm juice. A scrub later, the plastic was ready for another shift.

Waterloo Students Fold a Shirt Overnight Using a Laundry-Folding Robot

By Jackson Chung September 10, 2026

Steven Gong and his University of Waterloo engineering classmates needed a capstone that actually finished a chore companies have chased for years. Folding laundry looks simple until cloth bunches, sleeves hide, and every shirt arrives in a different mess. Their answer was a pair of follower arms that copied two leader arms driven by human hands, a pile of recorded demonstrations, and a single night of training.