Quick Fix is an art installation—a vending machine—that sells likes and followers for your social media accounts. Read the rest

CNC Kitchen's 18-minute video on nozzle wear in 3D printing involves sending abrasive filaments (the abrasiveness comes from pigments and additives like carbon fiber, etc) through a variety of nozzles (mostly cheap ones from China), then measuring the results with a micrometer and by taking castings of their interiors -- but the best part is when the nozzles are clamped to the business end of a CNC mill and milled down into cross-sections. Man, I love cross-sections. (via Four Short Links) Read the rest

Device Orchestra's first attempt at a classic video game theme. Other highlights from the channel include Spice Girls on 5 toothbrushes, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a Ladyshave and The Imperial March on a toaster. Read the rest

Apple announced the long-awaited modular Mac Pro yesterday. It's expensive, starting at $5000, but the faithful wanted some truly pro equipment and they got it. Even the 6k monitor to go with it is hard to fault at $4000, as there's nothing else out there to compete but for a plasticy 8k Dell that's only a little cheaper.

But $1000 for the stand? Even that was a little much for the audience at WWDC, whose collective gasp gave the presenter something to trip over.

Still, compare it to the roasting Steve Jobs got when he announced that Internet Explorer would be the default Mac browser:

Read the rest

"In this video I'm restoring an old French Wonder lamp," writes MyMechanics (Patreon). "My good friend TysyTube Restoration bought this Wonder lamp on a flea market in Paris. He asked me if I want to restore it and obviously I said yes. He already restored two of them himself, I link his videos and channel below. These Wonder lamps are very well known in France, they're used on railroads mostly as far as I know."

I want to put a Raspberry Pi in one of these and I don't know why. Read the rest

You know what's better than a smartwatch? Literally everything else. But especially: the centuries' worth of wrist-mounted paint palettes worn by some artists. Read the rest

The Universal Serial Bus first showed up in 1996, replacing SCSI and other interfaces—and the haphazard wizardry it took to get anything working with them. That's not to say, however, that it was easy—or that things just worked from then on. Joel Johnson (previously) interviews Ajay Bhatt, formerly of Intel, who dreamed of "one port to rule them all."

I also struggled, even as a technologist. I struggled with upgrading my PC when the multimedia cards first started coming out. I looked at the architecture, and I thought, you know what? There are better ways of working with computers, and this is just too difficult.

I like the idea of solving the world's interoperativity problems with "power breakfasts at Denny's". Read the rest

From its archives, RTÉ floats an Irishman with a motorized bar stool. It turns out that "I shall motorize this bar stool" is a frequent independent innovation, as many videos on YouTube attest. I've stacked a bunch after the jump for your education and amusement. Read the rest

Christian Cawley listicled 10 old devices upcycled to house a Raspberry Pi (including the Tomy toy dashboard OutRun previously at BB).

Embedded above is a Pi, with a wee LCD monitor, embedded in a 1975 mini TV by Martin Mander. Perfection!

This is a Hitachi I-89-311 portable TV that I've converted into a retro wall-mounted information station! It displays useful content in a series of full-screen Chrome tabs, and turning the TV's tuning dial switches between the pages. The volume button controls scrolling, the on-off button refreshes the page, and the TV has a PIR motion sensor so it turns off when you walk away.

“Welly, welly, well, to what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this ganjy gadget? What’s it going to be then, eh?

There was me, that is Lexa, and my pelendus Pria, Georgina, and Dim, all sat in the So Milkbar with the package sent my way, safe of the rainy blacklight without. As everybody is fast to forget, newspapers not being read much these days, this thing is quite the jem, folding like a zagamine and opening up to play any viddytube or app.

A dayback marvel, as the literature has it, so here we are ignoring the sayjaylays at the bar in favor of this mystic slab. It was the jang, or so we were told, and two grand to boot.

Unspun from its box, the ol' android came on and the hardware was alive. Oh, jala, jala! Like a sheet of rarespun heaven metal or silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now under my flicking and tapping fingertips. Gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh, flipping and folding, a wonder of wonders, even its music a cage of silk. Ah sa, my sisters, who well wanted a go and made grabby grabs at the magic machine.

"Over my baejae body girls," said I, recoiling and fending. There was yet a film on it, the protector that comes on all such things. Off I pulled this sheeting, daksal and slippy, as any would do. But within seconds there was a line and a flutter and then another and more. Read the rest

The bookends ($79) are the clear winner here, but the robot hand tankard ($58) is pretty sweet too; they're made of painted resin (with a stainless steel insert in the tankard), pre-order now for July shipping. (via Geekologie) Read the rest

I'd call it a spoiler, but you already know what's coming: "As Seen On TV" garden gadgets are not much good, however ingenious they seem to be. Household Hacker picked up a few items and subjected them to tests. None were terrible or dangerous, but the gimmicks don't really work — a trimmer that uses cheap zip-ties works OK, for example, but the ties are eaten so quickly that it's a false economy and a great example of the Vimes theory of boots. Read the rest

The Inverter is a kickstarted, sub-$500, 34mm automatic mechanical watch built around Citizen's Miyota Calibre 9000 movement, augmented with a custom module that makes the watch run backwards, so that it can be mounted so that the movement is exposed (beneath a sapphire crystal), with the back of the watch becoming its "face." Read the rest

Damon Beres notes that the situation with folding displays is quickly going to hell.

Enter Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, a kind of metal and glass taco that could define a new category of personal device — provided the company can get the thing to work. Several tech writers accidentally broke the gadget’s foldable display shortly after receiving review units, which led Samsung to delay the Galaxy Fold’s launch indefinitely. On Monday, the company said it would provide an update in the “next few weeks.” (Samsung’s official preorder link for the Galaxy Fold now leads to a 404 page.)

But even if Samsung eventually says it has worked out the kinks, you shouldn’t buy one. Not yet, anyway. There are the obvious problems that go beyond the breakable display. The Galaxy Fold is gut-blastingly expensive at $1,980, and review units contained design flaws that were revealed in a teardown by iFixit. (Facing pressure from Samsung, iFixit later removed its examination “out of respect” to the partner that leaked the phone.)

Unrepairable at any cost short of buying a new one, too. Read the rest

The Build Cave is a California-based prop-maker whose Etsy store is focused on decor for haunters with an emphasis on haunted, vintage elevators (!!), and which includes these delightful resin skull fence-toppers designed to be affixed to PVC pipe verticals and painted; they're $95/dozen. (via Creepbay) Read the rest

Last October, a startup called Helm announced a $500, plug-and-play home email server that was designed to be a secure, decentralized, privacy-oriented alternative to using one of Big Tech's email systems like Gmail, an option that was potentially even more robust than using email from a privacy-oriented provider like Riseup or Protonmail because your metadata would not be stored anywhere except in your home. Read the rest