Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

I’ve said it before, LEGO is an amazing thing. You can build so many useful things with these little bricks and their accessories. Why are we not building more houses out of this stuff? This heavy-lifting system is a good example of how strong a LEGO structure can be.

There are lots of types of pots out there for planting things, but most of them are simply variants of the same basic shapes. I’d rather keep my plants in something a bit geekier, like this custom-built Saturn V rocket planter by SimonRob.

Do you drink cans of soda to keep motivated during the day at work? You could get up from your desk and walk over to the vending machine, but that requires too much effort. What you need is your own desktop soda vending machine.

When you see a TIE fighter on fire, it usually means it’s been hit by a Rebel ship and it’s about to explode into a massive fireball. But here’s one case where a flaming TIE fighter will last for a good long time.

This past week, Amazon revealed a slew of new gadgets to upgrade your smart home setup. Among them is Guard Plus, a premium version of its Guard security service that lets you use your Echo speakers and Echo displays as home security devices.

When I was just 14-years-old, I managed to sneak into the movie theater to see John Carpenter’s gruesome, R-Rated horror movie The Thing. I left the theater both thrilled and horrified by the creepy creatures I had witnessed, and the incredible scares along the way.

Back in the 1980s, computers were largely shades of beige or grey plastic. While this look might seem dated by today’s standards of slim, glass and metal devices, there’s no question that these retro color schemes immediately bring back fond memories of the early days of personal computing.

There’s not much that’s cuter than Baby Yoda. LEGO clearly agrees and has just announced a new official LEGO set based on The Child from The Mandalorian. LEGO set number 75318 is as adorable as you’d expect and will make a great addition to any Star Wars fan’s bookshelf or desktop.

Holiday season 2020 should be a good one for video gamers, with the impending release of next-gen consoles from both Sony and Microsoft. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X pack graphics capabilities on par with many gaming PCs, so they need room for all of that hardware and cooling tech.

With reboots of The Lion King, Aladdin, and Mulan, Disney seems to be on quite the live-action remake kick of late. While some of these movies have been okay, I prefer to leave these Disney classics in the animated world where they belong.

Back in the 1970s, the idea of “pyramid power” was about as popular among crackpots as today’s flat earth theories. While the Egyptian pyramids and other pyramid-shaped structures possess no magical qualities, they are cool to look at and architecturally significant.

Do you love retro arcade games? I certainly do. While the pixel art character sprites get a whole lot of love, the fonts used to display your score and life status deserve much more appreciation. Typeface designer Toshi Omagari’s book catalogs dozens of the chunky pixelated fonts used in arcade games from the 1970s through the 1990s.

The original Rubik’s Cube is one of the most iconic and popular toys of all time. From its deceptively simple design to its frustrating complexity for noobs, to the amazing way that some people can solve them in seconds, they’re a mechanical masterpiece of puzzle goodness.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had a tendency to play with my food. I remember cobbling together all kinds of gross concoctions at the table whenever we went out to eat, and occasionally stacking food items like Lincoln Logs to create edible towers.

It takes a whole lot of work to create stop-motion animation. After all, the characters and scenery in each and every frame need to be precisely positioned before snapping each still image. At the traditional film rate of 24 frames per second, you need to shoot 1440 individual photos for one minute of footage.

Usually, when you think of Godzilla, you imagine the giant reptilian breathing fire from his mouth as he stomps on Tokyo. But it turns out that the monster can also dispense tissues between his mighty jaws.