This brilliant do-it-yourself mod kit lets you snap and screw together a pc gaming powerhouse.

No soldering gun required here!

The zombie-apocalypse will arrive any day, and when we wake up to live a life devoid of workshops, steady electricity, and solder, a life of on-the-run urban foraging, motorcycle chain gangs, and baked beans, we will surely need portable entertainment.

Battery-powered pastimes.

Even the walking dead will stop mid-stride from eating your brains, if they can fire up Half-life 2 and take a crowbar to the ass-crab aliens or hop on a mushroom in a good Super Mario Bros. 3 emulation.

Decapitate the zombies and reward humanity – and yourself – with handheld retro gaming goodness mashing genuine Nintendo Gameboy buttons.

Pick out your own Gameboy or Gameboy Color and for a hundred-dollar Kickstarter pledge, you can gut that bad boy and go full ReBoi!

The ReBoi comes with its own display and board, so the only thing your Gameboy has to be is an intact shell with buttons that still have that nice button-pressing resistance.

Leave the stickers and the spearmint gum.

For years, we have written about the incredible advances in robotics and with it, the many impressive programmable robot kits, and that is all made possible by Raspberry Pi technology.

Thousands upon thousands of video games from platforms like Atari 1600, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 have been rebuilt in emulators for download or for online gameplay.

There are innumerable choices of titles, thousands of gaming franchises, and all manner of 2D and 3D games available.

Let DARPA make the bots that can be guard dogs assailing the undead on approach, you can spend your time doing something way more meaningful and slap together your own power gaming emulator console.

All of the colossal gaming a ReBoi offers fits in a Gameboy in your pocket!

When I first read about a smart telescope, I balked, thinking some things will never supersede the experience of using a high-powered telescope to move and pivot and focus it on the astronomical event or celestial body yourself and exploring it with your eyes.

And though that initial thought may not be wrong, there is no way I do not want an affordable, portable (weighs l.1 pounds and is roughly the size of a nice hardcover book at 6.7×9.5×2.2 inches), and extremely easy to use telescope for myself or my young daughter to be able to on a whim enjoy the stars!

Do you plan on photographing the solar eclipse visible in North America in 2024 or in western Europe in 2026?

Why not? These opportunities only come around once every twenty years or so.

Hestia the smartphone-based telescope is on Kickstarter for another 12 days and is available for $189 USD if you need extra impetus.

The Hestia telescope is phone-powered and is built for the future and its myriad possibilities for different smartphone shapes and sizes.

So, without burning your retinas right out of your skull, you can arm a Hestia with your phone and shoot the awe-inspiring solar and lunar eclipses of the world in stunning detail and alarming clarity while you look on through safety glasses or shields.

Hestia offers a limited (only for telescopes) but still invigorating 25x magnification, and I am blown away by the images a new iPhone captures with a Hestia.

The blood orange and crimson views of the sun with a solar filter and without are as apocalyptic as they are inspiring.

The easy-to-learn telescope fits most tripods and comes with a fantastic Gravity app that offers up astronomical insights and allows for your taking pics in both Jpeg and TIFF formats.

Just how does the Hestia work so well to give us the ability to stare up into the man-in-the-moon’s nasal cavity so deeply?

Hestia has a patented design for using a six-lens optical setup with a 1.2 inch objective and prisms that align to focus the light, and the stars, and beam them to your phone’s camera sensor.

Pack the Hestia for every trip and enjoy the facets of the sun and the stars as seen from your location on earth!

Power.

It is what all of us, both techy and Trekkie alike, require to fuel our quiver of gadgets.

From our Star Trek TOS Bluetooth Communicator to our smartphone, iPad, smartwatch, Fitbit, and e-reader.

Typically, a nest of cables awaits some cluttered corner of the kitchen counter, or the office desk, or the outlet adorned with stackable Christmas lights’ plugs.

Now imagine you need to make that private call and adorn your noise-canceling headphones to drown out the incessantly barking dalmatian. But alas, the headphones are tangled in a quagmire of both tens of feet of cables and the thousands of dollars of gadgetry fighting for their connections that have to be handled all too carefully to avoid damaging anything or worse…unplugging them.

Our lifeline of gadgets require juice, but that does not have to run our lives.

What if a sturdy eco-friendly wooden dock existed that collected all of the stray feet of charging cables and their attached tech into a neatly ordered set of trays?

The Pezin & Hulin Bamboo Charging Station can charge up to five devices comfortably and hold even more within its five trays, two adjoining compartments and an included detachable smartwatch shelf.

The reality is you choose the charging dock to use within the Pezin & Hulin Bamboo Charging Station – it does Not come with one.

That is the only grievance I have with this, though it would have driven the price up considerably from the current $33 price point.

This renewable bamboo charging station is light but sturdy, simple and sexy.

Six one-foot cables are included with the Pezin & Hulin Bamboo Charging Station so that short, untangled iOS cables (three of them), USB Micro charging cables (two of them), and a single USB-C cable replace any need for the jump-rope lengths of cables that usually adorn our goodies.

Measuring in at 10 inches by 5.9 inches, this piece of desk candy can adorn the office desk or watercooler, kitchen counter or table, living room end table, or anywhere you wish to organize and hide or organize and show off your indispensable tech.

So much thought has gone into this particular Pizza Ax that it is worth importing from the U.K.

The Vikings must have left their mark in England, not just in terms of battle tactics, but also literal marks in the food.

Let me give you a scenario: you have bought a large, heavy-duty pizza wheel cutter, and you take this impressive looking piece of kitchenware to your pie.

The light gleams from the steel wheel as it slices right across the entire pizza in one clean cut.

But alas, upon attempting the second cut the blade keeps getting stopped and jarringly – and begrudgingly it seems – barely makes it across for a second cut.

You look and the works are jammed full of meatball, cheese, and sauce.

A quick brush of the hand to free the wheel and OUCH!

The hot pizza particles bite back.

Cutting the rest of the pie is a bi- er, it is not fun. And then the worst part comes later as the caked on cheese cools when you try to clean the damn thing and the sauce and mozzarella do not budge.

We can do as our ancestors did: we can do better.

Behold, the ultimate pizza cutter, designed and made solely for Raven Forge to be the final form of all pizza cutters. The holy hand grenade of pizza cutters. [ravenforge.com]

“One, two, four! – no, wait – three!” And launch the Pizza Ax, just like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, toward the steaming pie to vanquish the foe that is in this case the smoldering cheese, meatballs, and sauce that clogs up the typical pizza cutter’s wheel.

Raven Forge has carefully thought of everything.

Not only does the Pizza Ax feather over 8 inches (22cm) of blade length to easily cross from one edge of the pie to the other, they built this specifically to work like an ulu knife eliminating the pizza cutters clogging and inefficiency thereafter.

It is a sharp blade made of 440 stainless steel tested to standup to rigorous pizzas with little maintenance.

The blade bears Viking elder futhark runes spelling “Raven Forge.”

The handle is made of English ash with a light burn to show the gorgeous grain of the wood.

The 75 pounds this costs is truly an invaluable lifetime investment.

And this ax is just plain fun!

Keep it in your belt for a home security option!

The folks at The Wave Talk have summed up our worst fears in a single, concise statement:

“IS IT REALLY SAFE TO DRINK THAT WATER?”

Their invention, the WaTalk cup, measures the turbidity of the water within its depths in 15 seconds!

What is ‘turbidity’ you ask? Hell, I had no idea.

But apparently it is a real overall measurement for water plants, most of which are only considered safe with the turbidity being less than .3 NTUs.

Turbidity is exactly what we need to monitor the 21^st century zombie apocalypse streams, and ponds, that we come upon while traveling past migrating hordes of hungry brain-eaters.

Pollutants, bacteria, and dangerous chemicals make up the turbidity, and with a cup like this you can check your tap water, the fridge water filter you pretended to change the past three years while you hit the reset button instead, and that expensive Hollywood bottled water of the day, smart, dumb or otherwise named.

To break down what is fit for drinking into four LED colors that show in less than a minute is a feat!

The WaTalk is extremely impressive for the simplicity and effectiveness featured.

A hundred dollars and you can know for sure how nasty that garden hose water has been for all these many years dating back to when we lived off it as a kid (or as a lazy adult a week ago).

Now portable devices for measuring water quality can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, so this Kickstarter being less than a hundred beans seems like a steal.

WaTalk has met its goal with five days to stretch it, but there are caveats to this gadget.

I happen to be a big water drinker. I drink a ton of water all day, and aside from AM coffee, it is often all I drink.

Good ole H2O.

So naturally I avoid water bottles, I actually change the water filter in the fridge (I swear), and I would want to know how effective that filtration system is daily.

Here is the caveat: the WeTalk is rechargeable (it takes two hours to fully load up on juice) and is listed as being made good for 300 charges.

If this thing lasts a day of testing, then mine is dead in less than a year.

If it lasts a few days on a charge, then I may get a couple years out of it.

I think if battery packs and solar and/or crank power stations or accessories could be mixed in so a long camping trip through the jungle to Incan ruins can keep this bad boy running then it would truly be a remarkable, world class, zombie-proof invention.

You have to watch the footage to really get a grasp on the Mini Pupper’s extraordinarily advanced powers!

It moves almost too life-like.

The Mini Pupper shuffles, hops, pivots, and leans, like a dancing machine.

This thing follows your facial’s movements, as well as your cup of coffee’s, and it can recognize the difference in both thanks to an OAK-D LITE OpenCV 3D camera module and its amazing spatial AI.

The bot lifts its whole body and flexes its legs like a dog would to follow your hand as it moves around.

To quote the Indiegogo page: With OAK-D-Lite vision, it’s now your Border-Collie-level smart robotic dog. Border Collies are amazing because they can learn very specific hand signals (and they’re neurotic about them).

That is a bar setting event: this unit, with its programmable faces that change expression can learn hand signals like a Collie, and be neurotic about it!

The freaky adeptness at moving like a living thing is explained in the twelve degrees of freedom built into the $600 Mini Pupper.

Where many mini-bots are limited with eight DOF, the Pupper is truly a hopping step above and beyond its bigger brothers.

Yes, it does remind us of Boston Dynamic and DARPA’s Legged Squad Support System (LS3) “Pack Mule” that is still haunting students in the campus woods of MIT, but there are several key differences.

The biggest one is the Mini Pupper is tiny by comparison.

This robot weighs in at 560 grams (19.75 ounces) and measures 209mm in length (just over 8” long).

Yes, the mini-part was kind of obvious, but the BIG difference in the two eerily Bradburyian bots is that the Mini Pupper is open source.

This little mechanized pup is inspired by the Stanford Pupper open source project and won a Hackaday Prize for its efforts.

All of the design files and source code are available from the Pupper Github, and this little guy has a Rasberry Pi-based board to make it extremely expandable, from the USB 3.0, SD card slots, two 4K mini-HDMI ports to a Gigabit Ethernet hookup.

If you like dogs and are allergic, or just love incredibly smart and capable bots like the new miniature king of robotics, the Mini Pupper, then an investment into this highly adaptable robot can be a great tool at a school or home.

This thirty-dollar powerhouse adapter from Logitech is a godsend!

For those who scoff at the tinny simulated surround sound, sans base, in soundbars and have a true audio/video receiver amp independently powering separate speakers and hooked up to a thumping subwoofer, especially surround sound setups with a true five-plus speaker setup, this device is for you.

You can also plug it into any speaker with a headphone jack and transform it into a Bluetooth speaker instantly.

Nice as a new expensive amp is, your old expensive amp has worked delivering the best quality audio for years or decades.

Maybe you have an old one for a gaming setup in the den and a newer one for movies in the living room or bedroom.

Either way, you do not need to buy a Bluetooth-enabled A/V receiver to reach the Bluetooth sound with Logitech’s reliable genius and quality sound in this little cube of a gadget.

The Logitech Bluetooth Audio Adapter has a 110v power cord, a button on top to link Bluetooth devices, and three inputs: one audio input to fit 3.5 mm jacks and one RCA jack with the traditional red and white inputs.

This thing could not be easier to use.

I bought a new TV that would only fit far from my surround setup in the living room, and I was resolved to not have surround for the foreseeable future.

Well, a good friend says to me: “see if the Samsung 4K has Bluetooth.”

And what do you know, The Wolf solved my problem!

Going in and selecting Bluetooth in the sound menu on the TV, I saw the Logitech listed there once I pressed the button on the mini-cube.

And then, BOOM, the bass rumbled throughout the house and perfectly clear audio of great range came from the array of speakers, just as if the TV was wired in.

The same worked with the iTunes and Spotify on the smartphone.

Crystal clear sound projected perfectly!

The Logitech Bluetooth Audio Adapter for Bluetooth may be tiny but it packs a wallop of great sound abilities into its $30 encasement.

The only complaint I have likely has more to do with my TV: once enabled, the Logitech cube will not stop playing through the amp or when the amp is off attempting to connect sound to it, interrupting the use of the TV.

If you have a little one napping, like I do, you may have to unplug the Logitech and the big sound, but there is no off button and the TV kept on bringing up a prompt to connect every ten seconds, even though the amp was off.

But that is a small price to pay for superior sound on-demand via Bluetooth!

This is no mere toy.

Using ancient designs that are long proven to help bring down a stone castle, or at least a small keep, the DDLDV Catapult (that is a mouthful of an acronym to say) is realized in all its glory, just at 1:24 scale.

Accurately fling candy, paper clips, gum, a halfling thief figure, and anything else you can think of a good 20 feet.

Click the vintage mechanisms’ cog back, spike by spike, dink, dink, dink, and once the lever is primed with your miniature wrench, you can release the lever and watch the satisfying arrow du jour – a piece of your lunch meat – hail down upon your enemies.

It may not take down the rock wall, but it could really mess up someone’s computer screen, or Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition grid.

Those halfling thief sneak attacks require precision.

And flinging enough of the player’s pieces out of their spacing can really be a dark and unexpected tool for a dungeon master equipped with the catapulting gear when the playing field needs leveling.

Every January a limited edition of 100 Desktop Leonardo Da Vinci Catapults are fully assembled by hand using Baltic birch wood and machined brass parts and put up on Kickstarter for a paltry $79 smackaroos.

This year, following the plague of 2020 (no metaphor necessary), is the matte black finish and it looks sharp!

The brass bolts and pieces really pop against the dark wood stain background.

These bad boys are 5 inches by 3 inches by 8 inches (Length X Width X Height).

And with less than a week left to sell, there are still some available, and a fantastic bonus comes with each da Vinci Catapult: perfectly fitting wooden balls made for the scoop of the catapult and maximum distance and damage.

To war!

After spending months trying to source parts during the great PC part shortage of 2020 (thanks Covid), my new dual-purpose PC was finally born. Although I had a brand-new PC, I still had the same lack luster mouse and keyboard pre-built peasants are accustomed to receiving in the packages they pick up at their local big box retailer.

It quickly became apparent that my 10 year old basic mouse was not up to the task of fast paced quick flick gaming. I needed a mouse built for speed and something with a few extra buttons for those custom fragging keybinds.

Enter the Logitech G MX518.

The MX518 is a remastered classic of an old tried and true design updated with the latest in sensor technology. As someone with no experience in the space, this is exactly what I needed. Something that so many people loved, and was so great, they had to do it again – it had to be for me, and it was.

In my search for the perfect mouse it seemed clear there has been a recent shift towards smaller, lighter mice. Which may be great for some but, at 6’3”, my hands are big. I needed something substantial and at 5.16 inches (131mm), the MX518 fits my hand perfectly.

In addition to an extremely comfortable ergonomic right-handed shape design (sorry lefty’s), this beast has all the fancy specs you need to play and compete at a high level. The HERO sensor boasts pixel level precise tracking at up to 400+ IPS max, 16,000 max DPI, 1ms report rate, and does it all pulling 10x less power than the previous generation.

The included G Hub software makes customizing your DPI settings and the 8 programmable buttons, a snap. Simply drag and drop a command, key, action, macro, or system setting right onto the button and viola.

Although people love to complain about peripheral software, I found it to be extremely intuitive and easy to use.

The additional programmable profiles make this mouse not only perfect for gaming but, also amazing for productivity. This was, by far, my biggest surprise.

I thought I needed a new mouse for gaming, it turns out, I just needed a new mouse.

How could this have happened? How did I ignore one of my most used tools?

When I stopped to realize I had wasted my life using a basic and relatively uncomfortable “free” mouse for the better part of my 20 year development career, it made me want to repeatedly punch holes in my drywall with all the fury of an angst filled teenager who has yet to fully comprehend how incredibly stupid and expensive punching holes in your own walls is.

All I can do now is be happy that I finally found it and help you from making the same mistake I did.

To anyone not interested in gaming, who made it this far, this is a great mouse… period. You don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy just how comfortable it is, and at $30 on Amazon, you really can’t go wrong.

For all of you first-time gamers out there, you don’t need to spend $100+ on a mouse to be competitive right out of the gate. Save that extra $70+ and finish off your new setup with a nice cheap mechanical keyboard instead.

Yes, the cruise bar table, while the place is devoid of patrons, is perfect for setting up the Switch’s built-in stand and for some Mario Kart Spouse Edition.

Wives do so relish the opportunity to mop the floor with their husbands in a game.

So, the dutiful husband agrees to liven up the early evening deadened bar scene with a battle mode of epic proportions.

But there are a couple of problems.

For one thing, that damn plastic foot tab will separate your fingernails from your cuticles while you attempt to extend the stand.

Fast forward to the turtle shell hurling.

The Nintendo Switch does include two working controllers, a gorgeous screen, and all that is needed to play a fully-fledged console video game anywhere.

But then every time the bartender brings another Scotch flight and, with a clunk, places the five short glasses on the table the damn thing falls over.

You take a dram, and then a big wave rocks the boat slightly and BAM you’ve just wasted your red shell and you are officially doomed, as the system falls over again.

The Switchblade Hub is the affordable solution to not spilling drinks in horror as you reach to pick up the console.

For less than fifty bucks USD, you get a heavy-duty case – and joycon guards – with a Swiss Army Knife of built-in goodies, including, you guessed it, folks, a damn sturdy stand!

Since the Nintendo brand dock is essential for playing on the big screen TV’s everywhere too, you have to unplug four different plugs (more if you are me and have the 4-player Gamecube controller adapter in there as well) in a knot of wires, including the ever elusive USB-not-quite-C wire to the power adaptor.

Basically when you have your home base, you want to leave the dock, you do not want to take it with you on the road to the hotel or Air B&B’s TV, because then you have to go home and try to reach behind your TV stand and hook it back up.

Charging the device is tough, and docking tougher unless you have a Switchblade Hub.

This thing provides an HDMI cable and a power cable hookup in the easily accessible top of the case.

Up to now, knock-off docks have been bricking (or burning) Nintendo Switch’s left and right because of their slightly modified USB-C charging ports (illegal, no?), but the word on that is out and the Switchblade Hub gives you the power you need, the stability, the HD capability and more!

Where else has the Switch fallen behind the times?

In sound! There is no Bluetooth setup to naturally hook up wireless headphones, an external speaker, or to sync up with your car’s stereo on a road trip (not meant for the driver, I got in trouble with that!).

If it is a portable powerhouse it needs to access Bluetooth accessories, and the Switchblade Hub does some magic here to allow this.

They tap directly into the board to ensure a reliable Bluetooth 5.0 connection.

Fifty bucks and you have magic in your hands.

This bad boy was funded by a frenzy of gamers in September at IndieGogo, and the campaign is selling like hotcakes!

There is even a package that includes for another $17 bones (or $66.90 USD) a custom carry case that looks rigid and tough like my current one at home, yet this allows for the Switchblade Hub to stay on the system and it fits in the portable attache case.

Go get one and feel like James Bond already (at least before your girlfriend pushes your Donkey Kong off a cliff).