Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This Startup Says Your House Should Be the Robot, Not ‘Have’ a Robot

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Most of the AI money right now is betting on robots. Hundreds of embodied-AI startups and their backers are convinced that a bipedal machine will eventually become the household’s operating system, rolling from room to room and handling everything. Endong Zhang, the founder and CEO of LiveLarge Home Inc., thinks that’s the wrong frame, and he’s pretty candid about it.

A robot, he points out, has limited battery life, limited field of view, and can only be in one place at any given moment, which makes it a fairly weak candidate for running a multi-room household with several people in it. His counterproposal is that the building itself is the smarter infrastructure bet, and he’s building a company around exactly that.

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The company Zhang founded in 2023 spent its first few years looking more like a serious California construction operation than a tech startup, delivering more than 20 accessory dwelling units (ADU) and residential projects across the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Endong Zhang – Founder and CEO, LiveLarge Home

In July 2026, LiveLarge revealed the Flagship L-Space, a standalone AI-native room environment and the clearest physical statement of Zhang’s thesis so far. Light, sound, air, privacy glass, and a voice assistant called Lila are coordinated as one system rather than a pile of separate apps, organized around three modes: Focus, Reset, and Passion.

Space AI: the invisible housekeeper

The conceptual core of Space AI is a deceptively simple question: can AI give every household some version of what a housekeeper provides? Zhang keeps returning to the housekeeper image because it captures something the smart home industry never quite cracked. A housekeeper reads the room, observes what’s needed, and acts without being told every small step. A traditional smart home, by contrast, receives a command or follows a fixed rule, and it doesn’t understand the situation, decide what should be done, or make a plan. “Without a human housekeeper,” Zhang says, “the home itself has to listen, observe, understand, decide and act.” That’s the jump LiveLarge is trying to make. LLMs, multimodal models, and a maturing robotics ecosystem are what make the timing feel genuinely different now rather than aspirationally so.

The room integrates a 5.1 surround sound system, adaptive lighting, fresh-air circulation, a 4K short-throw projector, and privacy glass into a single coordinated environment, all orchestrated by an AI assistant called Lila. The three modes, Focus, Reset, and Passion, were shaped directly by early users rather than invented in a whiteboard session. “People do not really want smarter devices,” Zhang told us. “They want to focus better, relax, recover, or spend time on something they care about.”

LiveLarge makes some deliberate engineering choices when it comes to privacy, with pretty straightforward reasoning: a room that watches, listens, and learns is exactly the kind of product that erodes trust the moment something leaks. The first rule is to do as much computation locally as possible, and L-Space uses an NVIDIA Jetson Orin as its local AI computer, with a large part of the sensing, data processing, storage, and inference happening inside the product. Sensitive information, including conversations, biometric signals, and usage data, can stay local.

The system uses voiceprints to recognize regular users, each user has a separate history and profile, and User A cannot access User B’s conversations or usage records. The full permission system is still in development, but the architecture already accounts for different access levels across family members, guests, and service providers. Zhang’s framing is tidy: “Personalization only makes sense within the permission given by the user.”

The Flagship L-Space is what Zhang calls a “concept car,” and the analogy holds up across more dimensions than the marketing might suggest. The Standard and Flagship models share the same core Space AI platform, but the key addition in the Flagship is vision: locally processed computer vision that lets Lila recognize individual users, read gestures, and actually observe what’s happening in the room rather than waiting to be addressed.

Vision is, in Zhang’s view, one of the most important sensors for a future AI-native home, and once AI can actually see a space, many services that are difficult today become possible. He’s testing facial identification and gesture control as more natural interaction layers on top of voice, and all of it runs on-device because visual data inside a home should never casually leave the building. “The engineering question is simple,” he says. “If AI can really understand a room, what useful services can it provide to the people inside it?”

The biggest lesson in getting from concept car to delivered product is that a lab demo and a product are different engineering objects. In the lab, every cable, firmware version, network condition, and room setup is controlled. A delivered L-Space has to survive shipping, installation, startup, software updates, and daily use. The customer also needs to set it up quickly, understand how to use it, and trust that the basic functions will keep working over time.

At current production volumes, many subsystems still use consumer-grade components, and the challenge of packing computing, storage, networking, IoT control, audio, projection, sensors, and actuators into a compact structure without compromising acoustics or airflow is, as Zhang puts it, closer to vehicle electronics than construction. “A feature is not finished when it works once,” he told us. “It is finished when it works repeatedly in the customer’s space.”

Technology is reshaping architecture and interior design

What the home looks like ten years from now, in Zhang’s telling, reads more like a tech product manifesto than an architecture brief. The house becomes a device in the same way a phone or laptop is a device: one integrated hardware and software system where every new appliance, robot, or sensor plugs into a shared runtime rather than living as yet another isolated smart product.

He also believes the intelligence shouldn’t stay tied to any specific building. “If you move, the home model, preferences and memory should move with you,” he says. “The new house becomes the new body, but the agent continues.” For designers, he sees a real reskilling moment coming, one where sensor placement, robot clearances, and interaction architecture start sitting alongside floor plans and material palettes as standard deliverables.

LiveLarge’s roadmap for the second half of 2026 includes bringing Space AI into ADU and broader residential products, which means the concept car phase has a fairly clear expiry date. You can see what the company is building at livelargetech.com.

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The post This Startup Says Your House Should Be the Robot, Not ‘Have’ a Robot first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple TV 4K Is Coming September 9, With a Gemini-Powered Siri You Can Actually Talk To

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Apple’s next Apple TV 4K is expected on September 9, and the headline feature is a Siri you can hold a conversation with. Siri AI runs on a custom 1.2 trillion parameter Google Gemini model inside Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which Apple reportedly pays Google around a billion dollars a year to license. It should reach the public with tvOS 27 in mid September, most likely around Monday the 14th. Leaked code in the macOS 26.7 release candidate lists an unreleased controller as ATVRemote1,5. Four years after the last box shipped, the living room finally gets the good Siri, and the remote gets demoted.

The current model has been on sale since November 2022 with an A15 Bionic chip, making it the longest running Apple TV between updates. Apple raised its price anyway in June, from $129 to $199 for the Wi-Fi version and $149 to $249 with Ethernet, blaming the memory chip shortage. The new box is rumored to carry an A17 Pro chip or newer, 8GB of RAM, and Apple’s N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. Apple has confirmed exactly none of it. My interest is in the stick, because a conversational assistant changes what a remote is even for.

Designer: Apple

The Siri Remote has always been the awkward part of this product. The 2015 glass touchpad version was famously easy to hold upside down. The 2021 aluminum redesign fixed orientation with a circular clickpad and a jog ring, but it stayed thin, cold, and easy to lose in a couch. Nobody expects ATVRemote1,5 to look radically different, although one can hope. The rumor mill’s best guess is a second generation Ultra Wideband chip for Precision Finding, which is a nice way of saying Apple is finally building a remote finder into the remote instead of asking you to turn your house upside down, or worse, strap a clunky AirTag to it.

Siri AI’s 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini model dwarfs the roughly 150 billion parameter models Apple’s own Foundation Models run on, and Google built it specifically to handle summarizing and multi step planning, the tasks Siri has failed at for over a decade. Apple’s answer to the privacy question is architectural rather than rhetorical: queries route through Private Cloud Compute, Apple’s own server silicon, so the assistant is Google’s brain wearing Apple’s skin. Whether Apple TV gets the full version or a scaled down version tied to on device processing is still unconfirmed.

None of this works without new silicon, which is presumably why Apple TV and HomePod mini were left out of the WWDC keynote entirely despite tvOS 27 shipping Apple Intelligence frameworks in its beta code. Current Apple TV and HomePod hardware simply cannot run it. That is also the best explanation for why Apple hiked the price of four year old hardware by 54 percent in June rather than discounting it toward obsolescence. The company was buying time, not margin.

What I find genuinely interesting is the inversion. For a decade, the remote was the product’s weak point and the box quietly did fine. Now the box is getting the transplant everyone wanted, and the remote becomes almost optional, a fallback for when you would rather not talk to your television. If Apple pulls off a Siri that understands “put on the thing with the guy from that show” without three follow up questions, the aluminum wand in your couch cushions finally gets to retire.

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Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years

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Florian Güllert spends most of his working life engraving shotguns. His bench sits in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, an Austrian province with zero watchmaking history and a four-century run of decorating hunting weapons. Urwerk handed him a raw titanium blank and asked him to bury the most sci-fi pocket watch ever built under Baroque ornament. He said yes, spent roughly 500 hours over three months, and produced the UR-1001 Amadeus, a piece unique that looks like a cathedral swallowed a computer. Gun engraving exists because a tool meant to outlive its owner gets decorated, which turns out to be this watch’s entire argument.

The Amadeus measures 106 by 62 by 23mm and shows satellite hours, retrograde minutes, an annual calendar, day and night, and a 39-hour power reserve on the front. The hinged caseback adds an oil-change indicator that turns red through years four and five, a counter tracking 100 years of running time, and a linear scale that climbs to 1,000. Güllert laser-cut the contours before touching it by hand, since titanium galls and work-hardens under a graver in ways precious metal does not. Every engraved surface stops at the sapphire. Inside, Urwerk’s matte black instrument panel carries on as though the ornament never happened.

Designers: Martin Frei and Florian Güllert for Urwerk

Titanium punishes a graver the way a stubborn hinge punishes a screwdriver, so Güllert’s first move was unfamiliar territory for a man used to steel. He rough-cut the relief with a laser, then went back in by hand with pneumatic chisels and files, balancing thick strokes against thin ones until the pattern read as depth rather than line. Backgrounds got textured, dotted, satin-brushed, or left matte depending on how he wanted light to catch each panel. Every edge was filed and rebalanced until the boundary between case and decoration effectively disappeared. That is a genuinely different skill set than cutting a scroll into a shotgun receiver, and it shows in how uneven the difficulty was across the piece.

The flanks and bezel run pure Baroque, scrolling acanthus leaves that could sit on an 18th century snuffbox. The caseback centerpiece is something else entirely, a quatrefoil rose-window panel with cusped Gothic arches framing the movement aperture, and the winding crown at 12 has been carved into an actual fluted coronet. Baroque excess on the outside, ecclesiastical stonework on the back, industrial sans-serif labeling the instruments inside. Three separate design languages sharing one case, none of them arguing with the others.

Three-armed satellite hours hand off to a retrograde minute display, three running-seconds hands split a minute into 20-second stretches, and a satellite annual calendar runs on three Maltese crosses riding a 93-tooth date wheel. Flip the watch over and the oil-change dial, calibrated for five-year service intervals, feeds a counter that advances in five-year steps toward a full century. Every hundred years, that counter sends a pulse to a linear scale on the caseback graduated all the way to 1,000. Yes, this pocket watch has a mechanical millennium indicator, and yes, it is exactly as absurd and wonderful as it sounds.

The UR-1001 has been Urwerk’s flagship strange object since 2011, when eight AlTiN-cased examples sold out at CHF 340,000 each, a number early buyers reportedly called cheap for what it did. We covered Urwerk’s other engraved oddities before, including the UR-210 Amadeus that first paired Güllert with the brand back in 2017, and the ambition here is visibly larger. Urwerk has not disclosed a price for this one, which tracks for a commissioned piece unique. Felix Baumgartner named it for Mozart, calling the composer a brilliant madman, and says he wanted a case as daring as the mechanics inside it.

Here is the part nobody selling this watch will say out loud. The 100-year and 1,000-year counters only advance while the movement is actually running, and a piece unique this expensive tends to spend its life in a safe rather than a pocket. Baumgartner’s own language calls the eventual buyer a custodian rather than an owner, which is a lovely way of admitting the millennium scale may never move past zero. A gunsmith spent 500 hours making sure it would look magnificent the whole time it doesn’t.

The post Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years

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Florian Güllert spends most of his working life engraving shotguns. His bench sits in Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, an Austrian province with zero watchmaking history and a four-century run of decorating hunting weapons. Urwerk handed him a raw titanium blank and asked him to bury the most sci-fi pocket watch ever built under Baroque ornament. He said yes, spent roughly 500 hours over three months, and produced the UR-1001 Amadeus, a piece unique that looks like a cathedral swallowed a computer. Gun engraving exists because a tool meant to outlive its owner gets decorated, which turns out to be this watch’s entire argument.

The Amadeus measures 106 by 62 by 23mm and shows satellite hours, retrograde minutes, an annual calendar, day and night, and a 39-hour power reserve on the front. The hinged caseback adds an oil-change indicator that turns red through years four and five, a counter tracking 100 years of running time, and a linear scale that climbs to 1,000. Güllert laser-cut the contours before touching it by hand, since titanium galls and work-hardens under a graver in ways precious metal does not. Every engraved surface stops at the sapphire. Inside, Urwerk’s matte black instrument panel carries on as though the ornament never happened.

Designers: Martin Frei and Florian Güllert for Urwerk

Titanium punishes a graver the way a stubborn hinge punishes a screwdriver, so Güllert’s first move was unfamiliar territory for a man used to steel. He rough-cut the relief with a laser, then went back in by hand with pneumatic chisels and files, balancing thick strokes against thin ones until the pattern read as depth rather than line. Backgrounds got textured, dotted, satin-brushed, or left matte depending on how he wanted light to catch each panel. Every edge was filed and rebalanced until the boundary between case and decoration effectively disappeared. That is a genuinely different skill set than cutting a scroll into a shotgun receiver, and it shows in how uneven the difficulty was across the piece.

The flanks and bezel run pure Baroque, scrolling acanthus leaves that could sit on an 18th century snuffbox. The caseback centerpiece is something else entirely, a quatrefoil rose-window panel with cusped Gothic arches framing the movement aperture, and the winding crown at 12 has been carved into an actual fluted coronet. Baroque excess on the outside, ecclesiastical stonework on the back, industrial sans-serif labeling the instruments inside. Three separate design languages sharing one case, none of them arguing with the others.

Three-armed satellite hours hand off to a retrograde minute display, three running-seconds hands split a minute into 20-second stretches, and a satellite annual calendar runs on three Maltese crosses riding a 93-tooth date wheel. Flip the watch over and the oil-change dial, calibrated for five-year service intervals, feeds a counter that advances in five-year steps toward a full century. Every hundred years, that counter sends a pulse to a linear scale on the caseback graduated all the way to 1,000. Yes, this pocket watch has a mechanical millennium indicator, and yes, it is exactly as absurd and wonderful as it sounds.

The UR-1001 has been Urwerk’s flagship strange object since 2011, when eight AlTiN-cased examples sold out at CHF 340,000 each, a number early buyers reportedly called cheap for what it did. We covered Urwerk’s other engraved oddities before, including the UR-210 Amadeus that first paired Güllert with the brand back in 2017, and the ambition here is visibly larger. Urwerk has not disclosed a price for this one, which tracks for a commissioned piece unique. Felix Baumgartner named it for Mozart, calling the composer a brilliant madman, and says he wanted a case as daring as the mechanics inside it.

Here is the part nobody selling this watch will say out loud. The 100-year and 1,000-year counters only advance while the movement is actually running, and a piece unique this expensive tends to spend its life in a safe rather than a pocket. Baumgartner’s own language calls the eventual buyer a custodian rather than an owner, which is a lovely way of admitting the millennium scale may never move past zero. A gunsmith spent 500 hours making sure it would look magnificent the whole time it doesn’t.

The post Urwerk Built a Hand-Carved Pocket Watch That Tracks Time for 1,000 Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

This 1,608-Piece LEGO David Comes with Its Own Historically Accurate ‘Detail’

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Michelangelo never gave David a fig leaf. Prudish museum directors did that centuries later, and one particularly famous plaster cast fig leaf still exists today, hanging on removable hooks at the Victoria and Albert Museum, ready to be clipped on whenever Queen Victoria or her modern equivalents came through for a tour. It is one of art history’s great compromises. You cannot un-carve marble, but you absolutely can hang a strategically placed leaf on it and call the problem solved.

LEGO builder paaadilla.17 just pulled the same move, except this time the leaf is a single green element and the whole statue is made of ABS plastic. His Ideas submission recreates David in full, not just the bust, standing at nearly 41 centimeters tall across 1,608 pieces, fig leaf included as the build’s cheekiest and most historically accurate detail. It already has a Staff Pick badge, which tells you LEGO’s own team appreciated the joke too.

Designer: paaadilla.17

Michelangelo famously carved David before the fight rather than after it, weight shifted onto one leg, sling draped over the shoulder, torso twisted into that slight S-curve that makes the whole figure feel like it is about to move. Getting that tension across in interlocking plastic, without a single curved surface to cheat with, is genuinely hard, and paaadilla.17 leans on layered slopes and offset bricks to fake the contrapposto rather than flatten it into a stiff standing minifig pose. He also gave David a tan colored base instead of matching the white brickwork, a small choice that does the same job as gallery lighting, making the figure pop instead of blending into its own plinth.

My favorite detail, though, is the tiny Michelangelo minifigure standing beside his creation, mallet and chisel in hand, looking like he just stepped away for a coffee. It is a genuinely nice callback to LEGO’s Starry Night Ideas set from 2022, which shipped with its own Van Gogh minifig at an easel, and it suggests LEGO already knows this artist-plus-artwork formula sells. Scale wise, a true minifig-accurate David would only stand about 12 centimeters given the standard 1 to 42 ratio, so this one towers over its sculptor on purpose, which is oddly fitting since the real David was carved oversized to read correctly from 80 meters up on a cathedral roofline that never actually happened.

The build is currently sitting at 1,187 supporters and already picked up that Staff Pick badge, with 575 days left on the clock to hit the 5,000 mark before the real climb to 10,000 begins. If it gets there, LEGO’s review board takes over, and honestly, between the pose, the base, and that fig leaf doing its silent historical duty, this feels like exactly the kind of art-meets-brick submission that has a real shot. Head over to LEGO Ideas and give it your vote, David has waited five centuries for worse odds than this.

The post This 1,608-Piece LEGO David Comes with Its Own Historically Accurate ‘Detail’ first appeared on Yanko Design.

A 9-in-1 Blu-ray Drive + USB Hub That Turns Cheap DVDs into 100GB Storage You Own Forever

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There was a window, roughly 1998 to 2006, when you could walk into a shop, buy a disc, and own the thing forever. No login, no region check, no email explaining that your library is migrating to a new tier. We traded that for the cloud and got monthly bills and films that quietly vanish from the catalog. BluHub is a 9-in-1 external Blu-ray drive built for people who want their files back on a shelf, with an aluminum lid that props open like a grand piano so a spare disc sits on display while the drive burns another. It is a strange, slightly stubborn object, and I like it.

Under the styling it reads and writes Blu-ray, DVD and CD, burns BD-R at 6x onto 100GB discs, and adds four USB 3.0 ports, SD and microSD slots and captive USB-C and USB-A cables, all in a 409g aluminum body running on bus power. Early pricing is $59 against $129 retail, with units due in November 2026. Sony ended production of all recordable Blu-ray media in February 2025, and Pioneer’s US arm has since stopped selling optical drives entirely. A three-person Los Angeles team looked at that and decided it was the perfect moment to build a nicer one.

Designer: BluHub

Click Here to Buy Now: $59 $129 (54% off) Hurry! Only 6 days left.

Lift the aluminum lid and it locks upright on a thin strut, holding a second disc in plain view while the internal tray reads or burns another underneath. Wang gets the credit for pushing that flip-top through, and it is the one decision here with real design lineage behind it. Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot put a clear acrylic cover on the Braun SK4 in 1956 and people nicknamed it Snow White’s Coffin, because for the first time a machine let you watch it think. Naoto Fukasawa did the same trick differently in 2000, hanging a Muji CD player on the wall so the spinning disc became the whole point of looking at it. Laptops spent the two decades after that hiding the mechanism, then removing it. BluHub just quietly puts it back where you can see it.

Apple pulled the optical drive from the MacBook Pro in 2012 and called it progress, and every Windows manufacturer followed within a few years, chasing thinner chassis and lighter shipping weights. That trade made sense for a while, streaming was cheap, storage was cheap, and nobody missed the disc tray. It also happened to be the moment computing quietly stopped selling you a machine that could read what you owned outright and started renting you access instead. The optical drive was the last piece of hardware standing between a consumer and a library they fully controlled, no account required, no revocation possible. Bringing it back as an external accessory does not undo that shift, but it does hand the option back to anyone who wants it.

Aluminum alloy covers a 165 x 160 x 34mm footprint, sitting on four anti-vibration feet with a claimed sub-30dB noise floor while burning. A captive USB-C and USB-A cable stows in a channel underneath, so there is nothing loose to lose in a drawer. Every USB hub I have ever owned has shed its cable within a year, and building the cord into the chassis is the kind of unglamorous fix that never makes a keynote but genuinely improves daily use. Four USB 3.0 ports, an SD slot and a microSD slot round out the connectivity, all riding a shared USB 3.2 Gen2 pipe rated at 10Gbps rather than 10Gbps per port, worth knowing before a card dump and a disc burn compete for bandwidth at the same time. Compatibility spans Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, plus iPadOS and Android over OTG.

A 1TB SSD costs roughly double what it did in late 2025, chased there by an AI-driven NAND shortage that shows no sign of easing before 2027. RAM prices are climbing for the same reason. Sony confirmed this July that PlayStation physical discs stop being produced altogether by 2028, one more signal that game ownership is headed the way of movie ownership already went. Against that backdrop, a $55 hub that turns a five dollar disc into 100GB of storage nobody can revoke reads less like nostalgia and more like a hedge. The piano lid is what got me. The timing is what makes the argument.

BluHub is available through its Kickstarter campaign, with the early bird sitting at $59 against a stated $129 retail price. Multi-unit bundles run $109 for two, $159 for three and $259 for five. Shipping is estimated for November 2026, with delivery fees of $6 to $7 in the US and comparable rates internationally.

Click Here to Buy Now: $59 $129 (54% off) Hurry! Only 6 days left.

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This LEGO Fan Rebuilt Linkin Park’s Meteora Cover In Bricks, Then Added the Whole Band Below Too

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Quick pop quiz for anyone who owns Meteora on CD, RIP CD collections. Who’s the guy on the cover, crouched down in a respirator with a spray can? If you said Mike Shinoda, you’re wrong, and so was I for about fifteen years. It’s actually Boris Tellegen, a Dutch graffiti artist who goes by Delta, and the whole thing started as a giant collaborative mural before the band decided the quiet shot of one guy working was more powerful than the finished wall. Which, honestly, is a very 2003 nu-metal thing to do. Make something huge, then zoom in on the one moment that feels honest.

Anyway, LEGO builder Zihnisinir_61 apparently had the same reaction I did, because he went and turned that exact photo into a brick-built diorama, complete with the ladder, the scaffolding, and Delta himself mid-spray. And then, because why stop at faithful, he added an entire concert underneath it that was never part of the original artwork at all.

Designer: Zihnisinir_61

The top half of the build is the album cover you already know, rebuilt with genuinely impressive detail. The scaffolding on the left is all thin, angular Technic framing that somehow reads as rickety and load-bearing at the same time, and Delta himself is hunched over mid-spray with a tiny paint can in hand, exactly like the photo. The wall behind him is where the real craft is hiding though. It is packed with SNOT, studs not on top, techniques both inside and outside the build, and Zihnisinir_61 pointed out something I would not have caught on my own, that all those angled bricks are what create the deliberate imperfections and diagonal shadow line running through the original mural. It should not work as well as it does, but it does.

The “LINKIN PARK” and “METEORA” logos sit just below that, fully brick-built in layered plates rather than printed tiles, alongside a custom tracklist graphic listing all thirteen songs. But the real swing is what happens underneath. The original cover has a solid black lower third and nothing else. Zihnisinir_61 looked at that empty space and decided it needed a full band. Chester is mid-scream at the mic, Mike is on piano, Joe is at the turntables, Brad is on guitar, Phoenix is on bass, and Rob is behind the kit, all set against glossy black tiles that actually reflect the minifigures like stage lighting. My favorite detail is a tiny one a fan pointed out in the comments, a horn piece used as Delta’s spray-painting index finger. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

It is a fitting way to honor an album that took its name from the Meteora monasteries in Greece, ancient structures somehow balanced on top of sheer sandstone cliffs, because Shinoda thought the word felt epic and cinematic. Meteora debuted at number one, sold around 810,000 copies its first week, and even scored a Grammy nomination for the instrumental track “Session.” This is also round two for Zihnisinir_61, who previously built Hybrid Theory’s Winged Herald cover, and one commenter already called it, joking that Minutes to Midnight has to be next.

The MOC is sitting at 207 supporters right now, with 425 days left to hit the first 1,000-vote milestone on the road to the full 10,000 needed for LEGO’s official review. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page here to add your vote. If Zihnisinir_61 really is building out the whole discography, I would not mind seeing a tiny brick-built version of that infamous label meeting where Warner almost buried this album entirely.

The post This LEGO Fan Rebuilt Linkin Park’s Meteora Cover In Bricks, Then Added the Whole Band Below Too first appeared on Yanko Design.

ASUS ROG Spatha X 65K: The Heavy MMO Mouse That Comes With Its Own Museum Dock

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The ROG Spatha X 65K comes with a charging dock, and the dock is doing four jobs. It’s the 2.4 GHz receiver, the charger, a battery status readout with a toggle button on the back, and an angled plinth that holds the mouse nose-up like a museum piece. Fifteen minutes parked on it gets you 25 hours of gaming, which is roughly one very poor decision about bedtime.

The mouse it holds is worth the pedestal. ASUS revived its MMO flagship at Gamescom 2026 with 12 programmable buttons, a 65,000 dpi AimPoint Pro sensor, hot-swappable Push-Fit Socket III switches, and a 126-gram body that takes two 10-gram weights across five front, center, and rear configurations. On the same stage, ASUS also showed the 56-gram Gladius IV Ace. One brand, one day, two completely opposite theories of what a mouse should weigh.

Designer: ASUS Republic of Gamers

Two 10-gram modules and three mounting positions produce the five configurations ASUS advertises: bare at 126 grams, a single weight sitting front, center, or rear at 136, and both installed at 146. Three of those five options weigh exactly the same amount. What changes between them is the center of gravity, which moves the pivot point when you swing from the wrist. ASUS built a balance system and marketed it as a weight system, which undersells the more useful half. Anyone who has shimmed a mouse with coins and electrical tape will recognize the intent immediately.

Angular, deliberately mismatched thumb buttons arranged in the outline of the ROG eye carry straight over from the 2015 original, and ASUS says so out loud rather than pretending the shape is new. No two buttons in that cluster share a profile, so your thumb identifies them by edge geometry instead of counting positions. The side grip carries a Mayan-inspired pattern pressed into the surface, and the primary buttons are dished so fingertips settle into them. Eleven years on, that thumb logic holds up better than most ergonomic thinking from its era.

Nobody plays above 3,200 dpi, so the 65,000 figure exists to sit on a box next to a competitor’s smaller number. The upgrade that actually changes how the mouse behaves is the 11 preset lift-off distances, which matter enormously for a device built around low-sensitivity sweeping across a large pad. Repositioning a 126-gram body means lifting it constantly, and a badly calibrated lift-off turns every reset into a cursor jump. ASUS spent the engineering where it counts, then wrote the press release around the other thing. Standard industry practice, and mildly annoying every time.

Worn-out clicks kill more mice than dead sensors do, which makes Push-Fit Socket III the feature most likely to still matter in three years. The box ships with a switch tweezer, two spare ROG Silent Micro Switches, a PTFE feet set, and grip tape. The default ROG Micro Switch II is rated at 100 million clicks and the silent option at 50 million, with third-party switches dropping in within a few minutes. Configuration runs through Gear Link in a browser, so no Armoury Crate install is required. Anyone who has fought that software will read this as an apology.

ASUS has announced no price, no release date, no color beyond black, and no total battery life, which is a conspicuous omission for a device this heavy on radio duty. At 137mm long and 126 grams before you add anything, it also rules out small hands entirely. The 2021 Spatha X landed near $150, so budget accordingly and expect a premium on top of that. For a mouse asking you to push nearly a third of a pound around all evening, I’d want the runtime figure in writing before committing. The dock is beautiful. It should not have to work that hard.

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This ceiling fan hides an 80W Hi-Fi speaker and smart lighting in one sleek unit

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You get light from above. You get wind from above too. So at some point, somebody was bound to ask the obvious next question, why not sound from above as well? Ceiling fans have spent years quietly doing side quests with built-in lamps, remote controls, and the occasional smart feature, but this feels like the first time one has aimed for proper living room territory. The lamp-plus-fan combo has always felt like a polite upgrade to an appliance nobody was particularly excited about.

WindGroove’s AirFi One takes that idea and runs with it, folding a Hi-Fi audio system, atmospheric lighting, and airflow into a single ceiling-mounted fixture. The audio setup is co-developed with Jamo, the Danish speaker brand founded in 1968, which gives the whole thing considerably more credibility than your average gadget trying to do five jobs at once. It’s one of those products that sounds slightly absurd for about three seconds, right up until you realize how much floor space your speakers and fans have been stealing this whole time.

Brand: WindGroove

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

Putting a speaker inside a spinning mechanical system is, acoustically speaking, a problem that mostly did not exist before. Motors generate vibration, and that vibration travels through metal housings and mounting hardware until it finds a speaker driver to rattle. At higher fan speeds, the blades also create periodic air pressure variations at blade-pass frequency, a rhythmic pulse that can cause a speaker cone to flutter and introduce distortion into the output. Positioning the speaker overhead compounds the issue further, because the ceiling acts as a large reflective surface, creating phase cancellation and comb filtering effects where certain frequencies pile up while others cancel out. Nailing clean Hi-Fi sound out of a product that is also spinning at variable speeds, mounted above a live listening environment, is a genuinely impressive engineering feat.

WindGroove’s entire design thesis rests on one idea: technology should dissolve into the room, not announce itself from it. Making that happen acoustically meant solving real engineering problems, because a spinning motor introduces vibration into a speaker chassis and rotating blades create periodic air pressure pulses that can rattle a driver into distortion. Intelligent DSP processing that corrects for ceiling reflection and overhead projection in real time is WindGroove’s most elegant solution, allowing the speaker to disappear into the architecture and still fill a room properly. Total harmonic distortion is rated at 1% or below, keeping music sounding like music rather than like hardware working hard. A motor running at under 32 decibels reduces mechanical vibration at the source, so the DSP has considerably less chaos to correct for.

Jamo has been building musically balanced speakers rooted in Scandinavian design since 1968, and that acoustic philosophy is what WindGroove borrowed for the tuning here. The 80W 3-way setup, twin 15W mid-high drivers plus a dedicated 50W subwoofer, carries real Hi-Fi ambitions rather than the polite background-audio compromise most integrated appliances settle for. Frequency response runs from 45Hz to 20kHz, wide enough to cover genuine bass texture and crisp high-frequency clarity across the full spectrum of recorded music. Bringing in a heritage audio brand rather than speccing the cheapest available driver stack reflects WindGroove’s conviction that invisible technology still needs to perform at the highest level when you actually sit down and listen. Putting a Jamo-tuned 80W Hi-Fi system inside a ceiling fan is the kind of product decision that only makes sense if you believe the room should come first, and the hardware should figure itself out.

The fan boasts a maximum airflow of 4621 CFM at under 32 decibels, quiet enough to run while music is playing without competing with it, and the blade direction reverses seasonally so the unit pulls its weight year-round. The dual-zone lighting system combines everyday illumination with immersive ambience. The lower section serves as the primary light source, providing bright, even illumination for the entire room. You can choose from three color temperatures – warm white for a cozy, relaxing glow, natural white for comfortable everyday lighting, or cool white for a crisp, energizing feel. Stepless dimming lets you fine-tune the brightness to suit everything from winding down at night to working, reading, or getting ready in the morning.

Picture a Friday evening where you dim the lights, the room shifts to a warm amber glow, the fan hums almost imperceptibly overhead, and the music you put on actually sounds like the artist intended it to. No speaker on a shelf eating into the bookcase. No standing fan taking up the corner you always meant to do something with. No three apps open at once trying to get everything to behave. The ceiling handles it, and the room just feels right in a way that is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

AirFi One is priced at $499 at retail and is available for purchase right now on WindGroove’s website.. Sure, you could just duct-tape a Bluetooth speaker to your fan and call it a day – but having an 80W sound system built into your ceiling fan isn’t something everyone can boast of.

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post This ceiling fan hides an 80W Hi-Fi speaker and smart lighting in one sleek unit first appeared on Yanko Design.

Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate

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Daewoo’s Rose Portable Iron collapses into the profile of a classic clothes iron, except there’s no soleplate anywhere on it. The red dome is a 550kPa steam head that never touches your shirt, and the whole assembly parks on a desk in the footprint of a sheet of A4 paper. The black wand tucks flat against the body when you’re done, closing everything into one clean shape instead of leaving cords and heads scattered around. Fold it up and you get a glossy red teardrop that looks like it belongs on a shelf next to your hats and cufflinks, not shoved in a closet with the vacuum. It might be the best looking iron I have ever laid eyes on, full stop.

That’s kind of the point. Ironing has looked the same since your grandmother’s era, hot metal, heavy arm, burnt fingertips optional. Daewoo took the silhouette everyone recognizes and gutted the inside, swapping pressure for a fine mist of high pressure steam that hovers over the fabric instead of flattening it. The project comes out of Guangdong Daewoo’s in-house design team under Wang Jun, and it won Top Design honors in the Home Appliances: Small category at the 2025 European Product Design Award, a competition that judges shipping products rather than sketches. It’s a weird little magic trick, and somebody clearly thought it deserved a trophy for pulling it off.

Designer: Guangdong Daewoo Design Team

Design history has a name for this trick, skeuomorphism, when a new object borrows the shape of what it’s replacing so people instinctively know what to do with it. Digital cameras kept the shutter click, and early e-readers animated a page turn, small gestures borrowed from objects they were busy erasing. The Rose runs that instinct backward, keeping the exact wedge shape of a clothes iron even though nothing inside actually presses fabric anymore. It’s a strange kind of respect for a shape nobody thinks about, right up until someone guts everything underneath it and leaves the outline alone on purpose. The result looks familiar enough to trust and strange enough to stop your thumb mid-scroll.

Inside that dome is the actual news. A 550kPa pressurized system pushes steam through five stages of vaporization, dense enough to punch through fabric fibers without soaking them, so clothes come out warm and dry rather than damp. Daewoo’s own demo shows the head steaming a balloon without popping it, which is either a fun party trick or genuinely reassuring if you own anything silk. Five modes tune temperature and steam volume by fabric, running from 110°C for silk up to 210°C for wool, with a narrower precision tip built for touchy spots like coat buttons. None of that matters if the thing scorches your favorite shirt, but on paper, it is built to avoid exactly that.

The original Daewoo chaebol collapsed into bankruptcy in 1999, and this badge now belongs to Guangdong Daewoo, a licensed China based operation with a Korean trading office attached. That is not a knock on the product, plenty of legacy names live second lives this way, but the actual design credit sits with Wang Jun’s team, not the vintage logo. It is also a corded, mains powered unit rather than a battery gadget, so portable here means light enough to carry across a room, not cordless freedom. It currently ships only in China across a small ladder of trims, working out to roughly 140 to 196 dollars depending on exchange rate. No release outside China is confirmed yet, so importing one means budgeting for a plug adapter and a converter.

Most appliance makers chasing “reinvented” just bolt a screen onto something and call it smart. Daewoo instead looked at the single most recognizable silhouette in the laundry room and asked what would happen if everything under it changed while the outline stayed put. The answer folds down to the size of a sheet of paper and looks better on a dresser than most speakers do. Whether it actually out-irons a cheap steamer from the drugstore is a separate question nobody outside a Guangdong test lab has fully answered, but as a piece of industrial design humor, it is hard not to grin at.

The post Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate first appeared on Yanko Design.