The benefits of using an E Ink tablet over an iPad
E Ink excels for tasks like reading and note-taking.
Monthly Archives: September 2026
How to customize the side button on your Samsung Galaxy phone
The side button on Samsung's Galaxy phones has performed different functions over the years, but you can really make it do whatever you want.
The $499 Lapis One Is A Tiny Mac mini Alternative Built Just to Run Your AI Agents
Earlier this year, people were buying Mac minis by the cartload just to give their OpenClaw agents somewhere to live, and Apple Store staff reportedly started calling it the “OpenClaw machine.” Pamir’s Lapis One looked at that trend and asked a very reasonable question: what if the agent’s computer was actually designed for the agent? The answer is a coaster-sized Linux box with a Rabbit R1 orange cap, an iMac G3 two-tone body, and a pixel robot snoozing on its little screen. Your AI assistant gets its own desk, its own internet connection, and its own battery, while your laptop finally gets some peace. Frankly, it’s a nicer setup than my first apartment.
Under that playful shell sits a Rockchip RK3576 chip with a 6 TOPS NPU, 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 64GB of storage, and room for an M.2 SSD and a microSD card. The standout feature is Agent KVM, a dedicated USB-C port that captures another computer’s display and fakes a keyboard and mouse, letting your agent operate a second machine the way you would. Tailscale comes baked in, so you can check on your agent from your phone in the grocery store checkout line. Pamir, a San Francisco startup that previously shipped the Distiller dev kit, has pre-orders open at $499, with December shipping to the US. The regular price will be $599 once pre-order pricing ends.
Designer: Pamir AI
Pick the Lapis One up and the design lineage is impossible to miss. The orange wedge housing the screen is doing a very direct Rabbit R1 impression, right down to the color and the cute pixel-art creature that lives on the display. We covered the R1 when it launched, admiring how Teenage Engineering gave it a Tamagotchi-like charm, and the comparison mostly holds here too. Where the two devices split is purpose. The R1 tried to replace your phone and got clowned for it because your phone already does everything a phone needs to do. The Lapis One doesn’t compete with anything you own. It just wants a permanent outlet and a Wi-Fi password, which is a much easier ask.
The other reference point is the iMac G3, and it shows up less in the color and more in the attitude. Apple’s original iMac made a whole generation comfortable with computers by wrapping them in candy plastic and betting the farm on USB when almost nothing supported it yet. The Lapis One runs a similar play for Linux, a platform whose default personality is a bare green board and forty tabs of forum troubleshooting. Four labeled USB-C ports on the back handle power, video out, data, and the KVM function, and the whole thing boots into a clean, readable interface instead of a terminal prompt. That is a genuinely useful decision for anyone who wants Linux without becoming a systems administrator.
The screen is a Sharp memory LCD from the same panel family as Panic’s Playdate, a device we have written about more than once for its willingness to be delightfully impractical. That low-power panel means the Lapis One can sit there all day, idle screen glowing faintly, without murdering its 3,300mAh battery, and it doubles as a desk clock when your agent isn’t busy. It is a small detail, but it is the kind of small detail that separates a product from a dev board somebody forgot to case.
None of this erases the real questions. Battery life tops out around four hours, which turns the “personal UPS” pitch into more of a personal nap timer. Agent KVM hands your agent direct control of a second computer’s keyboard and mouse with zero software safety net on the target machine, so you are trusting your own judgment about what that agent is allowed to click. And $499 for what is, on paper, a mid-range ARM chip in a nice box will keep the Raspberry Pi comparisons coming, same as they did the day this thing launched.
Still, I like where Pamir landed. The industrial design does the job good industrial design is supposed to do, which is make a genuinely intimidating category of hardware feel like something you would not mind on your desk. Whether $499 buys enough agent to justify the coaster remains an open question until October’s first batch actually ships.
The post The $499 Lapis One Is A Tiny Mac mini Alternative Built Just to Run Your AI Agents first appeared on Yanko Design.
Joby Aviation completed a fully autonomous flight from California to North Carolina
The startup is looking to expand beyond electric air taxi rides in major cities.
What’s the 30-degree rule for TVs?
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has a simple method for calculating the ideal viewing distance based on your TV size.
How to use your phone as a remote for any smart TV
Some phones have IR blasters to enable remote functions, but even if yours doesn't, you can do quite a lot over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
How to set up your Sonos speakers using the app
Whether you just got a Sonos speaker or you're adding one to your current setup, you'll need to use the app.
Yoniq Made a $199 PlayStation Portal That Doesn’t Need a PlayStation
Every great gadget eventually gets a knockoff cousin. The iPod had thousands of them, those chunky no-name MP3 players with a click wheel that clicked nothing and a brand name you forgot by lunch. They were a little rough around the edges, mostly forgettable, and they played your music just fine for a fraction of the price. The PlayStation Portal just got its own version of that cousin. It’s called the Yoniq Portal, it comes from a company almost nobody had heard of before Gamescom 2026, and it costs $199.
Yoniq took the shape of Sony’s DualShock 2 controller, split it down the middle, and wedged a reportedly 4.5-inch screen between the two halves. The triangle, circle, cross, and square all made the trip along with it, which is a bold move for a brand this new. Sony’s official PlayStation Portal now costs $249.99 and streams games from a PS5 or the PlayStation cloud, meaning it needs a console to do anything at all. Yoniq’s version is designed to play games locally, and a Gamescom demo running Winning Eleven 8, the Japanese cousin of Pro Evolution Soccer 4, points squarely at PS2-era emulation.
Designer: Yoniq
It costs less than Sony’s PS Portal, and it does not ask you to own a $649.99 PS5 first. But calling it the smarter buy skips over how little we actually know. Yoniq has not shared a chipset, RAM, storage, or a release date, and its own product page currently describes a completely different item, the company’s $12.99 stick-on phone controller. Retro Dodo, the outlet that got hands-on time at the booth, initially assumed Yoniq’s AI-generated marketing images meant the whole thing was fake. The prototypes turned out to be real. The pricing page did not.
Here is the part that actually bugs me a little. Photos of the Portal show a screen section that looks thick, almost like one of those quad-fold phone concepts that stack four panels of hardware behind the display. If the whole goal was cramming a phone-sized screen between two controller grips, a slim off-the-shelf smartphone chassis would have gotten there with way less bulk and probably a nicer panel too. Instead Yoniq built a chunky proprietary slab and bolted DualShock arms onto it, which reads more like an engineering default than a considered choice. The Frankenstein energy is real, and it did not have to be.
Sony designer Teiyu Goto had to fight his own management to give the original PlayStation controller its handles back in the early 90s, arguing that a flat pad belonged to a two dimensional world. Three decades later, a startup nobody tracked is borrowing that exact silhouette and gluing a thick screen into the middle of it, which is either a tribute or a very efficient shortcut, depending on how generous you are feeling. The DualShock 2 itself barely changed the shape at all when it launched in 2000. Its whole redesign lived on the inside, in buttons that could sense 256 levels of pressure. Whether Yoniq’s version kept anything like that is a real open question, not a minor one.
So no, this is not automatically the better PlayStation Portal. It is a cheaper, standalone bet from a company that is still figuring out its own website, wrapped in a controller shape that has quietly outlived three console generations. That combination can age into something genuinely good, or it can age into a $199 lesson. Right now, with a specs sheet this empty, it is simply too early to tell which one we are getting.
The post Yoniq Made a $199 PlayStation Portal That Doesn’t Need a PlayStation first appeared on Yanko Design.
Unlock Ultra Dark Mode on iOS 27: Here’s How to Do It
iOS 27 introduces advanced tools and settings that allow you to elevate your iPhone’s dark mode into an immersive ultra-dark experience. By carefully adjusting system settings, customizing visuals, and using accessibility features, you can create a sleek, battery-efficient, and visually cohesive environment. The video below from iReviews gives us more details on how to use […]
The post Unlock Ultra Dark Mode on iOS 27: Here’s How to Do It appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.
Before you throw out your old laptop, do this first
Giving away or recycling your old laptop is great, but you need to make sure all your data is fully removed before it finds a new home.
