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Sleep has quietly become one of the most closely watched aspects of personal health. Around one in three people struggle with it, and roughly half of Americans already use a wearable device to track their sleep each night. That growing awareness has made sleep monitoring mainstream, turning the wrist and the finger into familiar real estate for all kinds of sleep-tracking sensors.
The irony, of course, is that wearing a device to bed can get in the way of the very thing you’re trying to improve. A watch or ring adds a layer of physical awareness that makes settling in harder, especially for someone who already struggles with sleep. Sleepal addresses that contradiction by embedding the tracking technology inside something already on your nightstand: a bedside lamp.
That choice of form factor carries real design logic. Around 70% of people already own a bedside lamp, and it’s naturally tied to the rituals of winding down and waking up. Building contactless sleep monitoring into that familiar object means Sleepal enters the bedroom without asking anything of you. No new habits to form, no extra device to charge, nothing to adjust to before lights out.
And setting it up is just as effortless. You plug it in, scan the device with the app, and after that, there’s really nothing else to manage. No nightly adjustments, no calibrations, nothing to put on before getting into bed. You simply sleep as you normally would and check your sleep report the next morning, which makes the whole experience feel remarkably frictionless.
Behind that calm, unhurried exterior sits some serious sensing technology. Sleepal uses 60 GHz millimeter-wave radar with a detection precision of 0.1 mm, picking up the subtle chest micro-movements that come with breathing and a heartbeat. Those signals combine with environmental data and run through a sleep AI model built from scratch with nearly 100 million parameters, making the sleep-stage picture both thorough and precise.
And that technical foundation is backed by genuine clinical work. Sleepal collaborated with multiple hospitals to build one of the world’s largest radar-based sleep databases, including more than 2,000 datasets collected alongside polysomnography testing. This medical-grade data foundation is a key source of its accuracy, and based on Sleepal’s test results, its sleep-tracking accuracy is higher than that of most mainstream wearables.
Because it functions as a lamp, the light itself becomes part of how it supports your sleep. It adapts through the night, softening as you settle in and brightening gently as morning approaches. Plus, it reads the room’s environmental conditions, capturing the ambient factors that affect rest and giving you a fuller picture of your night by combining physiological and environmental data.
The wake-up experience gets the same level of thought. When you set a target time in the app, Sleepal doesn’t just ring at that exact moment. It looks for a more natural waking window, steering clear of deep sleep and REM in favor of lighter stages. A turn of the body triggers snooze, and if you drift off again, the alarm continues until it detects you’ve left the bed.
Getting to sleep is handled just as carefully. Breathing guidance, meditation, and relaxation audio are all built in, giving you a non-pharmaceutical way to ease into rest before the tracking even begins. Heck, for a lot of people, better sleep doesn’t come from gathering more data alone; it comes from having practical tools to actually wind down, and Sleepal has a solid set of those.
One of the more quietly impressive things about Sleepal is how much it conceals. There’s no camera, and a physical control for key sensors adds a layer of discretion, while all that advanced sensing sits behind a lamp that simply looks like it belongs. The design emphasizes comfort and calm over any overt technological statement, making it easy to trust in a space as personal as a bedroom.
Before the iPhone arrived in 2007 and quietly buried the category, handheld PCs were shaping up to be something genuinely exciting. Devices like the Sony Vaio UX and OQO Model 2 promised a full desktop OS in your jacket pocket, and for a brief window, that felt like the obvious future of personal computing. Smartphones won that argument decisively, and the handheld PC faded into a footnote. A YouTuber who goes by Wisce decided that footnote deserved a second chapter, and built one himself from scratch.
The result is a fully custom x86 handheld computer built around the LattePanda Mu single-board computer, running Linux Mint on a 7-inch 1920×1080 120Hz display. It has a full QWERTY ortholinear thumb keyboard with custom-printed keycaps, a Joy-Con thumbstick repurposed as a mouse, a horizontal scroll wheel, four USB ports, a full-size HDMI output, USB-C charging, and a 4,500mAh battery pack with a three-digit readout that tells you exactly how much juice is left. Every single component was designed, sourced, or fabricated by hand.
Designer: Wisce
The LattePanda Mu is an x86 SBC that outperforms even the Raspberry Pi 5 by a notable margin, and Wisce built a custom carrier board for it rather than using an off-the-shelf solution. That board delivers four full-size USB ports, a full-size HDMI port, M.2 SSD and Wi-Fi slots, and internal USB connectors for the keyboard and audio subsystem. A 1TB SSD and a budget Wi-Fi card complete the internals. The operating system is Linux Mint, chosen partly on merit and partly because Wisce’s previous builds attracted considerable audience displeasure when they shipped with Windows 11. Linux also strips out the background process bloat that Windows tends to accumulate, giving the Mu’s x86 architecture more room to breathe.
The display decision alone took multiple iterations to land. Wisce initially planned to use a 1024×600 60Hz panel from DF Robot, the parent company behind the LattePanda line, but rejected it for its low resolution, large bezel, and limited refresh rate. The replacement is a 1920×1080 120Hz eDP panel with a much thinner bezel, connected directly to the Mu’s native eDP output via a custom PCB that reroutes a pin mismatch between the two connectors. That kind of problem-solving shows up everywhere in this build: when a straightforward solution didn’t exist, Wisce designed one.
The keyboard runs on a custom PCB with an RP2040 microcontroller integrated directly into the board, bypassing the need for a separate Arduino or Pi Pico. The switches are surface-mount tactile types rated for around two million presses, sized small enough to fit a full QWERTY layout without sacrificing the thumb-typing ergonomics the ortholinear arrangement was chosen to support. Keycaps were modeled in Fusion 360 and printed on an FDM machine using a 0.2mm nozzle and multi-material filament to get legible, sharp legends on each key. The Joy-Con thumbstick on the left handles cursor movement via a QMK profile that maps it as a mouse, and the horizontal rotary encoder scroll wheel on the right is, by Wisce’s own admission, one of his favorite things about the finished device.
The enclosure is a two-part construction: a translucent resin rear shell that keeps the internal geometry visible, and an aluminum front plate that was CNC machined, anodized, then repainted by hand after the factory “champagne” finish came out looking closer to a flesh tone than the golden bronze Wisce had rendered. The finished device is 36mm thick at its deepest point and weighs approximately one kilogram, which puts it in a different category from a Game Boy but well within the range of something you’d actually carry. A 3D-printed dock props it upright on a desk with the HDMI port and USB-C charging accessible, turning the handheld into a functional desktop workstation when paired with an external keyboard and mouse.
What makes this build genuinely compelling, beyond the craftsmanship, is how clearly it articulates a design philosophy that commercial manufacturers keep fumbling. Devices like the GPD Win 5 chase gaming performance and end up compromising portability or pricing out most buyers. The Steam Deck nails the gaming use case and handles general computing as an afterthought. Wisce’s machine is neither of those things. It’s a full x86 desktop OS in a form factor that fits in two hands, with physical controls that were chosen specifically for the way humans hold objects, a battery system that actually communicates with its user, and a screen bright and sharp enough to make the whole proposition feel current. The handheld PC category failed twenty years ago because the hardware wasn’t ready. This build suggests the hardware has been ready for a while, and we’ve just been waiting for someone stubborn enough to put it together properly.
Kazakhstan is building a new city, and it just got a centerpiece worthy of the ambition. On March 5, 2026, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill unveiled the Alatau Iconic Complex and Gateway District, a pair of pyramidal towers set to define the skyline of Alatau, a brand-new city rising along the Almaty–Qonaev highway in south-eastern Kazakhstan. This is the same firm behind the Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center, and Jin Mao Tower. The pedigree speaks for itself.
Alatau is planned to span 88,000 hectares across four districts, positioned along the Western Europe–Western China transport corridor, with a master plan stretching through 2050. SOM’s Iconic Complex sits at the heart of the city’s fourth zone, the Gateway District, designed as a dense, walkable neighborhood anchored by multimodal transit. It’s not just a building drop. It’s a full urban proposition.
The complex totals 276,800 square meters across two towers: a 272-meter, 56-floor primary skyscraper housing offices and premium residences, and an 80-meter luxury hotel tower with branded residences and retail. When complete, the taller structure will be the tallest building in the region. The design concept, titled “Mountain Landscape,” pulls directly from the Trans-Ili Alatau, a 350-kilometer range of valleys, glaciers, and stratified terrain that forms the natural backdrop to the site. SOM translated that geology into architecture through stepped, wedge-shaped volumes, each level lined with external terraces and large central atria that pull light deep into the interiors.
Engineering the towers required serious thinking. The region sits in a high-seismic zone, which led to a dual structural strategy: a Japanese seismic damping model that absorbs earthquake energy through controlled structural movement, paired with an American reinforced framework built around a high-strength steel skeleton. The project also integrates eVTOL infrastructure alongside pedestrian and transit networks, future-proofing the complex well beyond its 2029 completion date.
Construction has been handed to China State Construction Engineering Corporation, a partnership announced during President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s state visit to China in September 2025. Full-scale excavation is scheduled to begin in May 2026, with total private investment exceeding $800 million.
For Kazakhstan, this goes beyond architecture. With Parliament recently approving a Constitutional Law on Alatau’s special status, the Iconic Complex is set to become the economic and cultural core of Central Asia’s most closely watched new city. SOM has built skyline-defining towers before. This one carries the weight of an entire nation’s next chapter.
Most great furniture doesn’t start with a grand vision. It starts with a sketch, usually a messy one, the kind you draw absentmindedly while thinking about something else entirely. Designer Deniz Aktay knows this. His latest piece, the Shift Sideboard, is proof that an unfinished line can sometimes carry more intention than a polished one.
The concept is deceptively simple. Aktay began with a sketch of shifted, incomplete lines, the kind of drawing that would normally get torn out and tossed. But he saw something worth keeping in that incompleteness: a structural idea where two horizontal planes don’t fully align, each one sliding past the other, leaving gaps and openings that feel both accidental and entirely deliberate. That tension between intentional and incidental is what makes the Shift so visually compelling.
Looking at it from the front, the sideboard reads almost like a typographic letterform. The upper shelf sits shorter, pulled to one side, while the lower platform stretches past it in the opposite direction. The result is a silhouette that feels like it’s mid-motion, caught between two states. It doesn’t try to be symmetrical, and that’s exactly why it works. Symmetry in furniture is safe. This is not that.
From a practical standpoint, those offset gaps aren’t just aesthetic choices. They translate into genuinely useful storage zones. Books stand upright in the open left compartment without needing bookends. A phone charges through a slot in the side wall, with the cable routed out cleanly through the offset gap at the edge, no cable box, no ugly workaround, no strip of tape pretending the cord isn’t there. For anyone who has ever stared at a tangled mess of cables on a media console and felt low-level irritation about it, this is the kind of thoughtful detail that earns real appreciation.
The material choice reinforces the whole mood of the piece. The warm, pale oak tones photograph beautifully against neutral backgrounds, and I imagine they read even better in a real room. There’s a quietness to it. The grain runs consistently across every surface, and the joinery is clean without being precious. It doesn’t have the cold austerity that some minimalist furniture falls into, the kind where you’re afraid to actually put anything on it. The Shift looks like it wants to be used, which is actually a harder thing to achieve than it sounds.
Aktay has been building a following for this kind of work for a while now, and he’s clearly found an audience that’s hungry for furniture that sits somewhere between concept and craft, pieces that look like they belong in a gallery but function like they belong in a home. His earlier work already hinted at this ability to make structure feel expressive without becoming theatrical. The Shift continues in that direction, but with more restraint. It feels more resolved.
My personal read on it: furniture that earns attention through subtlety is almost always more interesting than furniture that shouts. The Shift doesn’t need to be dramatic. The offset lines do the work quietly, and you keep noticing new things about it the longer you look. The way the shadow falls differently on each side. The way the open compartment frames whatever you put inside it. The way the cable route makes a modern inconvenience feel like it was part of the design from the beginning, because it was.
That last part matters more than it gets credit for. Cable management is often an afterthought, tacked on at the end of a design process with a grommeted hole and a prayer. Building it into the structure itself, as a consequence of the form rather than a patch over it, is the kind of decision that separates a design exercise from something you’d actually want to live with. The Shift Sideboard started as an unfinished sketch. Right now, at least conceptually, it feels very finished indeed.
Your game collection says a lot about you. With a cute new game, you can also give your collection a space that's just as personalized. BOXROOM is a building sim where the whole purpose is creating a space to show off your game library. You can select furniture, paint and lighting, then you choose games from your Steam library to display on your virtual shelves. Titles appear in game boxes, giving it a throwback feel to the days where a game collection had to be physical. Once complete, the room serves as a launcher, allowing you to boot up a title from the game box. The demo is available now, and the team said that BOXROOM will launch in early access soon.
This is a fun idea, although it's unlikely that you'd fit your entire collection into even this virtual space if your Steam library starts to number in the hundreds, or even thousands, of games. As with an IRL space, you'd need a warehouse rather than a cute, cozy room. But if you wanted to have a curated selection of your go-to titles in a customized virtual space, this might be a fun addition to your already sizable collection. Or, if you want a virtual reality take on a similar idea, EmuVR might be worth a look.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/boxroom-lets-you-build-a-cozy-game-room-for-your-steam-library-215349560.html?src=rss
