Tag Archives: Gadgets

The FPGB Mini Is Barely Wider Than a Game Boy Cartridge, and Plays One

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A Game Boy cartridge used to feel small in your palm, a flat plastic rectangle dwarfed by the console it slotted into. The FPGB Mini flips that relationship entirely. This new handheld measures barely wider than one of those cartridges, turning decades of shrinking electronics into an actual party trick rather than a marketing phrase. It plays original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges directly, no adapters, no compromises on how the games behave.

That accuracy comes from field-programmable gate array technology or FPGA, the same approach used in pricier hardware like the Analogue Pocket. Instead of software emulation approximating old hardware, the FPGA chip recreates the original circuitry’s behavior directly, which is why colors, timing, and quirks specific to Game Boy games show up exactly as they did decades ago. The tradeoff is narrower cartridge support, limited here to Game Boy and Game Boy Color only.

Designer: FunnyPlaying (via Retro Dodo)

Slide a cartridge into the back, and the 2.98-inch IPS screen renders everything at 800 by 720 pixels, a resolution chosen specifically because it scales the original Game Boy display by a clean five times. That kind of deliberate math means pixel art looks crisp rather than blurred or unevenly stretched, a detail that matters enormously to anyone who has stared at a mushy upscaled screen on a cheaper handheld clone.

Pull two of these out during a road trip, and the link cable becomes the actual point. FunnyPlaying included a dedicated wired connection for multiplayer battles and trading, mirroring what the original Game Boy Link Cable did for a generation of kids swapping Pokémon in parking lots and school hallways. It’s a small inclusion that says the design team understood which memories actually mattered here.

A built-in real-time clock keeps the momentum going even after the cartridge comes out. Games like Pokémon Gold and Silver relied on that internal clock for day-night cycles and timed events, a feature plenty of modern clones quietly drop. Its presence here suggests the engineering priority sat with preserving how games actually played, not just how the console looked sitting on a shelf.

A microSD slot rounds out the modern side of the hardware, storing save files, screenshots, or ROM files that can run through a built-in emulator when no cartridge is inserted. That flexibility turns the FPGB Mini into two devices depending on the moment: a hardware-accurate cartridge reader when authenticity matters, and a pocket emulator when convenience wins out instead.

Color reproduction gets a boost too, with support for 16.7 million colors and an RGB565 pipeline that keeps Game Boy Color titles looking properly saturated rather than washed out. It’s a detail easy to overlook next to the flashier link-cable and FPGA talking points, yet it shapes the actual daily experience of loading up a cartridge more than either of those features do.

At 113mm x 64mm x 22m and roughly 135g, the whole unit disappears into a jacket pocket in a way no console with a cartridge slot has any right to. An 1,800mAh removable battery pack handles the power side, charging over USB-C in roughly two to three hours and running for several hours of play per charge, numbers respectable for hardware this compact. A carrying case ships in the box, treating portability as a finished thought rather than an afterthought bought separately.

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A Wireless Charger That Quietly Doubles as a Desk Lamp

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Most wireless chargers look like something you’d find in an airport lounge. Flat, black, forgettable. They do their one job and ask nothing of the rest of your desk, which is exactly the problem. Somewhere along the way, home offices turned into small personal galleries. People started adding framed photos, a fake fiddle-leaf fig, a candle nobody actually lights. And then, right in the middle of that carefully curated setup, sits a charging pad that looks like it fell off a delivery truck.

Yong Zhang and Lei Wang, two designers working out of Liaoning Petrochemical University in China, apparently noticed the same disconnect. Their answer is a device called Poetry-Electricity, a wireless charger that also functions as a small tabletop lamp, its surface dotted with tiny spherical lights arranged like buds on a branch. Set your phone down and it charges. Leave it there after dark and it glows, casting the kind of soft, scattered light that makes a desk feel less like a workstation and more like a place you’d actually want to sit.

Designers: Yong Zhang and Lei Wang

I like that the idea starts from a real observation rather than a trend chase. Office decor got personal because people needed their workspace to feel human again, not because a design blog said cozy desks were in. A charger that ignores that shift and just sits there being efficient and joyless is missing the point of why people started decorating in the first place.

What actually makes this more than a nice-looking gimmick is the engineering hiding underneath the poetry. The designers built in a magnetic barrier that blocks stray magnetic fields from interfering with the charging circuit, which is a fussy but important detail, since wireless charging pads are notorious for losing efficiency the moment anything metal or magnetic gets near the coil. There’s a rubber texture on the charging surface so your phone doesn’t slide off mid-charge, and a built-in lithium battery strip means the whole thing can be used away from an outlet, not just tethered to a desk. None of that is flashy. It’s the kind of quietly practical thinking that never shows up in a product photo but absolutely shows up in daily use, when your phone stays put and actually charges at the rate it’s supposed to.

I keep going back and forth on whether the tree-shaped light cluster is a little too on-the-nose as a metaphor for “growth” or “energy” or whatever the press materials probably say. But I’ll admit it works better in practice than it sounds on paper. A charging pad that also throws warm, broken-up light across a desk at 9 p.m. does something a single overhead bulb or a phone screen never will. It softens a room instead of just illuminating it. What strikes me most is how unbothered this design is by the usual tech industry instinct to hide function behind minimalism, or hide personality behind function. Most gadget design forces a choice: sleek and cold, or decorative and useless. Poetry-Electricity doesn’t pick a side. It just assumes your desk deserves both, and builds accordingly.

Whether it ever shows up on shelves at a price a normal person would pay is a separate question, and awards concepts like this one, a Silver winner from A’ Design Award, don’t always make that leap to retail. But the thinking behind it deserves more company. Desks aren’t going back to being purely functional spaces anytime soon, not with so much of the workday still happening from home. The objects that live there should probably stop pretending otherwise. A charger that also wants to be looked at isn’t solving a huge problem. It’s solving a small, honest one, the kind that’s easy to dismiss until you notice how much better a room feels once it’s gone.

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5 Best Space-Saving Kitchen Gadgets & Tools That Actually Earn Their Shelf Space

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Most kitchen frustration is not about cooking. It is about the objects that have accumulated around the cooking: the appliances sitting unused on the counter, the measuring cups stacked four deep in a drawer, the dish rack that was always too big for the sink and was never once moved. The kitchen earns its floor plan back when the tools actually inside it are doing real work, not waiting to be used once a month.

These five picks have something worth saying about how a kitchen should actually work. Three are design concepts making a clear case for how appliances should be reimagined from the ground up. Two are tools available to order now. None made this list for being small. They made it for solving something the standard version never did.

1. Nanlong Cooker

Designer Vuk Dragovic’s concept for Nanlong imagines a single countertop appliance capable of grilling, steaming, baking, and hosting a hot-pot dinner, built for modern urban cooking culture. A matte black housing with subtle metallic accents deflects fingerprints, while a clean control panel manages mode selection through simple taps. Internally, the concept proposes durable stainless steel cooking chambers and high-temperature-resistant plastics. Grill racks, baking trays, and a dedicated hot-pot insert snap in quickly, keeping setup and cleanup as direct as the cooking.

What Nanlong gives you is not a smarter appliance. It is fewer appliances, operating in the one situation where consolidation holds up: when the replacement handles each cooking method on its own terms. A weeknight meal starts with steamed vegetables, shifts through grill mode for searing protein, and closes with a bake setting for a side dish, all without you touching a second power source. Standardized components across four functions also point toward a simpler production process, making this more than a concept sketch.

What we like

  • One countertop unit handles grilling, steaming, baking, and hot pot through interchangeable accessories that attach without tools
  • Standardized components across all four cooking functions simplify the production architecture and lower potential costs

What we dislike

  • The restrained matte black aesthetic may read as too minimal for cooks who prefer warmer kitchen design language

2. Iron Frying Plate

Made from 1.6mm-thick mill scale steel, the Iron Frying Plate is rust-resistant, stick-resistant, and ready to use out of the box. The wooden handle attaches and detaches with one hand, which means the plate moves from the stovetop directly to the table without a serving dish standing between the two. That transition from cooking vessel to table object in a single step is where the real space-saving happens: not in the plate’s footprint, but in the items it removes from the process entirely.

Mill scale steel develops character over sustained use, seasoning with each cooking session in a way that genuinely rewards you over years rather than months. The detachable handle keeps your storage flat, a meaningful difference from pans with fixed handles that dictate how a drawer can be arranged. At $69, the Iron Frying Plate earns its place through material quality and the logic of its handle system, which treats the move from stove to table as the primary design problem worth solving.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69.00

What we like

  • Detachable wooden handle moves the plate from stovetop to table without a serving dish in between, removing an entire category of vessel from the kitchen
  • Mill scale steel construction seasons with use and improves over time, building performance rather than declining it

What we dislike

  • Iron construction makes it heavier than conventional frying pans, which requires some adjustment for extended use
  • Hand-washing is recommended to maintain the seasoning and material quality, unlike most everyday cookware

3. Boi Silicone Measuring Cup

Designed by Hatice Esra Sungur, Boi is a one-piece silicone measuring cup concept that replaces an entire nested set with a single flexible tool. A slider adjusts the internal capacity across five labeled measurements: 1/8 cup (30ml), 1/4 cup (60ml), 1/3 cup (80ml), 1/2 cup (125ml), and 1 cup (250ml). The cup runs 20 centimeters long and 6 centimeters tall at maximum capacity. The renders show it in orange, though the material makes alternate colorways easy to visualize.

The drawer benefit for you is immediate. One tool replaces five, and because the body is flexible silicone, it stores flat when you are done. There is also a quieter efficiency in washing one item after measuring rather than rinsing a nested set that always manages to stack in the wrong order.

What we like

  • A single slider-adjustable tool consolidates five separate measuring cups into one flexible, flat-storing piece
  • One item to wash instead of a nested set saves both water and the specific frustration of rinsing stacked cups after every bake

What we dislike

  • The slider mechanism depends on silicone flexibility that may wear differently across materials and temperature ranges in a production version

4. Slim Fold Dish Rack

The Slim Fold Dish Rack collapses from a 14-inch working rack down to 1.2 inches using a patent-pending spring mechanism that deploys and retracts in a single motion. When folded, it fits in a cabinet slot, a drawer, or even a bag, which is the kind of storage flexibility that standard dish racks never permit. It is dishwasher-safe and easy to clean, priced at $75, and built with a mechanism designed for sustained, daily deployment rather than occasional use.

The dish rack usually forces you to choose between two problems: the rack that occupies permanent counter real estate, or the collapsible version that feels too flimsy to actually use daily. The Slim Fold resolves that by making deployment as fast as using it, so it does not become another object that lives folded in a cabinet because setup creates friction. It earns your counter space when in use and takes none when it is not.

Click Here to Buy Now: $75.00

What we like

  • Patent-pending spring mechanism collapses a full 14-inch rack to 1.2 inches in a single motion, clearing the counter in seconds
  • Dishwasher-safe construction removes the one maintenance step that makes most collapsible racks impractical for daily use

What we dislike

  • At $75, it sits at a higher price point than most household dish racks, which requires confidence in the spring mechanism’s long-term durability
  • The compact footprint when deployed may limit capacity for larger households washing multiple plates and pots at once

5. Hybrid Kitchen Aid

Designed by Rishikesh Sonawane and inspired by the French press, the Hybrid Kitchen Aid integrates blending, grinding, and kneading into a single compact machine. The motor placement is inverted from conventional food processors, a structural decision that compresses the overall form and allows upright storage without the footprint a standard appliance base demands. A regulator dial that doubles as an on/off button controls RPM, while a color-coded user flow diagram guides each session from start to finish with deliberate, reduced-error clarity.

The Hybrid Kitchen Aid saves you space by subtraction rather than miniaturization. Rather than fitting a smaller blender next to a smaller food processor, it removes the need for those devices to coexist at all, giving you one machine capable of carrying the full workload across categories. Adaptability and storage efficiency are primary design criteria rather than secondary considerations. As a concept, it remains one of the more coherent arguments for what kitchen appliance consolidation should actually look like.

What we like

  • Blending, grinding, and kneading consolidated into one compact upright form, removing the need for multiple devices to share counter or cabinet space
  • Inverted motor placement reduces the overall footprint and makes upright storage viable without a wide appliance base

What we dislike

  • The French press-inspired form factor may require adjustment for users accustomed to conventional food processor interfaces

The Counter Is Not a Waiting Room

The objects that truly earn their shelf space do not just save room. They change how a kitchen feels to work in, because fewer competing objects means fewer small decisions about what to move, where to put things down, and what to wash after. These five products, from concepts still working toward production to tools you can buy today, all share the same premise: every item in a kitchen should justify its presence through genuine, daily use.

The concept picks are worth following as they move closer to production. When design logic this direct gets a manufacturing path, the results tend to be good. The purchasable tools make an immediate difference in any kitchen where drawer space is a daily frustration. The standard stays the same regardless of what comes next: the most useful kitchen is not the largest or the best-equipped. It is the one where nothing on the counter is optional.

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Yoniq Made a $199 PlayStation Portal That Doesn’t Need a PlayStation

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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.

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This $21 Charger Powers Your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods at Once

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Most of us have two or more gadgets that need constant charging, plus several chargers and cables to keep them all juiced up. That’s probably fine if you have an entire outlet strip at home or in the office, but when you’re working with a small space, or you’re traveling and on the go, it can be a real challenge to charge multiple devices at once. You end up with a tangle of cords and charging heads, or sometimes you even have to take turns charging your gadgets.

If you mostly own Apple devices or other USB-C-powered gear, the TESSAN 3-in-1 USB-C Charger may actually solve that problem for you. It’s a compact wall charger with a USB-C port, a USB-A port, and a built-in magnetic Apple Watch dock, so you only need one outlet to power up three devices at the same time.

Designer: TESSAN

This 3-in-1 charger is especially handy when you only have one outlet available but need to power up three different devices. A few years ago, this wouldn’t have been much of an issue, since most of us only had one phone to worry about. But now that owning multiple devices is the norm, charging has become an everyday hassle. What do you do when you’ve got a phone, a pair of AirPods, and a smartwatch that all need power at the same time?

TESSAN’s charger features fast charging through its 20W USB-C port, so you can get a device like the iPhone 15 up to 55 percent battery in just 30 minutes. At the same time, its 18W USB-A port can juice up an accessory simultaneously while your main device charges. It also offers broad compatibility, working with everything from the latest iPhone models to AirPods and other USB-powered devices. The real star of the show, though, is the built-in magnetic charger for your Apple Watch. There’s no separate puck or cable needed here. Instead, you get a self-aligning dock, so you won’t have to fuss with positioning your watch every time you need to charge it.

The charger comes in four finishes (white, black, pink, and blue) and is clearly designed to double as a small desk-aesthetic item, though it will likely still read as “just a charger” to most people, especially in the white colorway. Where it really shines is portability: it’s a travel-friendly device you can toss in a bag without a second thought, instead of hauling around three separate chargers that eat up space and weight in your carry-on.

How does it stack up against the competition? The most obvious comparison is Belkin, whose 3-in-1 MagSafe charging stands are the gold standard in this category. Belkin’s BoostCharge Pro and UltraCharge Pro docks charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods wirelessly and look considerably more premium sitting on a nightstand, but they also run anywhere from $95 to $150 and require more desk real estate. TESSAN’s charger, at $20.99, skips the wireless charging bells and whistles in favor of a compact, plug-in design that’s built more for function and travel than for a styled bedside setup. If you want a showpiece charging stand for your living room, Belkin is still hard to beat. But if you want something inexpensive, pocketable, and fast enough to get you out the door in the morning, TESSAN makes a compelling case for itself as the budget-friendly, travel-first alternative.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a charger trying to be a lifestyle centerpiece. It’s a charger trying to solve a genuinely annoying, everyday problem: too many devices, not enough outlets, and not enough patience to wait in line for your turn at the power strip. For $20.99, the TESSAN 3-in-1 USB-C Charger delivers fast charging, broad compatibility, and a clever built-in Apple Watch dock in a package small enough to disappear into a laptop bag or a nightstand drawer. It won’t turn heads the way a sleek charging stand might, but it will quietly keep your phone, watch, and earbuds powered up without the usual cord chaos. For anyone juggling multiple Apple devices on a daily basis, or packing for a trip and dreading the tangle of cables, this little charger earns its spot on the “actually useful” list.

The post This $21 Charger Powers Your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods at Once first appeared on Yanko Design.

MATE Works Like a Sticky Note That Sets Its Own Alarm When You Write

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Setting a reminder on a phone means unlocking a screen, opening an app, and typing on a keyboard, three steps that break whatever train of thought led to needing the reminder in the first place. MATE skips all of that by reading your own handwriting instead. Write “meeting at 1:00 p.m.” on its E-ink panel with the built-in pen, and the device sets the alarm itself, no app, no unlocking, no menu to dig through.

That handwriting recognition is the entire premise, and it works because the device treats a note and a task as the same object rather than two separate steps. The moment it detects a time written into the text, it quietly converts that scribble into a scheduled alert running in the background. Nothing about the note’s appearance changes. It still just looks like something you jotted down on paper.

Designer: Geonwoo Kang

A thin LED bar along the top edge handles the countdown, giving a glance-able sense of how much time remains without requiring a full screen wake or a swipe through settings. When the set time actually arrives, the alarm sounds and stops the instant you tap the panel, keeping the entire alert cycle contained to the same physical surface where the note was written in the first place.

Because handwritten notes pile up fast, MATE handles multiple pages through a three-stage physical slider running down one side, letting you flip between up to three saved notes with a flick of a finger. That’s a deliberately low-tech solution to a problem most gadgets solve with a touchscreen menu, and it works specifically because a slider takes zero attention to operate correctly on the first try.

The memo pad itself doesn’t have to stay locked into the main body either. It detaches from its dock and relies on built-in magnets to stick onto a partition wall or a metal filing cabinet, turning a handheld notepad into a fixed reminder posted wherever it’s actually needed. A grocery list stuck to a fridge door works the same way a sticky note always has, just with an alarm quietly running underneath it.

Even the pen gets a small, deliberate design decision most styluses skip. It nests into a groove at the top of the device rather than rattling around loose in a bag or a drawer, solving the single most common complaint about any stylus-based gadget: losing the one piece that makes the whole thing work. Reaching for a note and finding the pen missing defeats the entire point of a device built around spontaneous handwriting.

None of MATE’s individual pieces, the E-ink panel, the physical slider, the magnetic pad, would stand out much alone. Put together, they describe a specific kind of object: something meant to sit on a desk quietly doing one job well, catching a thought before it disappears and holding onto it until the moment it’s actually needed.

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The Wooden Box That Refuses to Let Your Phone Win

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I’ve tried every trick to get my phone to leave me alone. Do Not Disturb. Grayscale mode. Leaving it in another room, which mostly just means I walk to the other room every twenty minutes to check on it. None of it works for long, because the problem was never the settings. The problem is that the phone is still there, still glowing, still capable of buzzing the second I let my guard down. Willpower is a terrible security system, and every app-based fix is still just asking me to trust myself, which is exactly the thing I can’t do at nine at night with a bag of chips in one hand.

That’s the gap French industrial designer Pascal Grangier is quietly working in with FARADAY, a home object that doesn’t ask you to resist your phone. It makes resistance unnecessary. Named after the 19th-century scientist whose cage design blocks electromagnetic fields, the piece works on the same basic physics: once your phone is inside, it has no signal at all. No calls sneak through, no texts land, no app can light up your lock screen and drag your eyes back to it. You’re not disconnecting through discipline. You’re disconnecting through geometry.

Designer: Pascal Grangier

What makes this more than a novelty is the shape it comes in. Most signal-blocking products look like they were built for a hardware store, not a living room. Faraday pouches for concerts and courtrooms are floppy nylon sleeves you’d never leave out on a counter. Grangier’s version is carved from wood, with the kind of soft, rounded form you’d expect from a well-made bowl or a piece of studio furniture. It’s designed to sit on a nightstand or a kitchen counter without looking like a confession that you have a phone problem. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. An object you’re proud to display gets used. An object you’re embarrassed by gets shoved in a drawer and forgotten by the second week.

I think a lot about why boxes like this are showing up now, and it’s not really about phones getting worse. It’s about people finally admitting that the “just put it on silent” advice never addressed the actual craving, which is the urge to check, not the urge to hear. Silent mode still lets the dopamine loop run in the background of your brain, because you know the notifications are piling up somewhere, waiting. A Faraday enclosure removes the pile entirely. There’s nothing accumulating on the other side of that lid, so there’s nothing to be curious about later.

I don’t think objects like FARADAY are anti-technology, and I’d push back a little on anyone who frames it that way. It’s closer to how we treat food we know we’ll overeat if it’s sitting on the counter. Nobody calls it deprivation to put the cookies in a cabinet instead of banning sugar from the house. A wooden box that mutes a phone for the length of a dinner, or a weekend, or a first date, isn’t rejecting the smartphone era. It’s setting a boundary the same way a lock on a liquor cabinet does, respectfully and without lecturing anyone.

The dinner table is probably where this thing earns its keep fastest. Phone stacking, where everyone tosses their device into a pile and the first person to grab theirs pays the check, has become a real ritual at restaurants precisely because people know they need external enforcement. FARADAY takes that same instinct and gives it a permanent home, no penalty games required, no honor system to break.

Whether a hand-carved signal blocker becomes a fixture in American homes the way candles or diffusers did, I couldn’t tell you yet. But the appetite is obviously there. We keep buying productivity apps, screen time trackers, even flip phones marketed as luxury items, all chasing the same outcome Grangier reached with a block of wood and a basic law of physics. Sometimes the smartest tech solution is the one that refuses to be technology at all.

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Razer’s New Gaming Keypad Puts 31 Customizable Controls Right Under Your Hand

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A keyboard can give you plenty of keys, but when you’re gaming, you rarely use all of them. What matters is having the right controls exactly where your hand needs them. That is the idea behind Razer’s new Tartarus V2 Pro, a one-handed gaming keypad that packs 31 programmable controls into a much smaller footprint while adding a proper analog thumbstick, something most keypads don’t have.

The thumbstick is one of the more interesting bits of the accessory. It uses TMR technology with anti-drift positioning and sits alongside three dedicated thumb buttons, giving the left hand a combination of keyboard and controller-style controls. The stick can handle movement, but it can also be assigned to other commands, making it useful for games that rely heavily on shortcuts, radial menus, or multiple simultaneous inputs.

Designer: Razer

Razer has also moved beyond the usual mechanical-switch approach, as Tartarus V2 Pro uses second-generation Analog Optical Switches that can recognize how far a key is pressed. Their actuation point can be adjusted anywhere between 0.1 and 4.0 mm, allowing the keys to be tuned for either quick, light presses or a more deliberate response. Rapid Trigger goes further by detecting upward movement as small as 0.1 mm, which can make repeated inputs feel considerably more immediate. Razer rates the switches for up to 100 million keystrokes.

There is plenty of control over how those inputs behave as well. Razer’s Advanced Input Control features include Snap Tap, Snap Flex, Dual-Keypress Priority, and Dynamic Keystroke. These allow players to change the way directional inputs work, prioritize simultaneous key presses, or assign different actions depending on how far a key is pressed. The wrist rest can slide outward and rotate from side to side, so the position of the hand can be adjusted instead of forcing it into one fixed angle. The keypad uses textured doubleshot PBT keycaps and a 5052 aluminum alloy top plate, with Chroma RGB lighting adding the familiar Razer touch.

True 8000 Hz HyperPolling is built in, while Razer Synapse handles deeper customization. Players can create up to 24 keymaps across three onboard profiles, with actuation and Rapid Trigger settings adjustable to suit different games. An onboard LED array also provides visual feedback without needing the software open.

At 211 × 159 × 49 mm and 486 grams, Tartarus V2 Pro takes up far less desk space than a conventional keyboard. Priced at $199.99, the gaming accessory changes how the player’s hand interacts with a game. Instead of reaching across a keyboard for commands, movement, and shortcuts, the controls are gathered into one compact surface designed specifically around that hand.

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This DIY Computer Build Looks Like a Muppet and Works Like a Real PC

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Nearly every DIY computer build chasing the cyberdeck label ends up looking like a prop from a gritty sci-fi film, all exposed wires and grungy metal panels borrowed straight from Neuromancer’s aesthetic playbook. This build ignores that entire tradition on purpose, wrapping a fully functional single-board computer inside a soft, orange, furry puppet head with a mouth that actually opens. It’s a cyberdeck that looks like it wandered off the set of a children’s show instead of a hacker den.

A single-board computer sits at the center of the whole thing, running the Linux side of its chip rather than tapping into the onboard microcontroller some builders use to drive servo motors. That decision kept the mechanics simple. A 5-inch HDMI screen handles the display duties, paired with a compact Bluetooth keyboard and touchpad combo for actual typing, while a USB battery bank keeps the entire rig running without hunting for an outlet mid-performance.

Designer: Natasha Dzurny

A webcam tucked into the build adds a function most puppets never get, letting its creator record herself running an actual puppet show through the lens mounted somewhere in that fuzzy head. That’s the kind of detail that turns a novelty prop into something genuinely useful for someone practicing puppetry, since reviewing your own performance afterward is a lot easier when the camera is already part of the puppet doing the performing.

Getting all that hardware to fit inside a rounded puppet skull took real spatial planning rather than just stuffing components wherever they’d squeeze in. The head itself started as a spherical mold, cut into two halves specifically so the mouth could open and close during a performance. A frame built inside that sphere anchors the electronics in place, giving the soft fur exterior something rigid to hold onto underneath all that plush material.

Fitting a human hand inside the same space the electronics occupy created its own puzzle, since puppeteering requires room for fingers to move the mouth while the board, screen wiring, and battery pack all compete for that same interior volume. A mounting platform above the hand cavity solved that conflict, giving the electronics their own dedicated shelf instead of floating loose around whatever space a puppeteer’s fingers happened to need that day.

Small engineering choices reveal how seriously the functional side of this build got treated despite the whimsical shell around it. The board itself sits on a piece of foam board rather than glued directly to the frame, which keeps adhesive away from sensitive components while also helping dissipate heat that would otherwise build up inside an enclosed, fur-covered space. A modified stereo jack even gets its own reinforced pocket near the mouth so headphones can plug in without disrupting the puppet’s face.

None of that hidden engineering shows once the fur and the big cartoonish eyes go on. What’s left looks entirely harmless, friendly enough to hand to a kid, right up until someone notices it also streams video, plays media, and somehow doubles as a bag you can carry over one shoulder. That kind of layered function inside a shape nobody would ever suspect is exactly what makes a build like this worth remembering.

The post This DIY Computer Build Looks Like a Muppet and Works Like a Real PC first appeared on Yanko Design.

Power Banks Make You Pick a Size, Trozk T3 Lets You Build One

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Most power banks force a single decision at checkout: buy the huge one for peace of mind, or the tiny one for your pocket, and live with whichever tradeoff you picked. The Trozk T3 Module Power Bank refuses that choice entirely, building a charging system out of three separate pieces that snap together or peel apart depending on what the day actually calls for. Capacity becomes something you assemble, not something fixed at the factory.

Each piece plays a distinct role instead of just being a smaller copy of the whole. Module A holds the control button, the ports, and a charging cable that’s already built in, acting as the brain of the system no matter how many other pieces get attached. Module B adds a hefty 10,000mAh reserve for a full day of use, while Module C packs 5,000mAh into something closer to a lipstick tube than a battery pack.

Designer: Trozk

That size difference in Module C matters more than it sounds. On a day when a bag feels like overkill and a phone just needs a quick top-up before heading out the door, Module C alone plugs directly into a device without any cable dangling from a pocket. Add Module B back in for a commute or a work trip, and the same system scales up to 10,000mAh without buying a separate product for each scenario.

Stack all three together, and the full setup climbs to 15,000mAh, enough to get a phone through repeated charges during a long travel day or a weekend away from an outlet. Every configuration still charges at up to 22.5W over PD and QC fast-charging protocols, so swapping modules never means swapping down to a slower charging speed. The system scales in capacity without asking anyone to compromise on how fast a device actually fills back up.

Inside Module B and Module C sit automotive-grade 21700 battery cells, the same cell format used in electric vehicles, chosen here for the higher energy density that keeps output steady rather than tapering off as the charge drops. A flame-retardant PC housing rated UL94 V-0 wraps around that battery core, paired with overcharge, over-discharge, and short-circuit protection working together as a layered safety net rather than a single point of failure.

None of that hardware stays hidden behind a plain status light either. Module B carries an animated color display that shows total battery percentage alongside the status of each connected piece, turning what’s usually a boring number on a phone screen into something worth glancing at on a desk. Connecting different module combinations even triggers its own visual response, giving the display a bit of personality most charging bricks never bother with.

Owning one system that reconfigures itself changes how you think about packing a bag in the first place. Instead of choosing between a bulky charger you rarely fully use and a small one that runs dry too soon, the same three pieces cover both extremes and everything between them, snapping together only when the day actually demands the extra capacity.

The post Power Banks Make You Pick a Size, Trozk T3 Lets You Build One first appeared on Yanko Design.