The VxD driver does a lot of the heavy lifting and is responsible for initializing WSL9x as well as handling userspace events that have to be relayed to the kernel (i.e., page faults and syscalls), which it does in a rather interesting way due to limitations in the Win9x architecture.
The RG Rotate will run on Android, feature an aluminum alloy frame and come in Polar Black and Aurora Silver. Anbernic's video detailed that the handheld will have a 'proprietary ultra-thin alloy hinge' that went through 'high-durability testing.'
The allure of the project is that the magnetic tape doesn't reproduce audio cleanly because the oxide coating introduces a slight instability in playback speed. But these are the 'flaws' that Iulius Curt is after, allowing the resulting sound to have that lo-fi warmth that's ideal for ambient listening.
The fix, he told me, was temporary - he didn't have the right part and couldn't get it. This experience revealed a broader shift in how modern products are designed, sold, and owned - one that increasingly treats repair as optional and replacement as inevitable.
The CyberFold is a foldable clamshell cyberdeck that bears a striking resemblance to an oversized Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP. Inside is a surprisingly capable Linux computer, complete with a touchscreen, a full QWERTY keyboard, stereo speakers, and a proper port selection.
The Pocket Grip is proof that the best ideas don't expire - they wait for the manufacturing era that can do them justice. MetMo pulled a 1913 Anderson patent from near-total obscurity and rebuilt the concept from scratch using CNC machining and modern metallurgy.
In the nineteenth century, entire railway networks became obsolete almost overnight, not due to physical deterioration, but because of changes in the technical standards that supported them. The expansion of railroads across Europe and North America adopted different track gauges, and as a dominant standard gradually emerged, these infrastructures became incompatible with one another.
The DIY centers around the familiar wedge-shaped Slope 45 2×2 LEGO piece, a part historically used in LEGO space-themed sets as a representation of computer terminals inside spacecraft cockpits. Staal enlarged this element to roughly ten times its original size, turning it into a functional housing that blends retro toy aesthetics with contemporary computing power.
Affordability is the primary driver in the secondhand segment, the analyst says, with around 40 percent of sales driven by budget-conscious users shopping in the €200 to €300 price band for laptops. The €300 to €400 tier is also expanding - representing 23 percent of the refurbished market, up from 15 percent a year earlier - indicating some buyers are prepared to spend a bit more for improved specifications.
By January 2026, over a quarter of Americans will live in states with right-to-repair laws, and that number should rise to more than 35% by fall 2026 when Connecticut and Texas join in. The European Union also passed a Right to Repair Directive in 2024, which will apply to all EU countries by July 2026. These rules make manufacturers give consumers and independent repair shops the tools, parts, manuals, and software needed to fix their own products.
My father kept manuals for products we hadn't owned in years, filed alphabetically in a cabinet. When I asked why, he looked at me like I'd suggested burning money. "What if we need to look something up?" The concept of finding any manual online in seconds just doesn't compute for a generation that had to rely on these paper lifelines.
The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper.
Pleban's talk, "Hacking the last Z80 computer ever made," was more than just a dive into retro computing. It also explored some of the many strange decisions involved in launching a new range of hardware based on the eight-bit Zilog Z80 chip in 1999 - when the 16-bit computer era was largely over, and just a couple of years before 32-bit x86 chips would be replaced by x86-64.
The result, shaped by industrial designer Jerry Manock and powered by Wozniak's engineering genius, was the Apple II: a smooth, warm-beige enclosure that suggested domesticity rather than machinery. It belonged on a desk the way a telephone did. That calculated approachability helped sell millions of units across sixteen years of production.
