Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Using three of Teenage Engineering’s tiny Pocket Operators all playing at the same time, YouTuber tubesockor masterfully performs a near perfect recreation of the sountrack to Delta, a legendary Commodore 64 game that dates back to 1987. But what’s more impressive than how authentic the rendition sounds, is how quickly tubesockor’s fingers have to fly…
Walking is cool. Bikes are fun. But this invention which sort of does both is just unsettling. The Boneshaker Bigwheel is a project of Jacksonville, Florida artist Ron L. Schroer. It combines the eeriness of kinetic sculptures with a penny-farthing’s blatant disregard for safety. More recently, he built a giant facemonster called “Ol’ Fence” which…
Zachary Vex has been building unusual guitar effect pedals for 21 years, but he debuted what might be his strangest yet: a vibrato/phaser run entirely by a candle. Because it’s a custom piece created by hand in a machine shop, one Z.VEX Candela Vibrophase will run you about $6,000, or at least that’s what Vex…
Despite a huge library of successful games, the Gameboy was deeply underpowered, even for its time. At its heart was a modified version of the same CPU that’s still used in some graphing calculators. Thrifty architecture created some benefits, like a lower price point and better battery life than its competitors. But that also made…
The North West 200 is the largest sports event in Ireland, and every May since 1929 motorcyclists gather to race down public streets between the towns of Portstewart, Coleraine and Portrush at speeds in excess of 200mph. So how fast does 200mph feel? Just watch the video below. It was filmed in 360 degrees, meaning…
The Marina 101 is a residential skyscraper in Dubai which is, as the name suggests, 101 stories tall. James Kingston decided to (illegally) ascend the building and walk out onto a crane which he repeatedly and alarmingly describes as “greasy.” Personally, I’m feeling sick to my stomach just watching the gif above. But Kingston is…
Even if you are not a League of Legends junkie or a professional blacksmith, that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the incredible work that the Man At Arms folks put into their replicas of seemingly impossible weapons. This sword belongs to a LoL champion called Master Yi who is an assassin of sorts. Nothing about…
Everyone knows the PCBs in their electronics aren’t soldered together by hand anymore. But what most people don’t realize is how cool the machines that make those tiny joints are. This particular machine—the Essemtec Scorpion—is capable of putting down over 1,600 little dots of solder per minute with extraordinary accuracy, and with little to no…
“You get what you pay for” is one of those tried-and-true idioms that’s especially relevant in high-end electronics. Want a nice camera or a computer that’ll actually play Max Payne 3? Expect to shell out top dollar. So imagine Markus Fuller’s surprise when he pulled open the chassis of a $700 replacement battery for the…
What’s the most amazing thing about bubble wrap? Popping it. Oh the delicious sensation. What kind of evil monster would want to eliminate the wonderful pop? All it takes is a little epoxy and some light sanding to turn everyone’s favorite packing material into a cruel joke to be played on unsuspecting dinner guests. At…
When I went to a restaurant as a kid, I’d be lucky if it came with a placemat and some color crayons. But Skullmapping studio is completely changing the art of pre-dinner entertainment with projection-mapped tablets, and its biggest star is a tiny one-inch-tall chef. Skullmapping is looking to get this kind of table-side entertainment…
That anxious feeling of parking a freshly washed car under a tree full of birds would become genuine terror if you were to drive anywhere near this massive flock of over 70,000 Starlings. This startling footage was captured by the BBC, which points out that the correct term for a massive gathering like this is…
Smartwatches might finally be outselling traditional mechanical watches, but that doesn’t mean Swiss watchmakers are going away anytime soon. The legendary horological creations from Switzerland are mechanical masterpieces. And watching the 234 components inside this Omega Speedmaster that Hodinkee filmed getting serviced is an amazing behind-the-scenes peek inside a watch that’s as much a gadget…
What happens if you add metallic lithium to a glass of 7-Up? First, it bubbles like Alka-Seltzer. Then, it starts to heat up and boil. As it does so, the color changes: to green, yellowish-brown, and reddish brown, until it is pretty much black sludge. “By the time I went to the lab, it looked…
Care for a walk around Lake Superior? We suggest you do it very, very carefully. Dawn LaPointe took this footage of ice stacking up over itself, shattering over and over like sheets of broken glass, on the shores of Lake Superior around Duluth, MN this weekend. Depending on just how the ice freezes over the…
The winners of the 59th annual World Press Photo contest were announced announced. Ranging from the Syrian refugee crisis and China’s Tianjin explosion to the wild orangutans of Borneo, these are the best that the year of photojournalism had to offer. They are all amazing. The images were selected out of 82,951 photos captured by…
Will the return of virtual reality be as big a flop as the return of 3D movies and TV was? Not when you can strap an Oculus Rift or a Google Cardboard to your face and watch 500 episodes of The Simpsons in a 360-degree VR experience. It’s not every last episode of the show…
The 2016 Oscars have some of the staunchest VFX competition in the award show’s history. (Either Star Wars or Mad Max better win, I swear to God.) But the entire 87-year history of silver screen special effects is equally stunning. The folks from Burger Fiction compiled every recipient of the award into one 9-minute-long spectacle.…
The only thing cooler than a being an astronaut who gets to explore nearby worlds would be to one day land on a planet completely made of delicious chocolate. It hasn’t happened yet, but students at Johns Hopkins University put melted and solid chocolate under a powerful electron microscope, and it’s remarkable how much it…
It’s natural to think of sound as an exclusively auditory experience. But if you were to see a sound wave, what would it look like? Science photographer Linden Gledhill decided to find out using water and neon lights. And the result is some psychedelic synesthesia. The setup behind Gledhill’s marvelous soundscapes is simple. A reservoir…
