If you’re looking for a mechanical keyboard that can give your desk a touch of retro flair, Amazon has 8BitDo’s Retro Mechanical Keyboard with Dual Super Buttons on sale for $69.99, one of the lowest prices we’ve seen for the bundle. The styling on this keyboard is thorough, with blocky retro legends on the rounded keycaps, and supplementary buttons and detailing to help match the theme.

8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard

This mechanical keyboard is designed to look like Nintendo’s original NES controller, with features like two red customizable buttons. Along with Bluetooth support, it also offers a standard tenkeyless layout with clicky, hot-swappable switches.

Where to Buy:

• $99.99 $69.99 at Amazon (N edition)

Despite how it looks on the outside, the internals on this keyboard are modern, with support for Bluetooth, 2.4GHz, and a USB wired connection, and compatibility with both Windows and Android. The 87-key setup is mounted on white Kailh Box switches for that vintage clicky sound, with a volume knob and function keys for quick controls.

The included dual super buttons connect to the keyboard, and can be programmed to a variety of key combinations and functions without the need for any additional software. These sizable buttons are great for easy access to shortcuts like copy and paste or media shortcuts, and the bundle includes one, but you can connect up to four to a single keyboard.

Other deals to consider

• Best Buy has the Aukey 2-in-1 MagSafe Qi2 wireless charging stand discounted to $27.99 (usually $49.99). The stand can charge your iPhone and AirPods at the same time with up to 15W of power, and folds away neatly for travel or to clear desk space.
• You can grab a Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge with 512GB of storage at Woot for $669.99, almost half off the retail price of $1,299.99. The phone stands out with its remarkably thin and light design, and still has recent generation smartphone features, like a SnapDragon 8 Elite chipset, 200MP camera, and 6.7-inch 1440p display with a 120Hz refresh rate. Read our review.
• The Lego Icons Transformers Soundwave set is on sale at Amazon for $168.96, almost matching its all-time low price. This 1,505-piece set can transform between the character’s robot and cassette player modes without any disassembly, and the included sound effects block helps give this kit a fun twist.

A Petlibro outage is preventing its smart pet feeders and other devices from performing scheduled tasks, like dispensing food. The outage began on Tuesday, with users across Reddit reporting that their smart feeders, litter boxes, and water fountains have gone offline.

Though Petlibro maintains that "existing settings and schedules stored locally on your device will continue to operate as programmed," many users say that's not the case. Instead, some users report that Petlibro's RFID and Granary food dispensers are missing scheduled feedings due to the outage - a major problem for pet owners currently away from home. Some users say they've …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Kinetic Publishing, a new indie publisher from the development team behind the co-op horror game Phasmophobia, just hosted its first games showcase, and it includes five ambitious new titles set to release in 2027 and 2028.

Perhaps the most significant announcement from Kinetic's show is that it's publishing the next game from Telling Lies and Immortality creator Sam Barlow, titled Precognition. (Barlow previously revealed the game as "Project C.") Like other Barlow titles, Precognition will feature FMV-sequences and nonlinear storytelling. Here's the setup:

Players take on the role of Diana, a woman who discovers she can receive vision …

Read the full story at The Verge.

According to an Economic Daily News report spotted by MacRumors, executives for Apple supplier Pegatron confirmed during an earnings call that the iPhone 18 Pro series phones will launch this fall, but the base iPhone 18 won't arrive until the first quarter of next year. The more affordable iPhone 18e and a new iPhone Air are also rumored to launch around the same time, in line with rumors that have been circulating for more than a year.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and The Information both reported last year that Apple was planning to only launch its premium iPhones in fall 2026, and earlier this year another Apple supplier said one of its custom …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project Hail Mary movie was created. The filmmakers didn’t “want it to feel like a human language because he’s supposed to be really more musically communicating”.

I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”

From TPM Reader AB …

I am but one anecdotal data point from Wisconsin, but as a politically engaged liberal in Madison, I’ve had plenty of conversations in the last week that align with your suppositions of how Crowley won.   

While I don’t really identify as a Socialist, I am highly motivated to support ‘socialist’ projects and see them implemented.  I put ‘socialist’ in quotes, because public education, fire dept, and public libraries are all socialist projects — but also pretty basic services. 

That said, for much of the primary, I was all in for Hong — she campaigned relentlessly and leveraged social media deftly, and she was meeting the moment with the piss and vinegar and fight that so many of us crave in this moment. She was also the first and only candidate on the Dem side to take a stand on Data Centers, calling for a 1 year moratorium (ironically, the only candidate in the gubernatorial race to support a 100% ban on data centers was Tom Tiffany’s opponent in the Republican Primary, Andrew Manske). 

Top congressional Democrats on Tuesday pushed back on a new memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.

“Executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the OLC opinion, published on Monday, reads.

Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why was no one…even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?”

Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them, The New Northland (1915), may be the earliest novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex. — Read the rest

The post A museum curator wrote the first T. rex novel on his daily commute appeared first on Boing Boing.

Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:

I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.

This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:

I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!

Tags: Death Cab For Cutie · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video