Originally created as places for monks to meditate on Buddha’s teachings, Zen gardens have been miniaturized and available in desktop versions for quite some time now. Just not in interplanetary form, like this Mars Zen Garden available from Uncommon Goods. The desktop meditation garden features a 10″ diameter resin tray, red sand, lava rocks, a tiny astronaut and Sojourner rover, and a rake for making patterns. I am going to have so much fun relaxing and not working!
The copper-finish nickel rake features one end for raking and the other for creating craters from meteorite impacts. How realistic. Of course, if they wanted to make it even more realistic, it should come with some alien mini-figures as well. Stop hiding the truth, NASA!
I remember I had a miniature Zen garden in high school to help calm my nerves from the high stress of youth (little did I know!), but my cat Bill eventually knocked it off my desk, and all the sand got lost in the carpet. I suppose I should just be thankful he didn’t decide to use it as a litter box instead. At least there’s that.
Following multiple leaks and quite a bit of speculation, Microsoft’s autumn hardware event for 2022 has finally given us a look at the next Surface products.
Microsoft is updating its Surface convertible lineup with the Surface 9 Pro, and this time, the big upgrade is reserved for the connectivity department.
Microsoft’s fall hardware launch schedule isn’t all about modest iterative PC upgrades. Case in point? The company has a new speaker for remote workers.
No matter how many cameras or sensors they use, autonomous cars will never be perfect, but research coming out of Japan suggests that a simple upgrade could help reduce the risk of self-driving cars hitting undetected pedestrians: a pair of animated googly eyes that make it obvious what the vehicle has or hasn’t…
It should soon be much easier to access your iPhone’s photo collection on a Windows-based PC. Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with the option to directly view iCloud photo libraries in the Photos app — you won’t need your browser, just an iCloud app from Microsoft’s store. So long as your iCloud account has enough space to hold all your images, you might never need to manually transfer photos to your Windows machines.
The functionality is available today for Windows Insider participants. It should be available to all Windows 11 users sometime in November.
The news comes just as the Apple Music app launches on Xbox consoles. It reflects Microsoft’s ambition to make Windows the “most open” desktop platform with support for rival services and apps. You can use Android apps and run Linux instances, for example. While this is partly a not-so-subtle dig at Apple’s more closed ecosystem, it’s good news for users who’d rather not switch hardware just to get seamless photo syncing.
Wait, so I’m supposed to get in my car, commute to some hoighty toighty coffee store, find and pay for parking, then wait in line to pay $3 for a few tablespoons of mediocre hot pressed bean juice served to me in a paper cup? Why would I do that when I can just walk my lazy ass to my kitchen and brew up a single piping-hot serving of concentrated coffee in under 5 minutes from the $150 Outin mobile espresso maker?
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget
I stumbled across the Outin (which keeps autocorrecting to Putin so not great branding) on Amazon while doing research for an upcoming Holiday Gift Guide and turns out that there are a shocking number of mobile, battery-powered caffeinated beverage brewers on the market these days. I was drawn to the Outin because, unlike a vast majority of available models, it handles both coffee pods (specifically, of the Nespresso variety) and ground espresso — you simply have to swap out the pod holder for small container about half the size of a film canister that holds the ground coffee. It does both hot and cold brew too. The well-equipped Outin starter pack comes with a coffee scoop, among myriad other accessories sleeves, and carrying cases, that is perfectly fitted to both fill and tamp down the grounds into the canister.
The actual brewing process gets a bit complicated as the Outin is built like a Russian nesting doll. You have to fill the canister with coffee grounds, tamp those down, snap on a perforated lid, drop the now-sealed canister in a larger mounting cup, screw that into the bottom of the heating unit before sliding the receptacle cup over the mounting cup to catch the coffee when it is extruded – where are you going there are still more steps – then pour exactly 70 ml of water into the upper chamber (gods help you if you overfill), put a cap on that, then hold the control button down for at least two seconds – but less than four, otherwise you get cold brew – and wait three to four minutes for the water to heat to 270 degrees F. From there, the Outin will automatically begin pushing said hot water through the coffee-filled pod at 20 bar pressure, but won’t stop until it runs out of batteries or you press the control button again.
Ooh, that reminds me: batteries. The Outin has 7800mAh of them and that still isn’t nearly enough. It takes around 45 minutes to fully charge the device from dead using the included USB-C cable. You get three cups of espresso out of that (four if you’re lucky) before another three-quarters hour on the charger is required.
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget
Also, I’m not a fan of having to memorize yet another obtuse sequence of button presses to get this thing to work because the designers thought they’d be clever and save money by having a single command input control everything. I’ve already had to commit to memory the patterns for a dozen various vape pens and desktop rigs, LED flashlights and household gadgets. It’s all too much so I wind up just pushing the button on this and swearing until something happens. Hell no I’m not reading the instructions, I’m an adult.
That said, espresso that makes me go “meh, at least I didn’t have to drive to get it” is still better than the alternative of “no espresso.” Plus, it’s leagues superior to the stuff I normally drink in hotel rooms while on assignment. I’m certainly not dragging this thing and its menagerie of lids-that-are-as-easily-lost-as-they-are-essential-to-the-device’s-proper-operation anywhere near the great outdoors, but I could see myself using it to pregame before working livestream events or press conferences. Maybe I’ll caffeinate myself to the point of oscillation in three-shot bursts for the duration of CES 2023.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
