Hasta La Gadget!

The 2022 Toyota Tundra Capstone takes the high-powered work truck into the future with one eye on luxury quality and the other on tried-and-true basics.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced late last Friday the company had disabled users from using paywalls on posts to get users to pay to access content for iOS devices. Apparently, Apple just didn’t like the idea of people paying others using bots without paying the troll toll.

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Amazon’s Fire HD tablets are still worthy options if you just want a competent media consumption device for as little money as possible, and within that lineup, the Fire HD 10 provides the best value for most. This is especially the case when the device is discounted, and as of this writing the 10.1-inch slate is back on sale for $75 at Amazon and Best Buy, among other retailers. 

While this isn’t the absolute lowest price we’ve seen — the tablet was briefly available for $55 at Target earlier this year — it does match the price we saw during last year’s Black Friday sales and Amazon’s latest Prime Day events. The 32GB model here technically has an MSRP of $150, though regular discounts mean its average street price has fallen closer to $130 in recent months.

This is a nice price for what was already one of the better values on the tablet market. Like Amazon’s other Fire tablets, the Fire HD 10 is a no-frills device: It’s largely made of matte plastic, the front and rear cameras are mediocre, and very little about its performance or design feels as premium as what you’d get from even an entry-level iPad. But for the money, it’s all good enough if you’re just looking for casual web browsing, ebook reading, video streaming, and Alexa stuff. Its eight-core MediaTek Helio P60T processor and 3GB of RAM won’t blow anyone away — don’t expect much in the way of gaming — but it can handle the basics without consistent slowdowns, and it’s generally more fluid than the lower-cost models in the Fire lineup.

Similarly, the 10.1-inch panel isn’t the brightest or most vibrant you’ll see, but it’s plenty fine for $75. Again, its 1920 x 1200 resolution is a firm step-up from the lower-res Fire 7 or Fire HD 8, and simply having more real estate makes it more pleasing for Zoom calls and video streams. The tablet gets a good 12-ish hours of battery life per charge, and it charges over USB-C. While the discounted model here only has 32GB of built-in storage, you can expand that with a microSD card. (A version with 64GB of storage is also on sale for $95.)

The caveat with any Amazon tablet is, as always, software. Amazon’s Fire OS is still a forked version of Android that lacks access to the Google Play Store — and thus, native Google apps like Gmail or YouTube — and frequently pushes you toward the company’s own apps, services and online store. There are still lock screen ads, and it still costs a $15 fee to get rid of them. It remains easy enough to sideload the Play Store and its more expansive app library, but that’s clearly not the most user- or security-friendly solution. Instead, a Fire tablet will work best if you stick to Amazon apps like Kindle and Prime Video, popular apps like Netflix or basic web browsing. All that said, the OS is still fairly robust when it comes to parental controls and supporting multiple user profiles, and there’s still a handy “Show Mode” that can essentially turn the tablet into an Echo Show-like smart display when you’re not holding it. 

The deal here comes as part of a wider sale on Amazon tablets. The Kids and Kids Pro versions of the Fire HD 10, for instance, are both back to their all-time lows at $120. Those come with large protective bumper cases (the Pro’s is a bit slimmer), two-year warranties and a year of Amazon’s Kids+ child-focused content service, though their hardware is otherwise identical, and it’s worth noting that you can set up a kid-friendly profile on the base Fire HD 10 as well. 

The Fire HD 10 Plus, meanwhile, is on sale for $105, which matches the lowest price we’ve tracked. That one adds another gigabyte of RAM and wireless charging support, which are nice upgrades — particularly if you want to use that smart display functionality — but nothing we’d call essential for most people in the market for a good affordable tablet. We’ll also note that the Fire 7 is down to a new low of $42, but we’d recommend waiting for the recently-updated Fire HD 8 and its altogether superior hardware to go on sale if you’re simply looking for the cheapest usable slate. 

Buy Fire HD 10 Plus at Amazon – $105Buy Fire HD 10 Kids at Amazon – $120Buy Fire HD 10 Kids Pro at Amazon – $120Buy Fire 7 at Amazon – $42

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Designed and built by Berthil van Beek for the Eurobricks T23 competition (where I’m sure it will be a contender), this LEGO Great Ball Contraption (GBC) is a massive functional Ferris wheel, with a diameter of a 91cm (~36″). For those of you unfamiliar, Great Ball Contraptions are modular machines built to move LEGO soccer or basketballs from one place to another in unique and unusual ways. A Ferris wheel definitely fits the bill. So would a tilt-a-whirl or a gravitron.

Berthil built the ferris wheel GBC using 128 strings, 63 pods, 2.5 meters of 3 mm rigid hose, and is 100% LEGO. For reference, my nephew is always around 1% LEGO depending on exactly how many pieces he’s eaten in the past few days. He takes after his uncle.

I can still remember the first time I got a LEGO soccer ball stuck in one of my nostrils. I panicked and went to the doctor. What an idiot I was! Now I just leave them there and wait for a good sneeze.

[via GeeksAreSexy]

Mitsubishi was pumping out plenty of iconic sports cars in the JDM craze of the ’90s and 2000s, but the FTO is perhaps the most underrated of the bunch.