Sarang Sheth

Here's a fun fact for you. Pingu is getting a brand new show. Yes, that Pingu, the clay penguin from 1990 who talks exclusively in honks and mumbles, is being revived by Aardman, the actual Wallace and Gromit people, because apparently a 35 year old Swiss show about a penguin family still has enough juice left to warrant a full stop motion comeback. Turns out the internet never really let go of the guy. Between viral memes, nostalgic TikToks, and a fandom that treats “noot noot” like a secret handshake, Pingu quietly became one of those characters who refuses to stay retired. Honestly, respect.

There's something wonderfully strange about walking up to a framed picture on your wall and telling it what to paint next.

Here is a fun little contradiction to chew on before we get into the actual lamps. The whole point of Call It a Day, Tongqi Design's new lighting collection, is that you barely have to try.

The humble foam earplug has been functionally unchanged since the 1970s: roll it down, jam it in, hope it expands to a seal, and find it somewhere in the sheets by 2 AM.

There is a tool called an English wheel that has been shaping aluminum car panels since roughly the 1930s. It is a big metal hoop with a roller in the middle, and you push sheet metal through it by hand until it curves the way you want. It sounds like something you would find in a blacksmith's shed, not in the workshop of a car aiming for 1,200 horsepower. Yet that is exactly the tool Coventry Metalcraft used to hand-form the body of the new Jensen Interceptor GTX, alongside laptops running computational fluid dynamics software. Old-world muscle meets new-world math, and somehow both sides showed up to the same car without arguing.

Apple and the gaming crowd have always had one of those relationships where you nod at each other across a party and never actually walk over. Apple makes the chips, brags about them beating a PS5 in some benchmark slide, then goes right back to talking about spreadsheets and stargazing apps. Gamers, meanwhile, buy a Steam Deck or a Switch and never think about the iPhone in their pocket as a gaming device at all. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman just reported that Apple wants to finally cross the room, having spent over a year quietly developing its own gaming controllers for the iPhone. The bigger twist is who gets to wear the name tag. Rather than an Apple logo, the hardware is reportedly launching under Beats, the audio label Apple has been slowly turning into its lifestyle catch-all since buying it in 2014.

You know that little rounded square Xiaomi uses as its logo? The one a Japanese design legend spent actual months tuning with a math equation just to get the curve right? Lucas Angelo looked at that shape and thought, sure, why not build a car out of it. The result is the Xiaomi Horizon, and I mean that almost literally. The tailgate is one giant glowing squircle. The wheels are squircles. The whole rear end reads like someone blew up an app icon to the size of a minivan.

Google's Add Me is one of the stranger things a phone has ever done. Introduced on the Pixel 9, it takes a photo of your family, then hands the phone to somebody in that photo, who takes a second shot of you standing where the gap was. The phone stitches the two together and produces a group picture that never existed, of a moment where everybody was never actually in the room at once. It works remarkably well. It is also, if you think about it for longer than four seconds, deeply odd, a family portrait assembled in post like a Marvel crowd scene.

Here's a fun bit of trivia to drop at your next party and watch people's eyes glaze over: LEGO made its own version of Vice City before Vice City existed. It was called Paradisa, it ran from 1992 to 1997, and it was basically an entire toy line built on pink bricks, jet skis, and mustachioed men serving cocktails poolside. Nobody remembers it because it got quietly discontinued and replaced with fairy castles, but the DNA never really left the company. Fast forward a few decades and GTA 6 is about to remind the entire planet why Miami pastels slap so hard, and wouldn't you know it, a LEGO Ideas builder has basically resurrected Paradisa just in time.

Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, costs $1,999 for 256GB. That same money also buys four other Apple products with change left over: a 512GB MacBook Neo at $799, an iPhone 17e at $699, an Apple Watch SE 3 at $249, and AirPods Pro 3 at $249. Add it up and you land on $1,996, which is three dollars short of one folding phone. I ran the numbers twice because it looked like a typo. It's not a typo, it is Apple's live price list as of September 2026, and the distance between the cheapest thing Apple makes and the most expensive thing Apple makes has never been this wide.