What was the best thing your parents ever built for you? A treehouse? Maybe a go-kart? I’m afraid their efforts pale in comparison to the jet-powered scooter Colin Furze built for his son who finally has a definite answer to the question, “which parent do you love the most?” Read More >>

When it was released 20 years ago, it didn’t matter that the Game Boy Camera took terrible, low-res, black and white images. It was a digital camera kids could buy if they saved up enough pocket money, and the fun factor far outweighed the device’s technical limitations. Even today there’s still a rabid fanbase for it, including designer Bastiaan Ekeler, who managed to hack together a Canon EF lens mount adapter for the toy. Read More >>

Destroying sensitive documents using a paper shredder is a long and boring process because most of the machines are woefully underpowered. Destruction is supposed to be fun, so a gifted Danish hardware hacker upgraded a run-of-the-mill shredder with a 44,400-RPM brushless motor, letting the machine tear through a page in less than a second. Read More >>

Benedict Cumberbatch aside, the best part of Marvel’s Doctor Strange movie was the animated spells the magical characters could generate out of thin air. Given our world lacks real magic, a Japanese cosplayer has found a way to simulate the same effect using a modded Nerf blaster and a spinning LED wand. Read More >>

Spare tyres aren’t cheap, and do you really want to spend all that money on something you might never actually use? Not when 20 rolls of duct tape can apparently be used to make a remarkably functional spare tyre, as the mechanics at YouTube’s Life OD discovered. Read More >>

YouTube’s My Mate VINCE has a knack for wiring modern video game consoles to old-school TVs. After perfecting his skills, he’s hacked together what is undoubtedly his greatest, most absurd creation: a resurrected boombox that lets gamers play their favourite titles anywhere they’re strong enough to carry this monstrosity. Read More >>

After miraculously getting a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe toy to take flight, the RC hobbyists at YouTube’s FliteTest challenged themselves to get one of Ikea’s cheap Jokkmokk wooden chairs airborne. Not only did they succeed, they also managed to complete all of the flightworthy upgrades in a mere six hours. Read More >>

Matt Denton has been putting his 3D printer to good use again, possibly the only good use for those plastic-extruding machines. He’s super-sized all the pieces in Lego’s 1979 Technic Bulldozer set, which required over 600 hours of printing to recreate all 372 parts. Read More >>

Shooting on film continues to get more and more expensive, especially for fans of instant cameras like the reborn Polaroid. Sixteen bucks (£11) for just eight shots was far too pricey for Tim Alex Jacobs, so he hacked an old Polaroid camera to instead spit out images on cheap thermal paper, the same kind used in tills to print out your receipt. Read More >>

Stressed about job security? Worried about making ends meet? Super Mario might be a plumber, but do you ever see him fixing pipes? No, and why would he when his world is filled with random blocks that spew gold coins? Apparently hoping for an early retirement, hacker Jonathan Whalen attempted to build a real-life version of a Super Mario Land question block that actually spits out coins. Read More >>

On Monday, anyone looking to hack their Switch or run their own software on it got some good news and more good news. An exploit has been released that opens the homebrew floodgates—and because it’s hardware-based, Nintendo can’t just patch it. Read More >>

You might think the most dangerous part of a roll of plastic wrap is the metal cutting blade on the package, but another hazard lurks within the roll itself. After turning tinfoil into a functional blade, Japan’s most talented knife maker has now demonstrated how a roll of regular food wrap can be hardened, sharpened, and used to slice and dice. Read More >>

If you’ve got kids at home, or if you’re just incredibly careless with your own Lego collection, YouTube’s The Brick Wall has built a Roomba-like robovac that sweeps any errant plastic pieces off your floors, letting you finally walk around barefoot with impunity. Read More >>

The most-watched YouTube video of all time, “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, was was briefly removed from YouTube early this morning, along with several other popular YouTube videos, after hackers seemingly defaced the videos. Read More >>

If you weren’t able to scrape together $500 to buy Elon Musk’s fund-raising flamethrower, YouTube’s Jairus of All has a cheaper, DIY alternative that instead spews a massive spinning tornado of fire using a pair of ducted fans and a tank of liquid propane worn as a backpack. Read More >>