r/TechImpact

Firefox, VLC, Blender, Linux, OBS… or something else? Share your pick and why you like it?

The legendary 3310, N95, Lumia, or another classic? And would you buy a modern Nokia flagship today if it offered great cameras and long battery life?

One app. No alternatives. No backups. Everything else disappears forever.

What’s your choice?

The smooth UI, Live Tiles, Lumia cameras, or the clean design? If Microsoft launched a new Windows Phone tomorrow with full app support, would you switch from Android or iPhone?

1. Smart Ring — tracks sleep, heart rate, and controls devices using finger gestures.
2. AR Glasses — show notifications, maps, and AI replies directly in front of your eyes.
3. AI Bird Feeder — camera identifies birds automatically and sends alerts to your phone.
4. Exoskeleton Wearable — supports legs during walking, hiking, or heavy physical work.
5. Battery Swap Charger — swaps external phone batteries automatically within seconds.
6. Tiny AI Robot — reacts to people with sounds and small emotional movements.
7. E-Ink Poster — a digital artwork display that uses very little electricity.
8. Soccer Ball Tracker — helps find lost footballs using phone tracking features.
9. USB-C Mini Fan — tiny portable fan powered directly from your phone.
10. Global Travel Charger — one charger with plugs for multiple countries.

Which gadget would you actually buy? Can you share any innovative gadgets you have discovered recently?

I Built a smart cube on ESP32-S3 — round touch display, 6-axis IMU auto-rotation, RGB LED filaments, 6 smart faces. Full source on GitHub.

What is it and why I'm sharing

This is the YUMO CUBE — my third build, designed and built entirely by me from scratch. I'm sharing it because I've made the full source code open source so anyone can build their own, and I'd love feedback from the community on what to improve or add next. It's a desk gadget built around the Waveshare ESP32-S3 Touch LCD 1.46B, housed in a hand-bent brass wire sculpture I made myself. The cube has 6 faces, each running a different "smart" app on a 412×412 round capacitive touch display.

What does it do?

The QMI8658 6-axis IMU detects orientation in real time, whichever face is up becomes the active app automatically.

The 6 faces are:

live clock (NTP + IP geolocation timezone), weather station (OpenWeatherMap, refreshes every 10 min), SD card photo gallery (JPEGDEC hardware-accelerated), joke fetcher (Official Joke API), tilt controlled mini game, and a personal workout timer. Four flexible RGB LED filaments run on the rear face, individually addressable and synced to the active app.

Hardware: No custom PCB , the Waveshare ESP32-S3 board is all-in-one with the display, touch, and IMU already on board. The only external wiring is the RGB LED filaments connected to pins 12 and 13, and a LiPo battery connected to the board's dedicated battery pins. That's it very approachable to replicate.

Stack: LVGL 9.2.2 on FreeRTOS, built with PlatformIO. All UI layouts and screens were designed by me in SquareLine Studio and exported directly into the project. Core 0 handles heavy tasks; Core 1 is dedicated to 60fps LVGL rendering. 16MB Flash with PSRAM support, custom DMA buffer padding. WiFiManager captive portal on first boot , no hardcoded credentials. Power latching cuts battery completely after 3-second button hold; IMU wake-on-motion brings it back.

The engineering challenge: Getting LVGL 9 to run stutter-free on a round display while simultaneously polling the IMU, fetching API data, and driving addressable LEDs across both cores was the core puzzle. Memory was tight — PSRAM fallbacks and careful DMA buffer alignment were essential. The round display boundary for the physics mini-game also needed a custom collision approach since LVGL doesn't handle circular constraints natively.

Source code: https://github.com/yumobuilds/yumo-smart-cube

Parts: Waveshare ESP32-S3 Touch LCD 1.46B/ 1.5mm brass rods/ flexible LED filament/ 3.7V 1200mAh LiPo/ MicroSD card.

Libraries: LVGL 9.2.2 · ArduinoJson 7/ WiFiManager/ JPEGDEC/ SensorLib.

Happy to answer questions. What would you add to the cube?

A coalition of thirteen major publishers including Penguin Random House, Elsevier and HarperCollins has secured a $19.5 million default judgment against Anna's Archive, a shadow library offering free access to pirated books. The case was filed in a New York federal court and because the site's anonymous operators never appeared to defend themselves, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled entirely in the publishers' favor. The judgment was signed on May 19, 2026.

The penalty was calculated at the maximum statutory rate of $150,000 per infringed work across 130 titles. The publishers also argued that Anna's Archive was functioning as a primary source of training data for AI companies including Meta and NVIDIA. Collecting the $19.5 million however is considered essentially impossible. The operators remain anonymous citing fear of lengthy prison sentences and though the court ordered them to unmask themselves within ten days they are widely expected to ignore this. The award mirrors a similarly uncollectable $322 million judgment the music industry won against the same site in a related Spotify case.

The more consequential part of the ruling is the permanent injunction targeting the site's technical infrastructure. Because Anna's Archive routinely evades enforcement by cycling through domain names the injunction orders all domain registries and registrars to permanently disable the site's active domains and block their transfer. More than twenty companies are named including Cloudflare, Njalla, DDOS-Guard and the registries managing the site's current .gl, .pk and .gd domains.

Enforcement will be strongest against American companies within the court's jurisdiction. Most named intermediaries however are foreign entities that have historically ignored U.S. court orders. Notably unlike the Spotify music scrape which Anna's Archive voluntarily removed, the publisher's books remain actively available on the site making it harder for intermediaries to justify inaction. As of writing all three of the site's domains remain live and the operators are widely expected to have backup domains ready to deploy.

Source : TorrentFreak

Are you still using traditional passwords everywhere, or have you started switching to passkeys?

After struggling with traditional to-do apps, I realized the problem wasn’t only procrastination — it was the feeling of staring at an infinite list of expectations every day.

So I built Kindred.

Instead of managing endless tasks, the app focuses on making a few intentional promises to yourself each day.
The companion exists to make productivity feel more emotionally meaningful rather than mechanical.

Over time, the companion quietly mirrors your habits:
- intentional work strengthens your bond
- overcommitting drains energy
- rest matters
- consistency matters more than perfection

A few things I wanted to do differently:
- offline-first
- no account required
- no ads
- no subscriptions, just a one-time payment
- no social pressure
- no overwhelming setup
- simple UI for beginners, not productivity power users

The app just got approved on the App Store, and I’d genuinely love honest feedback — especially critical feedback.

I’d really appreciate any thoughts, critiques, or feature suggestions. There are also a lot more features and improvements I’m excited to work on moving forward.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/ph/app/kindred-kinder-promises/id6768028725

Phone, smartwatch, earbuds, laptop, or something unexpected? Share your pick and tell us why

Was it smooth, confusing, exciting, or a complete disaster? Tell us which distro you tried first and how it worked?

Samsung and Google have shown a first look at their new AI-powered smart glasses called Intelligent Eyewear. The glasses use Gemini AI and are designed for hands-free use, so users can talk to them instead of pulling out a phone. They work as a companion device connected to a smartphone.

Key features include voice commands, turn-by-turn navigation, live translation, message summaries, calendar actions, photo capture, and smart suggestions like nearby places during a walk. The glasses can also translate signs and menus in real time.

Benefits include hands-free use, quick access to information, and easier daily tasks while keeping your eyes on the world around you. Samsung and Google partnered with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker for stylish designs. Launch is planned for fall 2026.

Source

I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts & keyboard-first workflows, but I found Chrome's implementation quite limiting for my use-cases - creating groups & pinning/unpinning tabs. I also found myself often forgetting some shortcuts and then having to look them up online. So I started experimenting with a command palette for myself - Open the palette, type for what you want, and hit enter to let it do it for you.

Over time, I kept adding more actions and controls, like tab search, custom shortcut to jump back to previous tab, highlight tabs that are playing audio, rename tab titles to make search easier, and more recently, working on window controls. I call it Conduktor, and I've been using it daily for the past few months.

I shared it with some friends and got them onboarded too, but would love it more people would try it out and give feedback on what needs to be added/changed to improve the keyboard-first workflow. I have a free 30-day trial, but happy to extend it if you need more time to check it out. Here's the store link. 

Some looked normal back then, but today they seem funny, strange, or hard to believe 😄 Share an old ad you still remember.

Read books, sleep, go outside, panic, or finally finish that task you've been avoiding? Share your first move in the comments.