We may earn a commission from links on this page.

An immutable law of the universe is that no matter how big your house is, you eventually fill it up with stuff. And if you’re starting off with a small house to begin with, you hit maximum storage pretty quickly. That can make DIY home maintenance and other projects a challenge, because so many of the tools you need are kind of enormous and awkwardly-shaped, making their storage problematic even in spacious homes.

While hand tools like hammers and screwdrivers can usually be stashed creatively, larger items eat up your spare room pretty quickly—unless you opt for a folding or collapsible version. These tools do the same job, but shrink down when not in use so they can squeeze into tight spots or unexpected locations, solving your storage problems.

A folding ladder is easy to store in a garage or shed

Ladders can be some of the biggest storage challenges because they are, by their very nature, extremely large and rigid. If you don’t have enough vertical or horizontal space to store a ladder, it can wind up just sort of standing in an odd place, collecting dust in between uses and making your home look like a perpetual job site.

You have two small-space options to solve for this, though. The most common is a telescoping ladder, which collapses down to a portion of its height when not in use. This can make it a lot easier to find storage space in a closet or other location, and it can even be hidden behind furniture. Another option is a folding ladder like this one from DuoSaftey, which folds into a stick-like form when not in use, minimizing its horizontal footprint instead of its vertical footprint.

This wheeled cart can be store in a laundry room or closet

A sturdy, wheeled cart is incredibly useful in a lot of maintenance and repair jobs, making it easy to transport tools and materials around the area. But who has the space to have a whole cart just sitting around until it’s needed? A folding cart is the answer: It folds flat for easy storage, but snaps into a sturdy full-sized cart that can handle up to 300 pounds of weight when it’s needed.

Get a collapsible bubble level that folds around corners

A bubble level is a necessity if you want your home projects to look like a sane, rational person performed the work. But a full-size level is often difficult to find space for, and smaller levels aren’t as useful for larger projects.

This folding level not only collapses into a tiny form factor for storage, it can be bent and used to check level around corners, which is one of those DIY superpowers you don’t realize you need until you learn about its existence.

This folding saw is great for the occasional DIY project

Saws are another rigid tool that can be problematic to store. Hanging them on a wall is a good solution that gets them out of the way, but if you need to pack your tools out of sight, you need to consider a folding saw like this one. If you saw wood every day of your life, you might not want this, but if you need a saw for the occasional quick project around the house and don’t have storage space to spare, this will get the job done and fold up and away when not needed.

Store this pop-up workbench in the garage

Like rolling carts, workbenches are incredibly useful when you need a flat surface to work on, but become a real pain when it’s time to store them away. Luckily, you can pick up a folding workbench like this one from DeWalt. It’s a sturdy work surface that can support up to 1,000 pounds, but when the job is done, it folds up to be slid into the tightest spot you have available.

This collapsible bucket fits under the sink or in a utility closet

Everyone needs a job bucket in the house, but the traditional five-gallon bucket not only takes up more space than you realize, it also becomes a place to store stuff in, making it a chore to unpack every time you need to use it. A folding bucket like this one isn’t quite as large (it’s only three gallons), but it collapses into an easily-stored flat configuration when you’re not using it, preventing it from tempting you with all that empty space.

A folding hand truck can transport heavy stuff and then get tucked away in a closet

For years, I had a hand truck stored in my crawl space, because a hand truck was an incredibly useful thing. Any time I had to move bags of cement or large items around, I’d have to climb down into that nightmarish crawl space and retrieve the hand truck, which was a pain in the butt. Now I have this folding handtruck, which does the same job (it can handle more than 300 pounds) but can be tucked away in a closet when not in use.

Use this folding shovel for gardening and clearing out snow

Every house needs a shovel. You either have a garden or backyard where digging will occasionally be needed, or you’ll need to clear snow from your sidewalks and driveway. Or both! Shovels tend to be left in garages or outside when not in use, but if you need to store yours in a small space inside, a folding option is a real space-saver. It collapses into a compact square that will squeeze into any space, but it’s sturdy enough for the toughest jobs you can throw at it.

Mafia: The Old Country demands to be played on an enormous screen. As much as I love my 32-inch Alienware OLED gaming monitor, it doesn’t do justice to Mafia’s cinematic vistas of Sicily. But, I also wanted to play that game in its full 4K glory, with none of the compromises of today’s game consoles. So why not just shove a tiny gaming desktop under my home theater? Enter the Fragbox, Falcon Northwest’s revamped small form factor gaming PC. While it’s very expensive, starting at $3,997, it’s incredibly powerful and gives you the freedom to easily upgrade the hardware down the line. 

I know what you’re thinking: “A $4,000 desktop, in this economy?” That pricing also doesn’t include upgrading from the stock NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 GPU, as well as adding more RAM and larger SSDs, all of which could drive the price up thousands more. I initially planned to review the FragBox back in early December 2025, before the AI-induced RAMaggedon made memory, storage and other components dramatically more expensive. Falcon Northwest is mainly known as a boutique and high-end system builder, so its wealthier clientele can likely weather the pricing storm. If you’re looking for a deal, though, you won’t find it here.

So what, exactly, is a FragBox? Imagine a typical mid-tower desktop squashed down to a system that’s only 10.2-inches tall, 10.5-inches wide and 15.9-inches deep. When Falcon initially debuted the FragBox in 2004, it was notable for being a genuinely small PC that used full-sized parts. That’s still a main selling point today: It can still fit in large NVIDIA GPUs, including the beefy RTX 5090, as well as either Intel’s latest Core Ultra chips or AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs. A huge 280mm radiator sits at the top pulling out hot air, and it also serves as an All-in-One (AIO) liquid cooler for the CPU. 

At 25 pounds, the FragBox isn’t exactly light, but its sturdy metal handle makes it easy to move around. Most mid-tower desktops usually weigh between 20 and 35 pounds, depending on their case material. But they’re also much larger and harder to squeeze into tight spaces. The FragBox’s relatively squat size makes it easy to shove into a home entertainment center, or just sit on the corner of your desk. I do wish the handle was removable, though. It was about half an inch too tall for one of my shelves.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Despite its density, the FragBox’s elegant design makes it a cinch to access to all of the system’s components. Just unscrew the side and top panels and you can easily remove the GPU, RAM, storage and other major components. There are three slots of M.2 SSDs, as well as two locations for 2.5-inch drives and a spot for a large 3.5-inch HDD. The system is bundled with a 1,200W power supply, which should be more than enough to handle future GPUs and CPUs. 

Ports are plentiful as well: There are two USB-A and one USB-C connections right up front, alongside a headphone jack. On the rear, you’ve got your typical assortment of mid-tower connections, including four USB-A 2.0 connections, seven USB-A 3 ports, one 20G USB-C 3.2 port, 2.5G Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort. Our RTX 5090 review unit also included three DisplayPort jacks and one HDMI connection (which you’ll see on most GPUs). Wi-Fi 6E is also built-in, though at this price it would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

The FragBox, thankfully, lacks the garish LEDs and cheesy thermal glass you find on more ostentatious gaming rigs. Falcon Northwest’s aluminum case looks and feels stately, like an old-school luxury car. If you want something flashier, you can shell out an additional $400 for a custom UV printed case or $149 for a UV-printed front panel.

Our review unit was equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D CPU, NVIDIA’s RTX 5090, 96GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB SSD. So sure, even before benchmarking or running any games, I expected it to be a beast. In PCMark 10, the FragBox scored a whopping 13,810, which is around 500 points higher than my mid-tower system with the same CPU and GPU. It also scored the highest 3DMark Speedway and Port Royal ray tracing scores I’ve ever seen. Even more impressive, the FragBox’s fans were barely audible under load, and the CPU and GPU sat at a chill 52C and 65C, respectively

To get back to my initial point, it ran Mafia: The Old Country in 4K flawlessly, with every graphics setting cranked all the way up. While playing on my 120-inch projector home theater setup, the game reached 62 fps natively, and flipping on DLSS upscaling and frame generation bumped that up to 120 fps. Not that you need a super higher framerate for a slow-paced, mostly cinematic action game. I was just happy to be playing without any compromises — even the PS5 Pro can’t reach the same level of graphical fidelity as the monstrously powerful RTX 5090. 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

I’m no stranger to big-screen PC gaming, but previously I’ve had to run a laughably long HDMI cable from my desktop to make it work. I’m just too old for that mess now. And it also doesn’t work consistently, especially at higher framerates, thanks to the massive bandwidth required to pump out 4K at high refresh rates. In-home game streaming is also an option, but that’s not great when you’re blowing games up to an enormous TV or projector screen. It’s just too hard to ignore the imperfections of streaming compression. (Admittedly, I need to test newer high-bandwidth options, especially after I was impressed by NVIDIA’s GeForce Now upgrade last year.)

The FragBox also made it easy to jump into all of my recent Steam titles, including Mewgeneics and Arc Raiders on a big screen. Unfortunately, Windows itself remains a key stumbling block for home theater PC gaming. You’ll still need to keep a keyboard and PC around to deal with the initial OS configuration. And even once I enabled Steam’s Big Picture mode, which offers excellent controller options, I still occasionally had to deal with Windows Updates and other annoyances. 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

Microsoft is currently trying to optimize Windows for gaming handhelds, and it’s reportedly doing even more to make a future PC-powered Xbox feel more console-like. For now, though, using a Windows PC in your home theater doesn’t feel much different than it did a decade ago. Steam is your savior, Windows is your enemy. Or you could just save thousands of dollars and buy a $500 PlayStation 5 or $700 PS5 Pro, instead. The latter will still get you smooth framerates and a healthy dose of ray tracing, without the annoyance of Windows, keyboards and mice.

But if you just want a compact and insanely powerful gaming desktop, and you don’t mind spending a premium, it’s hard to deny that the FragBox gets everything right.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/falcon-northwest-fragbox-review-a-compact-gaming-rig-that-does-everything-right-130000837.html?src=rss

“In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever…” writes GitHub’s senior developer advocate.

They point to this as proof that “AI isn’t just speeding up coding. It’s reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place.”

Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what “easy” means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead.

The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift:
— TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year
— JavaScript grew 24%
— Shell scripting usage in AI-generated projects jumped 206%
That last one matters. We didn’t suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost.
“When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers,” they point out. “Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems.”

“AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints…”
“Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see.”
“Test AI-generated code harder, not less.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No one knows exactly when the vehicles we drive will finally wrest the steering wheel from us. But the age of the autonomous automobile isn’t some sudden Big Bang. It’s more of a slow crawl, one that started during the Roosevelt administration. And that’s Theodore, not Franklin. And not in America, but in Spain, by someone you’ve probably never heard of.

His name was Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a Spanish engineer born in Santa Cruz, Spain, in 1852. Smart? In 1914, he developed a mechanical chess machine that autonomously played against humans. But more than a decade earlier, he pioneered the development of remote-control systems. What he wrought was brilliant, if crude—and certainly ahead of its time.

The first wireless control

It was called the Telekino, a name drawn from the Greek “tele,” meaning at a distance, and “kino,” meaning movement. Patented in Spain, France, and the United States, it was conceived as a way to prevent airship accidents. The Telekino transmitted wireless signals to a small receiver known as a coherer, which detected electromagnetic waves and transformed them into an electrical current. This current was amplified and sent on to electromagnets that slowly rotated a switch controlling the proper servomotor. Quevedo could issue 19 distinct commands to the systems of an airship without ever touching a control cable.

Read full article

Comments

“A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules,” reports Live Science. “It’s not only exceeding the ‘speed limit’ of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist…”

“How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer….”

As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit… Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. “For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud,” study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as “this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years,” Obuchi added.

ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. “This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching,” the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls “one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe.” Altogether, ID830’s rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation.

Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were “eerily similar,” reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was “abundantly clear” they’d used AI.)

Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market…. Employers say that’s having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same…
It’s easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn’t normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It’s worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate’s behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they’d have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI’s role in it becomes obvious.

The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he’ll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. “You’re saying, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this’ when I know a good chunk of them do this!”

Obligatory XKCD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. “The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw.”

The Register explains:

The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, “aleabitoreddit,” that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook… In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web… In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster…
The Register argues Raspberry Pis aren’t as cheap as they used to be “thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago.”

“You know what’s cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.