Your Small Room Secretly Needs Fewer Lamps, Not More

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A small room rarely gets to do just one thing. The table that holds your laptop during the day might host dinner a few hours later, while the chair beside it becomes your reading spot before bed. The problem is that lighting often stays fixed while everything else changes. An overhead fixture can feel harsh at dinner, and a decorative table lamp may be lovely but useless when you need to see what you’re doing.

That is a more interesting way to look at the Infinite Solas Lamp than simply calling it a cordless desk lamp. Its height, direction, brightness, and color temperature are adjustable, so the same object can play different roles as a room changes throughout the day. I like the idea of a lamp that adapts to the space you have, rather than asking you to find space for another lamp.

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Picture a table on a weekday morning. You pull the Solas taller and angle its head toward a notebook or the project in front of you. Later, you lower it and soften the light for dinner. By evening, it can move beside a chair and become a reading light. None of those uses is particularly dramatic on its own. Together, they make a persuasive case for a lighting object that doesn’t belong to one corner of the home.

The mechanics behind that flexibility are pleasantly straightforward. The Solas adjusts from 8.9 to 19.7 inches tall, while a magnetic ball-joint head lets you redirect the beam without shifting the whole lamp. Its LED light can be dimmed, with color temperature adjustable from 2500K to 4000K. Those choices matter because a change in angle can be just as useful as a change in brightness. Sometimes you want to see the pages in front of you. Sometimes you want the room to feel a little softer.

I also appreciate that the design doesn’t insist on looking like equipment. Machined aluminum with an anodized finish gives it a composed, minimal shape, and it comes in black or warm champagne. Either could sit on a shelf or side table without making the room feel like an office. That matters in a smaller home, where every object tends to be visible from almost everywhere else. A lamp can be useful, but you still have to enjoy looking at it when it’s off.

Of course, movable lighting is not a new idea. IKEA has helped make portable table lamps feel familiar as everyday home accessories. The Solas asks for a more specific kind of attention: not just where you can carry a lamp, but how much you can change its height, aim, and warmth once you set it down. I wouldn’t say that makes it the right choice for everyone. If all you want is a gentle glow on a shelf, a simpler lamp may do the job beautifully. The Solas makes more sense when one surface has several jobs.

That flexibility does come at a considered-object price. The Solas is listed at $325, which is a lot to spend on a lamp if you need light in only one place. It also still needs charging: the listed runtime is six to seven hours at full brightness, or up to 70 hours at its lowest setting, with a recharge taking approximately four hours via USB-C. Those numbers are worth knowing before imagining it as a fixture you can leave on indefinitely.

For me, the appeal isn’t the promise of owning one lamp and never buying another. It’s the smaller, more believable improvement of having one good lamp that can follow the way a room is actually used. When furniture has to work harder, lighting should be allowed to change its job too. The Infinite Solas Lamp understands that a home doesn’t hold still from morning to night. Its best trick is making those transitions feel a little easier.

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This Kid-Friendly Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Teaches Children How To Build Chatbots

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Remember those Radio Shack project kits with the spring terminals, where you bent wires into a working radio and felt like Tony Stark? Elecrow’s CrowPi 3 is that feeling, updated for a world where the thing kids want to build is a chatbot. It is a Raspberry Pi 5 learning station with 41 built-in sensors and modules, a camera, a microphone, and a 4.3-inch touchscreen. The courses run from blinking an LED to face recognition and voice control, plus plugging in LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek. Kids already talk to AI all day, so Elecrow figured they should get to build one.

The CrowPi 3 ships in a bumpered gray briefcase with a frosted magnetic lid, a fold-out handle, and an orange pull tab, which makes it the friendliest cyberdeck I have seen. For the uninitiated, that is a DIY computer built into some rugged container, usually with a Raspberry Pi for a brain and a lot of sci-fi attitude. Most of them cost their builders a few weekends of 3D printing and swearing, while this one arrives finished. The faceplate is silkscreened with labels and pin numbers, so the board doubles as its own wiring diagram. A middle schooler can legally carry the whole thing onto the bus, and I did not own anything this cool at that age, so I am only slightly bitter.

Designer: Elecrow

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Every module gets its own labeled cell, so the ultrasonic sensor, buzzer, tilt switch, RFID reader, and flame sensor sit in plain view instead of hiding behind a lid. That layout is the best teaching decision in the box, since a kid can point at the part they just coded and watch it react. Two breadboards on the left handle custom circuits, and a Pico, Arduino Nano, or micro:bit can join the Pi 5 on the same board. The unit measures 11.2 by 7.3 by 1.5 inches (285 by 185 by 38mm) and weighs 2.43 pounds (1,100g), about a hardcover textbook. Elecrow calls the design open source, with resources on GitHub.

The touchscreen is the one part of the faceplate that moves, folding flat or flipping forward for a better angle. A 2MP camera sits on a small bar above it like a laptop webcam, which is exactly where a face-recognition lesson wants it. At 800 by 480 pixels and 300 nits, the screen suits status readouts and debug info, and the It’s FOSS reviewer found the custom learning interface doesn’t display properly at that size. The full-size HDMI port solves that, so a bigger monitor can take over once the real coding starts. The RGB cooling fan got a gripe too, loud for its size and always spinning, though the same reviewer cheerfully called silencing it a free coding exercise.

The AI curriculum covers OpenCV (an open-source computer vision library) image processing, object tracking, face recognition, QR codes, pedestrian and car detection, and speech recognition. Elecrow says there are 180+ lessons in total, which is a lot of homework disguised as fun. The LLM lessons connect the board to ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek, and since a Pi 5 can’t host models that big, expect those to lean on online services. Elecrow’s project ideas are pleasantly small, like a voice-activated night light or a piggy bank that recognizes coins and plays a sound for each deposit. There is also a Minecraft course where tapping an NFC card spawns TNT, which is how you sneak Python into a kid’s weekend.

Raspberry Pi’s own 500+ answers a simpler question: what if the whole computer lived inside a keyboard? For $200 you get 16GB of RAM, mechanical keys, and a 256GB SSD, which makes a fine desktop and a poor science fair. It has no joystick, no ultrasonic sensor, and no flame detector, which are the things a kid actually wants to poke. The closest direct rival is the Joy-Pi Advanced, a Pi 4 kit that TechRadar put above $470 while comparing it to the CrowPi 3’s Kickstarter pricing. The CrowPi 3 is the one that sells the poking.

The original CrowPi hit Kickstarter in 2018 with a Pi 3B+ and a carry case, and the CrowPi 2 later fit in over 22 sensors and modules. The CrowPi 3 nearly doubles that count and adds the AI courses, plus Pico and micro:bit support that the earlier kits never had. Makers who build briefcase cyberdecks from scratch will get the appeal immediately, since this one skips the modeling and wiring marathon. The sensors come pre-wired and the lessons come already written. That is a fair trade when the person at the desk is eight.

Elecrow sells two kits, and the gap between them is a Raspberry Pi. CNX Software’s December 2025 roundup had the Basic Kit at $229 on Elecrow’s store and the Advanced Kit at $439, with the Advanced Kit listed at $599 on Amazon, so check that listing for today’s price. The Basic Kit expects you to bring a Pi 5, while the Advanced Kit adds a 16GB Pi 5, a wireless keyboard and mouse, two 18650 batteries, and two game controllers. Kids will spend the next decade chatting with AI, and the Radio Shack kids turned out fine because someone let them open the box. Somebody will build a piggy bank that judges your coins, and honestly, I would back that.

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5 Reasons why a foldable iPad Duo is a BAD Idea

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Exactly a month and 2 days ago, John Ternus unveiled Apple’s first foldable phone. It’s been a decade in the making, Apple’s done a whole bunch in the interim, hit $1 trillion in 2018, and subsequently grown to a $3 trillion brand, shifted from a hardware company to a hardware AND services company, launched a spatial computing headset, pretty much worked on and shelved their Apple Car. Rumors are tracking a few more devices that Apple’s been secretly working on. A smart ring that does the same job as a watch, or alternatively a screen-less Watch Air that competes with the likes of Whoop and Fitbit, and even a foldable single-screen laptop modeled on the same design of the iPhone Duo.

I’m not entirely sure whether Apple’s truly working on a larger folding device, but scaling the iPhone Duo up to a larger hardware unit isn’t a good idea for a bunch of reasons. Aside from the fact that it would cannibalize a whole slew of existing products, it would also create a bit of a UX nightmare for the iPadOS developer community. An iPad Duo (let’s just call it that) is nothing but a MacBook Neo with extra screens. The MacBook Neo ITSELF is designed to be compact and handle compact tasks, giving it a foldable design with maybe iPad Pro-level power achieves nothing. Here are a few reasons why the foldable iPad Duo isn’t the best idea.

1. The foldable Android tablet doesn’t exist for a reason

Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Google, Motorola, and a bunch of other makers have folding phones on their roster – yet nobody’s tried to push a folding tablet beyond maybe just 1 iteration. Huawei unveiled the MateBook Fold last year and hasn’t done much to work on a v2.0. It cost around $3,300 when it launched and occupied headlines for precisely a month before becoming yesterday’s news (partially because of its China-only distribution platform). The point I’m making is that companies haven’t explored the foldable tablet space because there’s little merit to it. Lenovo’s worked on a ThinkPad X1 Fold too, but here’s the hilarious bit – they’re marketing it more as a laptop than as a traditional tablet.

Tablets aren’t designed to be carried in pockets, therefore a smaller tablet that turns into a bigger one isn’t really a pressing need. Even if they were, the size of a pocket confines you to a very limited bounding box, giving you a folding phone template rather than a folding tablet one. Tablets themselves aren’t as popular as phones are, and folding phones are already a niche to begin with – making folding tablets mainstream would cost more money than it’s worth.

2. The aspect ratio nightmare

Of all the companies that have worked in the foldable space, there’s always been one question they’ve struggled to answer. What aspect ratio do we make? Because a foldable device exists in two states – a shut state and an open state. With phones, there are broadly 3 templates – the flip style foldable, which offers a square aspect ratio that turns into a vertical screen when opened. The second is the long book ratio that turns squarish when opened sideways. The third one, which Apple’s popularizing, is the middle ground – a book-shaped design that’s short and stout and has a repeating aspect ratio like the A4 and A3 paper so that the OS can scale meaningfully.

At least in this concept, we’re looking at what I believe is one of the most bizarre aspect ratios ever. This concept by Krishnavi Anand Krishnavi opts for an almost 1:1 ratio when shut, opening to reveal what feels like a widescreen 16:9 device. Both versions have their caveats – a 1:1 tablet doesn’t exist and it shouldn’t. Nobody works on a square screen, content isn’t optimized for it, heck even physical notebooks are vertical (who writes on square paper). Open it and you have a socially acceptable 16:9 device, but tablets are usually one of two things – they’re either big and 4:3 or they’re small and 16:9. Nobody makes a large 16:9 tablet because carrying it is a nuisance – you might as well just buy a laptop with a convertible design. A large 4:3 foldable tablet would fold down to a small 3:2 device, which still feels palpable, but continue reading and you’ll realize why the odds are stacked against a foldable tablet.

3. Building a massive hinge + flexible screen is cost-prohibitive

Apple’s poured hundreds of millions, if not billions into R&D for its titanium hinge. Every company has its own workaround for a hinge, ensuring durability, reliability, and the ability to conceal/remove the crease. It works well in flip phones, it’s tricky with book style foldables but companies have still come a long way in all these years. Scale that up to a device that needs a 7-8-inch long hinge and the engineering problems compound significantly. The hinge needs to uniformly open from one end to the other. Any discrepancy and the screen could stretch/tear. Any damage and the device could get stuck in a closed or open position for life. Laptops have suffered from hinge problems for years now, they’re the first mechanical part to fail on a laptop), so you can only imagine how much more work a tablet has to do – while still ensuring you can open/close it 10-20 times a day.

Not only is the hinge a problem, the screen is too. The screen used on a foldable phone is very different from the one used on you 15.6″ laptop. Companies work with suppliers to find the right kind of OLED that can take daily bending without the pixels suffering failure. The crease has to vanish when open and allow the screen to meaningfully bend when shut. A laptop display also doesn’t get touched hundreds of times a day the way a tablet or phone does. So it’s easier for a company to commission hundreds of thousands of small 6″ or larger OLED displays. Scale that up to a 12-15″ OLED display and you aren’t doubling the price, you’re quadrupling it (hold your phone to your laptop and see, four of its 6″ screens will fit in your 13″ laptop). A 4x pricier display eats up all your profits on a folding tablet.

4. The iPad Duo doesn’t have a target audience

This might be the biggest problem yet. We’re still struggling to find a mainstream audience for folding phones – so you can imagine how difficult it’ll be to find someone willing to shell out upwards of $3k on a folding tablet. The audience doesn’t exist because the use-case doesn’t exist and neither does the appetite (more on the appetite later). What would you do on an iPad Duo that you can’t already do on a laptop or a tablet? Phones need to be compact for a reason so the idea of folding your phone for easy carrying still holds up logically – folding a tablet makes absolutely no sense when it isn’t fitting into a constrained space like your pants pocket.

People buy their pants regardless of the phone they carry so the phone has to work backwards to fit into pants. With tablets and laptops, it’s the other way around – you buy a sleeve or a backpack based on the size of device you have. A larger laptop demands a larger bag, a sleeker, smaller tablet works great with a sling. Nobody buys the sling before they own the tablet. But I digress – the foldable tablet doesn’t exist because the market doesn’t. In over 10 years of working for Yanko Design, I’ve seen dozens of folding phone concepts, but even concept designers don’t work on foldable tablet concepts because there’s honestly nothing to desire there!

5. People want affordable computing, not foldable computing

This year, when Apple launched the MacBook Neo, we wrote about how it proved Apple wrong in one fundamental way. Apple’s always priced their products at a premium, thinking that they get to choose their audience – it worked when the economy was in a steadier state, when diesel wasn’t more than $6 a gallon. When Apple launched the MacBook Neo, the laptop literally flew off shelves, proving that there was a VERY strong demand for affordable computing. Especially when RAM and storage prices are already so high thanks to this AI boom that nobody asked for.

The MacBook Neo’s success with the Vision Pro’s silent failure proved that it’s time for tech to be democratic again. To focus less on shareholder value and more on actual consumer value. The iPhone Duo already costs upwards of most people’s salaries (globally speaking), so building an iPad Duo that would probably touch $3.5-4k in price makes no sense for a product that’s supposed to be for consumers, not enterprises. The iPad Duo doesn’t exist, and from the rumor mill, it probably won’t for the aforementioned reasons. John Ternus has proved to be an astute consumer-centric design lead, realizing what products fill the current gaps in Apple’s offerings. Speaking of which, I’m still waiting on that smarter Siri 2.0…

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