The Memdock G3 Is the 13-Port Dock You Don’t Have to Hide Anymore

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Modern desks have never looked better. Sit-stand tables, cable management trays, and ultra-thin laptops have turned the average workspace into something worth showing off. But for all the effort that goes into making a desk look clean and intentional, the accessories that actually power it are often still a mess, and docking stations, in particular, tend to be boxy, generic things that most people try to hide.

That habit of hiding docks makes sense, since most of them aren’t exactly something you’d want on display. The Memdock G3 takes a different approach. It’s a 13-in-1 docking station that doesn’t look the part in the way most docks do, and that’s a compliment. With a rounded aluminum body and a physical volume knob at one end, it’s designed to sit on the desk, not behind it.

Designer: Memdock

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $189 ($100 off). Hurry, only 135/200 left! Raised over $50,000.

The aluminum shell is both light and sturdy. Weighing just 175g and measuring 17cm in length, it won’t crowd any desk. The silver-white finish sits comfortably alongside a MacBook or a Surface without looking out of place. A one-touch power switch keeps things simple, while the knurled volume knob doubles as a status indicator with a blue ring glowing softly at its base.

Where the G3 separates itself from generic hubs is with its dual HDMI outputs, both capable of 4K at 60Hz. Whether you’re juggling two monitors or spreading your workspace across screens, the setup doesn’t need extra adapters or complicated display routing. It works across Windows and macOS without additional drivers, so plugging in is genuinely all you need to get a full dual-screen arrangement running.

Charging is another area where the G3 keeps things clean. The 100W PD port can keep a laptop topped up while everything else stays connected, which means you don’t need a separate charger taking up another outlet. Pass-through charging also stays active even when the dock is switched off, so your devices keep charging overnight without you having to think about it.

On the data side, the G3 carries multiple 10Gbps connections, including USB-C, which is meaningfully faster than the 5Gbps typical of most docks in its category. Moving a batch of raw photos or offloading footage from an external drive feels noticeably quicker, cutting the time you’d otherwise spend watching a progress bar crawl. Two USB-A ports handle the everyday stuff, from keyboards and mice to thumb drives.

Photographers and video shooters will appreciate having both an SD and a TF slot built in, which removes the hassle of hunting for a separate card reader every time they need to pull files off a camera. Pair that with a Gigabit Ethernet port for a steadier wired connection, and the G3 handles a range of workflows that most hubs can’t without reaching for yet another dongle.

The volume knob deserves a separate mention, not just as a feature, but as a design choice that says something about the G3’s priorities. Instead of digging through a settings panel every time you want to nudge the audio on a call, you just reach over and turn it. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of immediate, tactile control that feels obvious once you have it.

Docking stations rarely get treated like products worth designing with real care. They sit at the junction of display, power, data, and audio, making them genuinely central to how a desk functions, yet they’re almost always designed as if nobody will ever look at them. The Memdock G3 is a reminder that the things holding a workspace together can be just as thoughtfully considered as anything else on the desk.

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $189 ($100 off). Hurry, only 135/200 left! Raised over $50,000.

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This LEGO VHS Player Actually Has Cassettes You Can Insert and Remove

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Before streaming queues and binge-watching algorithms rewired how we consume film and television, there was a ritual. You drove to the video store, walked the aisles, made your pick, and came home to slide that chunky black cassette into a slot that swallowed it with a satisfying mechanical thunk. The VCR wasn’t just a piece of consumer electronics. It was the centerpiece of a whole cultural ceremony, the thing that turned an ordinary Tuesday night into a genuine event. Polar-Angel_UA, a LEGO builder and 10K Club Member from Ukraine, has captured exactly that feeling in brick form with the Video Home System.

The build recreates a classic VHS setup with the kind of specificity that only someone who actually lived through the era could pull off. The main unit nails the flat, utilitarian slab aesthetic of a proper 80s or 90s VCR deck, complete with a cassette slot, a row of playback controls, and a PAUSE indicator rendered in green. A top-loading lid flips open to reveal the tape mechanism inside, and the real delight here is in that interaction. The tapes go in. The tapes come out. For a build that’s ostensibly a static display piece, that single interactive element transforms the whole experience.

Designer: Polar-Angel_UA

Four items accompany the main unit: a movie cassette, a cartoon cassette, a remote control, and a VHS case. The distinction between the movie tape and the cartoon tape is a quietly brilliant design decision because if you grew up in that era, you absolutely had a dedicated shelf section for each. Saturday morning cartoons lived in their own plastic sleeve, carefully rewound and stacked away from the movie collection. Polar-Angel_UA understands the taxonomy of the VHS-era household intimately, and it shows.

The MOC’s inherently block-ish nature (thanks to the LEGO bricks) works well for this product. VCRs were not delicate objects. They were heavy, deliberately black, and looked like they meant business sitting under your television set, blinking 12:00 in perpetuity because nobody ever set the clock. This LEGO version carries that same hulking, I-mean-business energy, with the cassettes propped against it like they’re already queued up for a double feature. The remote control sitting casually beside the deck is a small touch that completes the tableau perfectly. You can almost feel the carpet under your feet and smell the takeaway boxes.

The Video Home System is currently gathering votes on the LEGO Ideas platform, where fan-created builds compete for the chance to become official retail sets. Cross the 10,000 vote threshold and LEGO’s internal team reviews the submission for potential production. With 688 supporters on the board right now and 422 days left on the clock, there is plenty of runway here. Head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote!

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This $35,000 Tiny Home Proves You Don’t Need More Than 161 Square Feet to Live Well

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At 20 feet long and 8 feet wide, the Tulsi by Simplify Further Tiny Homes doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t. It has everything you need, and nothing you don’t. That restraint is exactly what makes it work. While the tiny home market is crowded with builds that either sacrifice livability for aesthetics or pile on features that inflate the price tag, the Tulsi threads the needle — landing at a starting price of $35,000 for a fully functional, NOAH-certified home on wheels.

The Florida-based builder behind it, Simplify Further, has built a reputation around the idea that quality and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive. Their motto — “Simple Living, High Thinking” — runs through every design decision in the Tulsi. The build carries a BBB Accredited A+ rating, and its certification as an RV through NOAH means it meets a recognized standard for workmanship and safety.

Designer: Simplify Further Tiny Homes

At 161 square feet, the Tulsi packs in a kitchenette, a full bathroom with a shower stall, a flush toilet, a mini sink, a built-in seating area, a main-level queen-sized bedroom, and a loft. The loft measures 7 by 4 feet with a 36-inch height at the low side, accessible by ladder with black metal railings — tight, but functional. The height under the loft sits at 6 feet 4 inches, which means the main living area never feels like you’re ducking through a crawl space.

What sets the Tulsi apart from its contemporaries is its genuine flexibility. The main level bedroom isn’t a compromise — it’s a feature. For guests who don’t mind the loft, you could designate the loft as the main sleeping area and convert the downstairs bedroom to a living room. That kind of adaptability is rare at this price point. In the kitchen, buyers can opt for open shelving or swap seating for additional cabinet storage — a small but meaningful decision that shapes how the space actually lives day to day.

Simplify Further positions the Tulsi primarily as a guest house or mother-in-law suite — a secondary structure that gives visitors full independence without removing them from the property entirely. But the build has proven versatile enough to serve as a short-term rental, a starter home, or a full-time residence for someone drawn to the economy of small living. The Tulsi by Simplify Further seamlessly blends convenience and comfort, making it a charming addition to any property.

For a 161 square foot box on wheels, the Tulsi has quietly earned its place as one of the more thoughtfully designed entry points into tiny living — and the numbers back it up.

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Woven by Hand in the Philippines, Sold in Milan

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Most lamps just sit there. They do their job, emit their light, and fade into the background of a room. Mirei Monticelli’s lamps are the kind you keep looking at.

The Milan-based Filipina designer has built her practice around a single material: banaca, a woven textile made from the fibers of the banana-abaca plant, harvested by hand on the island of Catanduanes in the Bicol region of the Philippines. It’s not exactly the kind of material you’d expect to find at the center of a glossy Milanese design studio, and that’s exactly the point.

Designer: Mirei Monticelli

Monticelli studied at Politecnico di Milano, earning her Masters in Design and Engineering, but her roots have always pulled her back to the Philippines. Her mother, celebrated fashion designer Ditta Sandico, actually pioneered the banaca textile itself, a blend of banana and abaca fibers that is both remarkably durable and incredibly malleable. Working with renowned rattan designer Kenneth Cobonpue also shaped her early understanding of how natural, traditional materials can carry enormous aesthetic power. In 2019, she founded Studiomirei, and by the end of that same year, her Nebula lamp had already won the Salone Satellite Award at Milan Design Week.

Since then, she has used banaca almost exclusively for her lighting pieces, and the results are genuinely hard to categorize. They hover somewhere between sculpture and utility, between craft object and fine art. When light passes through the woven fibers, the pieces seem to breathe. The way the material catches and filters illumination gives each lamp a softness you don’t usually expect from a functional object. The forms manage to feel both ancient and completely contemporary.

The newest work carries that same visual language forward. Biomorphic shapes, swells and folds that recall sea creatures, coral reefs, and natural formations, seem to suspend mid-motion. The organic quality of banaca lends itself to this perfectly. Unlike glass or metal, the material doesn’t impose rigidity; it holds form while still suggesting movement. Looking at them, you get the sense that if you turned the light off, the shape might slowly release and unfold.

The material story goes deeper than aesthetics, and it’s the part that tends to get overlooked in design coverage. Each lamp is the result of an entire chain of human hands. Farmers in Bicol harvest the banana-abaca trunks by hand when the plants reach maturity. The fibers are extracted, brought to the community, and woven by artisans using techniques passed down through generations. By the time a finished lamp reaches a room in Milan, it carries the labor and heritage of an entire province in the Philippines.

Monticelli has said explicitly that her studio works at the intersection of sustainable materials, craft, technology, and community empowerment. It sounds like a mission statement, and maybe it is, but the work itself proves it isn’t just positioning. The banaca lamps are not mass-produced. They are made to order, with lead times that reflect the reality of handcraft. Customizable in size and color, they are objects you commission with intention rather than objects you add to a cart.

A real tension exists in sustainable luxury design between the genuine and the performative, and it’s worth naming. Many brands talk about ethical sourcing while scaling in ways that hollow out what made the material meaningful in the first place. Monticelli’s studio, still rooted in direct relationships with the farmers and weavers of Bicol, has navigated that tension well. The limited production isn’t a constraint; it’s the whole point.

The design world loves a good material story, and banaca has a genuinely good one. A plant grown on a remote Philippine island, harvested by hand, woven by a community of artisans, shaped by a designer navigating two cultures, and ultimately glowing softly in rooms that could not be further from the landscape that produced it. That kind of distance, traveled with integrity, is what turns a lamp into something worth writing about.

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Waymo’s Self-Driving Car Saw the Flood and Drove In Anyway. Here’s The Problem Plaguing Every Robotaxi.

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Every sensor on a Waymo robotaxi sees the world in layers. The LiDAR maps it in three dimensions, radar bounces through it, and cameras read it in color and contrast, building a composite picture of the road that no human retina could match at the same fidelity. So when a Waymo encountered a flooded section of a 40 mph road in San Antonio on April 20, the car absolutely saw the water. It slowed down for it. Then it drove in anyway, floated off the road surface, and came to rest in Salado Creek. The voluntary recall Waymo filed with NHTSA on April 30, covering 3,791 vehicles, was triggered not by a sensor that missed a hazard, but by a software stack that saw the hazard clearly and still chose the wrong response.

You might be sitting in one of those 3,791 recalled vehicles right now, somewhere in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, or Atlanta, and Waymo has confirmed the permanent software fix is still in development. Tesla’s Cybercab, entering production at Giga Texas, runs a supervised robotaxi service in Austin, Dallas, and Houston on a pure-vision architecture with no LiDAR whatsoever. Uber’s platform in Dallas is dispatching Avride-operated Hyundai Ioniq 5s that are currently under NHTSA investigation for 16 crashes involving lane changes and failure to stop for traffic ahead. Amazon’s Zoox uses cameras, LiDAR, radar, and long-wave infrared on every vehicle, the most sensor-redundant consumer-facing stack in the industry, and is still in limited city testing. Each platform has a different answer to what a self-driving car should do when it encounters something it cannot traverse, and after the San Antonio creek, all of those answers deserve a much closer look.

The NHTSA recall notice characterizes the flaw precisely: the software “may allow the vehicle to slow and then drive into standing water on higher speed roadways.” That is a classification error buried in the decision stack, not a sensor failure, and the distinction matters more than the recall number suggests. Waymo’s 5th-gen Jaguar I-Pace and 6th-gen Zeekr RT both carry LiDAR, radar, and cameras in overlapping fields of view, and the San Antonio car processed the flooded road accurately as a hazard worth responding to. The decision architecture, however, had no hard-stop condition for water on a 40 mph road, only a caution flag that reduced speed and left proceeding as an available output. A separate Waymo had already been stranded near McCullough Avenue in San Antonio roughly two weeks before the April 20 incident, confirming this was a repeatable failure mode across a fleet that was still carrying passengers in nine other cities.

Tesla’s Cybercab carries no LiDAR, putting its supervised fleet in Austin, Dallas, and Houston in a fundamentally different position when floodwater appears than Waymo’s overlapping sensor stack would. The platform relies on eight cameras and 4D millimeter-wave radar, meaning no independent depth-sensing channel exists to assess water severity when camera visibility degrades in heavy rain. A real-world FSD 14.3.1 test in April 2026 ended in manual takeover when the front bumper camera submerged, a precise illustration of where the vision-only approach runs out of information. Avride, dispatching Hyundai Ioniq 5s through Uber’s Dallas app since December, is under concurrent NHTSA investigation for 16 crashes involving lane changes and failures to stop for road hazards, all 16 occurring with a trained safety monitor seated in the vehicle. Amazon’s Zoox sits at the opposite end of the sensor redundancy spectrum, combining cameras, LiDAR, radar, and long-wave infrared in a 360-degree array with a human TeleGuidance fallback for scenarios the stack cannot resolve, though its commercial footprint remains a fraction of Waymo’s.

The Waymo recall, the Avride probe, and a dashcam video of a Waymo rolling through a red light on Irving Boulevard in Dallas all surfaced in the same seven-day window, collectively mapping the same design gap across three platforms: a perception-to-action pipeline that detects a hazard but generates the wrong response to it. Waymo’s OTA patch is deploying now, but the permanent fix remains in development, meaning every current ride runs on interim constraints rather than a finished solution. The San Antonio incident involved an empty car, and that is the only reason this story ends with a recovery operation rather than a casualty report. Each platform carrying passengers today is still writing its edge-case rulebook, publishing each new chapter only after something breaks on a live road. Knowing which system you are riding in, what its sensor stack can assess in a sudden storm, and whether its flood-detection logic has been patched from an interim fix to an actual solution is, I’d argue, the most practical safety question a passenger can ask in 2026.

The post Waymo’s Self-Driving Car Saw the Flood and Drove In Anyway. Here’s The Problem Plaguing Every Robotaxi. first appeared on Yanko Design.