adidas x DIOS Put Houston Car Culture on a $180 Sneaker

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Most sneaker collaborations start with a mood board. The DIOS x adidas Originals Megaride 01 feels like it started with a city. Specifically Houston, specifically at night, specifically the kind of night where car culture and Southern pride and a very particular kind of handmade craftsmanship all converge in one place. The design is dense with meaning in a way that rewards attention, and I think that’s exactly the point.

The first thing you notice is the restraint. The entire upper is Core Black leather, no gradient, no contrasting panels, no bold colorblock moment to grab your eye from across the room. DIOS and adidas made the deliberate choice to work almost entirely within one tone, which puts the pressure entirely on texture and form to carry the design. That’s a harder thing to pull off than it sounds, and the shoe earns it.

Designers; adidas Originals x DIOS

The cowboy boot references are the most discussed part of the design, and for good reason. The DIOS-branded toecap, stamped in Old English gothic lettering reading “DIOS Did It Ourselves,” is the shoe’s most striking typographic moment. It sits right where the toe cap of a traditional cowboy boot would be reinforced, borrowing that structural logic and translating it into something that reads as streetwear without losing the original reference. The lace shroud is covered in dense embossed floral leather, the kind of ornamental detailing you’d find on fine boot craftsmanship, and a snakeskin-textured panel sits just above the heel, anchoring the Western narrative with a material that has long been associated with Texas boot-making culture.

Then there’s the zipper closure. A silver zip runs across the midfoot where laces would ordinarily sit, which changes the silhouette profile considerably. It’s a cleaner, more architectural line that gives the shoe a slightly futuristic edge while simultaneously calling back to Western riding boots. The zipper pull is where things get genuinely interesting: a metal skeletal praying hands charm hangs from it, the kind of detail that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. It’s equal parts devotional and defiant, which is more or less DIOS in a single object.

The Houston car culture element lives in the hardware and the midsole. Chrome accents thread through the upper in subtle ways, but the real statement is the Megaride cushioning unit at the heel, finished in metallic silver. Photographed from behind, it reads almost like a chrome bumper, low and wide and polished. It’s a clever translation of an idea that could easily have been too literal, but the scale and placement keep it feeling like design rather than costume.

The heel counter carries DIOS iconography on both sides: a coiled serpent logo on one side, praying skeleton hands on the other. Both are worked in against the black leather with enough contrast to be visible without screaming for attention. The embossed star detail pressed into the top of the heel counter is quieter still, the kind of thing you clock after a second look. Contrast stitching traces the contours of the heel panels, reinforcing the handcraft quality the whole design is working to communicate.

The insole is unexpected in the best way. Against the otherwise all-black exterior, the lining is printed with a rope or lasso pattern in white, and the adidas logo is rendered in pink. It’s the one moment of warmth in an otherwise cool, severe design, and it functions almost like a private detail. The person wearing the shoe knows it’s there. Everyone else has to look closer.

Looking at the Megaride 01 as a whole design object, what I keep returning to is how resolved it feels. Every element connects to either cowboy boot craft, Houston car culture, or DIOS identity specifically, and none of those threads feel like they’re competing. That kind of coherence is genuinely rare in collaborative sneaker design, where the temptation to layer references without editing usually wins. DIOS and adidas resisted that, and the shoe is better for it.

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This Clock Looks Like It’s Sinking Into a Desk and It’s Not a Trick

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Clock design hasn’t changed much in its fundamentals for generations. The round face, the numbered ring, the hands that sweep from hour to hour, these conventions are so deeply embedded that most people don’t question them. The clock is a functional object, and like most functional objects, its form tends to follow a well-established script. Most designers accept that arrangement. The rare few who don’t tend to produce something genuinely worth paying attention to.

The Sinking Clock started as a self-imposed creative exercise: how much could you distort or take away from a clock without costing it the ability to tell time? That question became a limited-edition timepiece that looks exactly as its name suggests, as if a conventional tabletop clock were being absorbed into the flat surface it’s sitting on, caught mid-sink somewhere between this world and whatever lies below it.

Designer: Ross McBride

That effect isn’t achieved through software or projection. The clock’s own form is sculpted to create the impression that it’s disappearing into the surface it rests on. The lower portion dissolves into the plane of the desk while the readable face stays above. It’s deliberately disorienting, giving you the time while making you question what you’re actually looking at. The object reads as a clock and as something else entirely at once.

The philosophy behind it is that a clock doesn’t need to announce itself. Most homes and offices already have enough of them, ticking as quiet reminders of every passing hour. The intent was to make something that gives you the time when you need it but otherwise recedes, functioning more as a kinetic object than a conventional instrument. It’s there when you need it and something quieter when you don’t.

The body is constructed from gold PVD steel, giving it a warm finish that sits somewhere between industrial and refined. The movement is quartz and battery-operated, with nothing to wind and nothing to plug in. At 19.14cm x 15.39cm x 13.37cm, it fits comfortably on a desk or nightstand without dominating the space around it. Each piece is handmade to order, numbered, and can be personalized, meaning no two feel entirely alike.

On a bedside table, it does something most clocks don’t: it draws attention not for how loudly it announces the time, but for how strangely it sits there. On a desk, the same thing happens. You notice it, look closer, and the question of how it works starts to matter more than whatever hour it’s currently showing. That quality is either an annoyance or a distinction, depending on how much you appreciate being puzzled by an object.

The Sinking Clock is a handmade piece in an era when handmade things are genuinely rare in the product world, shaped by mid-century American design sensibility and Japanese minimalism in equal measure. The result doesn’t feel like either tradition directly, which is part of what makes it difficult to place in any familiar category. For a clock, that might be the most interesting thing it can be: useful and genuinely puzzling at the same time.

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You Don’t Have a Desk Anymore and This Leitz Hanging Organizer Gets It

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Hot-desking has quietly redefined what it means to have a workspace. Workers no longer have a corner to call their own; they arrive, claim a free surface, settle in, and pack everything back into a locker at the end of the day. It can feel like camping at your own job, and the accessories being designed around it reflect just how thoroughly the modern office has shifted.

Leitz’s Hanging Desk Organizer addresses one of the most specific problems of that routine: the transition from locker to desk. The idea is fairly simple. The organizer sits in a locker overnight, gets carried to whichever surface is free in the morning, and clips onto the desk’s edge so everything stays within reach without claiming more surface area than necessary. It’s designed for a habit that isn’t going away.

Designer: Leitz

The hanging mechanism is the core of the design. A metal bracket with a patent-pending adjustment system grips the desk’s edge and can be sized to accommodate different tabletop thicknesses, from 1.8cm to 5cm. That range covers most modern slab desks, so the fit tends to be secure regardless of the office furniture. No tools, no adhesive, nothing to set up at the start of each day.

Inside, there are two main compartments roomy enough to fit a laptop, a compact keyboard, a notebook, a water bottle, and a phone. Three elastic holders along the interior manage pens and cables, and a small removable tray corrals the smaller items that tend to get lost at the bottom of any bag. The tray lifts out and can sit flat on the desk surface independently while you work.

The beech-wood handle makes the carry feel intentional rather than makeshift. Between the locker and the desk, or between floors if your building has multiple shared spaces, you’re carrying something that behaves more like a proper tote than a repurposed storage box. At 1.2kg empty, it’s light enough to carry fully loaded, and the 7.5kg capacity means it comfortably handles a full day’s worth of gear.

The body is made from Thermofelt, which looks and feels like conventional felt but is actually a heat-formed polyester material made from 100% recycled post-consumer plastic. It gives the organizer a softer, more considered presence than the hard plastic or nylon you’d normally find in office accessories, and it holds its shape well enough to stay structured even when fully loaded. Packaging is plastic-free, in keeping with the material choice.

At the end of the workday, the organizer comes off the desk, goes back in the locker, and takes up a footprint of 38cm x 19cm x 30cm, compact enough for most standard office lockers. The design keeps its usefulness outside the office too; arts and crafts supplies, hobby gear, or anything else that needs to stay organized and mobile fits the same brief just as well.

There isn’t much ceremony to it. You hang it on the desk, get to work, take it down, and put it back in the locker when the day’s over. That’s the whole point. The hot-desking workplace turned the act of setting up for the day into a ritual of its own, and the objects being designed around it are starting to feel like they belong there.

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TEKTO’s First Fixed Blade Is a Full-Tang MagnaCut Drop Point That Weighs Under 4 Ounces

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TEKTO built its entire reputation on blades that fold, flip, and fire out the front. The Maine-based brand spent nearly a decade getting serious about automatic and folding knives, quietly becoming a go-to for people who want an OTF that actually holds up. Their design playbook was consistent: lean into a tactical DNA, use premium materials that punch above their weight, and build everything with a certain rugged honesty. It was a solid formula that earned them a loyal following. So when TEKTO dropped the X1 ATLAS, their first fixed blade ever, it felt less like a new product and more like a declaration. Ten years in, they stepped out of the OTF lane entirely and planted a flag in fixed blade territory.

The ATLAS is a 7.70-inch fixed blade with a 3.30-inch drop point ground from CPM MagnaCut, the steel that has dominated knife talk for years for good reason. Its handle is skeletonized G10 on a full-tang frame, a clever move that keeps the whole knife down to a featherlight 3.88 ounces. A Kydex sheath with an adjustable belt clip comes standard, ready for vertical or horizontal carry right out of the box. TEKTO even offers custom blade engraving for ten bucks, a nice touch on a tool designed for hard use. The ATLAS is made in the USA and priced at $249.99, positioning it as the flagship of a new fixed blade line for a brand confidently stepping into a new arena.

Designer: TEKTO Knives

Click Here to Buy Now: $212.5 $249.99 (15% off, use coupon code “ATLAS”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

CPM MagnaCut, developed by metallurgist Dr. Larrin Thomas at Crucible Industries, did something the knife world had been waiting for: it solved the toughness-corrosion trade-off. Most premium steels forced a choice between the two. High corrosion resistance, think M390, meant giving up toughness. High toughness, think S35VN, meant accepting some rust risk. Thomas eliminated chromium carbides from the microstructure, freeing chromium to stay in solution and fight corrosion without touching hardness or edge retention. For a brand debuting their first fixed blade ever, choosing MagnaCut over something more conservative is a signal I like. TEKTO hardened the ATLAS blade to 60-62 HRC, the sweet spot for the steel’s properties to fully express themselves.

The ATLAS runs a drop point profile, the blade geometry that wins the “which shape do you actually want in the field” argument most of the time. The spine slopes gradually from handle to tip, creating a robust, centered point and a long useful belly that handles slicing and fine work without compromise. That shape resists tip damage under lateral loads, which matters once the ATLAS gets handed something harder than kitchen cardboard. Running steel continuously through the full 4.40-inch handle as a full tang eliminates the structural weak point at the blade-handle junction, the exact place a partial tang fails under hard chopping or batoning. The 3.30-inch blade length keeps the ATLAS legal in most carry situations while still being genuinely useful.

Skeletonized G10 is what makes 3.88 ounces possible on a full-tang fixed blade with this much handle real estate. G10 is a fiberglass and epoxy resin composite, laminated and cured under high pressure, producing a material that resists impact, moisture, and chemicals without adding unnecessary weight. Skeletonizing means CNC milling away material from non-load-bearing sections of the handle scales, cutting mass without compromising structural integrity. The resulting surface is textured, grippy, and stable across temperature extremes, which matters for a brand literally founded on the frustration of knives that quit in cold Maine winters. The one early reviewer on TEKTO’s site noted the handle felt grippy and surprisingly light, which is exactly the combination a full-tang fixed blade needs to pull off.

The Kydex sheath that ships with the ATLAS is purpose-molded to the knife, meaning retention is consistent from the first draw rather than requiring break-in time. Kydex is a thermoplastic material that holds its shape, shrugs off moisture and sweat, and skips the periodic conditioning that leather demands. The adjustable belt clip configures for vertical or horizontal carry, a practical detail for users whose setup changes between contexts, say a belt rig in the field versus a horizontal setup at a work site. A lanyard hole at the butt of the handle adds the option for wrist tethering or utility cord attachment. The sheath ships ready to use, no aftermarket upgrades required to make the carry system work.

The X1 ATLAS retails for $249.99 and is currently available in Black G10 directly through TEKTO’s website, with free US shipping and returns included. TEKTO backs it with a limited lifetime warranty covering defects in materials and workmanship, so if the knife ever fails because of the knife rather than the user, they will repair or replace it at no charge. Custom blade engraving is available as a $9.99 add-on at checkout. At this price, the ATLAS shares shelf space with USA-made fixed blades like the Benchmade Puukko, but the MagnaCut specification pushes it into a stronger materials conversation. For a brand making its very first fixed blade, this is an unusually confident place to start.

Click Here to Buy Now: $212.5 $249.99 (15% off, use coupon code “ATLAS”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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The Redmi K100 Pro Turns Its Glass Back Into a Glowing Sketchpad

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Photoluminescent material is not new. It is the stuff in your kid’s ceiling stars, in old wristwatch dials, in every glow stick you have ever cracked at a concert. What is new is putting that decades old chemistry on the back of a flagship smartphone and letting the owner become the artist instead of the factory. That is exactly what Redmi did with the K100 Pro, and it might be the single most fun thing to happen to phone design all year, mostly because it does not take itself too seriously.

The finish is called Glowing Firefly, and it works by hiding a luminescent layer between the phone’s glass back and its green ink coating, invisible in daylight and glowing wherever you point a flashlight or light pen after dark. Redmi launched the K100 Pro in China on August 11, pairing the party trick with a legitimately serious spec sheet that includes a 185Hz OLED, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 V Series chip, and a 200MP camera. The phone can keep up with any flagship on paper. It just also happens to double as a doodle pad.

Designer: Xiaomi

Redmi’s own language calls the back panel a light painting canvas, and that description holds up better than most marketing copy tends to. Point a flashlight, a laser pointer, or a dedicated light pen at the glass and the material soaks up the energy along the exact path the light traveled, then releases it slowly as a glowing outline. Write your name, sketch a smiley face, sign the thing like a yearbook, and watch it fade out over the following minutes. There is no chip involved, no battery drain, nothing to charge separately. It is closer to a Lite Brite than to anything Qualcomm builds, which is honestly the charm of it.

Nothing tried something adjacent with the Phone 2a Plus Community Edition, and I still think about that phone. It used a green phosphorescent coating along the ribbon cables and camera trim, charged by ambient light and glowing softly on its own without any input from you. It was quiet, tasteful, very on brand for a company obsessed with making internals look intentional. Redmi took that same chemistry and handed the pen to the user instead of the factory. One phone glows because the designers told it to. The other glows because you told it to, and that distinction matters more than it sounds.

None of this changes what the K100 Pro is underneath the finish, a genuinely stacked gaming flagship with an 8,580mAh battery, 100W charging, and a cooling system built for long sessions. But the spec sheet was never going to be the reason anyone remembers this phone. The reason is a green slab that lets you leave a temporary signature in light, fading like sidewalk chalk, gone by morning, ready for you to draw on it again tomorrow.

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This 20-Foot Tiny Home by Is Built for Nomads Who Refuse to Compromise

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The tiny home movement has been quietly drifting toward bigger. Floor plans stretch, footprints grow, and somewhere along the way, the original appeal — freedom, lightness, the ability to leave — gets traded for a second bathroom. Saly Karavan, the Turkish caravan maker, went the other way. The Sunrise Tiny House is 20 feet long, road-ready, and designed around one core idea: that a home should be able to go wherever you do.

Built on a hot-dip galvanized double-axle trailer with a 3,000 kg axle capacity, the Sunrise sits at a standard road-ready width, which means no special permits, no wide-load headaches, just a truck and an open road. The exterior is finished in American siding with a shingle roof, giving it a classic cottage silhouette that reads warmer than the flat-panel aesthetic dominating the tiny home space right now. An optional Finnish pine exterior is available for those who want a more tactile, natural feel on the outside.

Designer: Saly Karavan

Step through the glass entrance door and the interior opens up more than the dimensions suggest. Generous double-glazed windows pull in daylight and keep the space from feeling like a box. The living room runs along the main floor, centered on a two-seater sofa that converts into a bed, with integrated storage tucked underneath. A small coffee table completes the picture. Above the living area sits a secondary loft, intended purely for storage — a smart detail that keeps the ground floor clear.

The kitchen is compact but considered. A Thetford three-burner stove with a glass lid, a Thetford sink, and a 152-liter 12V compressor refrigerator handle the basics without taking up more space than necessary. The bathroom, accessed through a sliding door, is private and fully functional: a 110×80 shower cabin, a washbasin, a home toilet, and a mirrored upper cabinet. Nothing superfluous. Nothing missing.

The bedroom is a fixed loft above the kitchen and bathroom, reached by a removable ladder. A skylight sits overhead, which makes waking up somewhere new feel like the point of the whole thing. The Sunrise sleeps four — two in the loft, two on the sofa bed — which gives it genuine flexibility as a couple’s full-time home or a traveling retreat for a small family.

The off-grid configuration supports up to four 205W monocrystalline solar panels paired with either gel or lithium batteries, alongside a 125-liter clean water tank. Optional upgrades include a Truma heating system, a Dometic aspirator, a Truma Saphir air conditioner, and an L-shaped exterior platform for outdoor living. Pricing is available on request directly from Saly Karavan.

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The Buenos Aires Lamp Made From One Folded Sheet of Steel

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Most lamps exist to disappear. You buy them, you place them, you forget about them. They live as background objects, chosen for ambiance or practicality, rarely for the kind of staying power that makes you stop and actually look. Table Lamp Z by Buenos Aires-based Cobre Estudio is not that lamp.

Lead designers Malena Vivanco and Miranda Gurny built the entire piece from a single sheet of 2mm steel. Not assembled from components, not welded from separate parts. One flat sheet, laser-cut and folded into a Z-shaped silhouette that serves as both the structure and the visual language of the object. The result is asymmetric, angular, and quietly striking. It reads as effortless even though you know it isn’t.

Designer: Cobre Estudio

The process matters here, and not just as a talking point. When a design emerges directly from its making, when the fold is the form and the material carries the whole identity, you get something that can’t be faked or replicated in another medium. You couldn’t achieve the same effect in molded plastic or cast resin. The steel had to be steel. The fold had to be a fold. That specificity is increasingly rare in contemporary lighting, where most products feel like they could have been made in a dozen different ways and still arrived at the same forgettable result.

The 2mm thickness isn’t incidental. It’s exactly rigid enough to become structure rather than just skin. Thinner and the lamp loses its self-assurance. Thicker and it tips into heaviness. At 2mm, it holds its shape with a kind of quiet confidence that feels calibrated, even when the logic behind it seems almost too simple to be intentional. The material does the structural work openly, without hiding it behind a shell or a casing.

When lit, warm light bounces across the internal steel surfaces, making the angles more visible and more alive. The lamp doesn’t just sit on a table; it performs slightly differently depending on the hour and the light conditions around it. Cold midday light treats it one way. A dim evening room treats it another. That kind of responsiveness, a lamp that changes the way you see it without changing at all, is a quality that’s hard to engineer and even harder to manufacture cheaply.

The fabric cord is the one element that breaks the industrial logic, and it does so deliberately. It’s allowed to introduce color, a small but coherent choice that keeps the lamp from reading as too severe. You can choose the cord. You can’t change the steel. That hierarchy makes sense.

I’ll be upfront: the Z form isn’t a revolutionary formal gesture. Right angles and folded metal exist all over design history, from Eileen Gray to Donald Judd’s furniture. But originality isn’t the only metric worth caring about. Clarity of vision matters too, and Table Lamp Z has that in full. Vivanco and Gurny didn’t try to add complexity where none was needed. They worked with the minimum, one material, one primary process, one guiding form, and resisted the temptation to embellish.

During these days when most products are designed to look like they required more effort than they did, a lamp this transparent about its own construction is almost disarming. The steel sheet carries the Cobre Estudio logo, not as branding stamped onto a product, but as part of the object itself. Even that detail points back to the same idea: nothing here is applied after the fact.

Does every home need a Table Lamp Z? Probably not. It suits a certain kind of space, minimal, considered, not too precious, and a certain kind of person who prefers objects that reward attention rather than demand it. But for what it is, it’s very good. Precise without being cold, sculptural without being decorative, functional without being ordinary. Sometimes a lamp is just a lamp. And sometimes a designer folds a single sheet of steel and proves that even the most ordinary objects still have room to surprise you.

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Galaxy Z Fold 8 vs Fold 8 Ultra: Why the ‘Better’ Phone is a Worse Deal

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PCMag spent real time with both new Samsung foldables and walked away calling the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra the most capable foldable the company has ever shipped. Then it gave its Editors’ Choice award to the cheaper one anyway. That’s a strange thing to watch happen in real time, kind of like a judge handing the trophy to the runner who finished second because they liked her shoes better. Samsung built a $2,099.99 phone with a 200MP main camera, a 3x telephoto lens, a bigger battery, and the largest screens in the Fold lineup, and the people paid to obsess over spec sheets shrugged and picked the $1,899.99 model instead.

Forbes landed in the same spot. So did Android Police, in a review literally titled around the Ultra’s problem being the other phone. The Ultra is winning almost every line item on paper, and almost nobody who has actually used both wants to pay extra for it. Something broke in Samsung’s foldable hierarchy this year, and I don’t think $200 is where you’ll find the crack.

Designer: Samsung

Here’s the part that should embarrass the Ultra a little. Both phones run the same Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, carry the same storage and RAM tiers, and charge at the same 45W wired speed. The Ultra’s real advantages are a 200MP main sensor against the standard Fold 8’s 50MP, an extra 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, and a 5,000mAh battery next to the Fold 8’s 4,800mAh. That last gap is worth about one extra hour of video playback by Samsung’s own numbers, which is not nothing, but it’s also not $200 of nothing. You’re basically paying a camera tax dressed up as a flagship tax.

The engineering story underneath both phones is actually the good part, and it’s the part nobody’s arguing about. Flex Titanium tucks an alloy film thinner than a third of a human hair under the OLED panel, backed by a titanium plate for flatness, and reviewers who’ve run a finger across the open screen say the crease is basically gone. GSMArena called it more uniform and flat under direct touch. I’ll admit I didn’t expect Samsung to actually solve this after years of “reduced crease” claims that meant “still very much a crease.” This year it sounds like they meant it.

That fix cost something, and Samsung didn’t exactly advertise the trade. Flex Mode, the half-open laptop stance the Fold line has offered forever, no longer works on the standard Fold 8 because the new hinge can’t hold itself at 90 degrees. It survives on the Ultra, barely, described by reviewers as fiddly to trigger. Nobody put that on a spec sheet, and it’s a bigger design story than either phone’s camera bump.

Which brings me to the actual confusion. The Ultra name is supposed to mean “take the flagship, stack on the best of everything, charge more,” the way it works on the S series. This year the Ultra is following the Fold 7’s shape while the plain Fold 8 ships an entirely new passport-style body, different aspect ratio, different case ecosystem, zero parts compatibility. 9to5Google flat out called the Ultra the boring option this generation. Two phones share a family name and nothing else, and the one without the suffix is the one people actually want to talk about.

I’d take the regular Fold 8. Not because the Ultra is bad, it clearly isn’t, but because Samsung finally shipped a foldable shape that argues for itself instead of a spec sheet arguing for you. That’s rarer than a good camera.

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