Tech

QuestBar is a to-do app for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. You pick one task as your current quest and it stays in view: in the menu bar next to the clock on a Mac, as a Home Screen or Lock Screen widget on an iPhone or iPad, and as a complication on your watch. You scribe a quest, begin it, vanquish it, and resurrect it if it turns out you weren’t finished. Quests sync through your own iCloud, there’s no account and no tracking, and it’s a single purchase covering every device rather than a subscription.

The Playdate is a handheld games console made by Panic, the company that published Untitled Goose Game, and designed with Teenage Engineering. It’s bright yellow, fits in your palm, and has a crank on the side. The screen is a 400×240 black-and-white display with no backlight. It’s sharp, and it’s easy to read in direct sunlight. The crank is used as a game control alongside the D-pad and buttons: depending on the game you’ll use it to reel in a fishing line, wind time backwards, or steer. It launched with a season of 24 games, released two a week. Panic also publishes a free SDK for making your own.

Teenage Engineering have never made a boring object, and the EP-133 K.O. II is no exception. It’s a sampler and sequencer about the size of a hardback and just 16mm thick, laid out like a piece of industrial equipment from a 1978 stockroom. Point the built-in mic at anything… a kettle, a door, your own voice, and it stores in one of 999 sample slots, ready to be chopped, pitched and sequenced. There’s 128MB of space to fill it with, MIDI in and out for the rest of your gear, and a speaker so you don’t have to dig out headphones to hear what you’ve done. All of this running on four AAA batteries, or USB-C when you’re near a plug.

The Insta360 GO 3S is a compact yet powerful 4K camera designed for adventure. Small enough to fit in your pocket, this camera boasts durability and a sleek design that belies its robust capabilities. Whether clipped to your shirt, helmet, or worn as a pendant, its magnetic mount keeps your hands free to fully immerse yourself in the action. Weighing only 1.4oz (39g) and despite it’s small size, it delivers high-quality footage and features like the new MegaView FOV for expansive, distortion-free 4K hands-free POVs, and an impressive 140-minute battery life, ensuring you capture every moment with ease. Equipped with FlowState Stabilization and Horizon Lock, the Insta360 GO 3S guarantees smooth and level shots under any conditions. Its magnetic design and diverse accessory range enable versatile mounting options, empowering you to film from angles that other cameras can’t handle. Whether you’re diving into deep waters with its IPX8 waterproof capability or utilising QuickCapture for rapid shooting, the Insta360 GO 3S adapts effortlessly to your adventures. Enhancing usability further, Gesture Control and Voice Control options simplify shooting when the camera is

With energy prices going through the roof, and rolling blackouts seemingly just over the horizon, it’s about time we start thinking about generating and storing our own electricity. The Anker 535 PowerHouse is a stylish way to make sure you’ve always got your devices juiced up, and paired with solar panels it turns into the eco-friendly electrical generator you didn’t know you wanted. Equipped with premium LiFePO4 batteries that offer 6 times longer lifespan, the Anker 535 PowerHouse is housed in a drop-proof unibody structure, and uses industry-standard electric components for enhanced durability. What good is your own portable power station if it breaks down after a couple of years? Anker has you covered boasting a 10-year lifespan of daily device charging. It also comes with a 5-year full device warranty. You want some more specs? I’ve got you. Let’s talk solar panels. The supplied panels convert 23% of solar energy to electrical energy EVEN ON CLOUDY DAYS. If you’re lucky enough to have direct sunlight, the Anker 535 PowerHouse will recharge to 80% in just 4 hours. It has

Roli BLOCKS let you build your own modular music studio. With the Lightpad BLOCK at its heart, you can tap it, stroke it, hard or soft to create sounds and beats for your next track. It features a 15×15 LED matrix with 5D Touch capability on the silicone surface allowing you to sequence, loop, and finger drum with expressive control. Being modular, you can connect more BLOCKS giving you even better control over your music. The Roli Lightpad BLOCK is pocket-sized at 94mm x 94mm and connects to your iPhone or iPad through Bluetooth so you can make music on the go with the free Roli NOISE app (iOS) or other third party apps. If you’re into making music on something a little bigger, it also connects with any desktop app that supports multidimensional polyphonic expression (MPE).

Splash-proof, wireless, and up to 10 hours of music playtime with an interactive light show. The LED lights may seem like a gimmick, but that quickly dissolves into an appreciation of mesmerising ambience while you listen to your favourite tracks. The award winning JBL Pulse 2 also lets you capture the colour light you want to see using the colour-detecting prism on the front. Simply it at the colour you want; be it a wall, t-shirt, or pet, press the button and watch it glow. Accompanied with two 45mm transducer woofers, you’ll literally feel the bass as this speaker pumps, and aside from great sound, you can connect up to three Bluetooth devices allowing you and couple of others to take turns playing the music. The JBL Pulse 2 also has a built-in microphone making it perfect for talking to Siri if it’s connected to your phone, or hosting conference calls if you’re into that sort of thing.

Fashionable, sleek, and sexy are not the usual words you associate with a hard drive. Redefining the aesthetics of portable storage, Western Digital have given their My Passport range a facelift with a beautiful new look in a range of colours. Available in 6 colours, black, white, orange, blue, yellow, and red, and starts at 1TB (1024GB) going up to a whopping 4TB of storage capacity. They’re also blazing fast with USB 3.0. You’ll only need one, but you’ll want them all.

Founded in 2010, The Vortexgear company set out to improve the craftsmanship of keyboards and change their dull image into a piece of equipment to be proud of. The Vortexgear KBC Pok3r has done just that. This mechanical keyboard is 60% the size of a full width keyboard, has a metal casing and PBT keycaps sitting on your choice of Cherry MX switches, giving you control over key pressure and click loudness. The keycaps are easily interchangeable if you want to upgrade it with new colours or change the QWERTY layout to DVORAK or COLEMAK. The Pok3r Mechanical Keyboard has three programmable layers on top of it’s default keyboard layer, meaning you can set different functions to different keys up to three times. At the press of a button you can switch from the default typing keyboard to one set up for your gaming rig, or one for your development environment, or even one that’ll type your most commonly typed phrases or email addresses with a single click.

A box of nostalgia that you can plug directly into your TV’s HDMI port. Young or old, the Nintendo Classic Mini lets you relive your childhood memories, or make new ones in glorious High Definition 8-bit magic. Fitting in the palm of your hand, this mini console comes with 30 NES games built in. Game like PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kirby’s Adventure and of course Super Mario Bros. If unlike me, you have friends, you may want to buy an extra NES Controller as only one is supplied.