LEGO tie-ins with upcoming vehicles are nothing new, and the Jaguar 2020 Land Rover Defender is no exception. While the real thing will be out sometime next Spring (and it looks to be awesome), you can get the LEGO version as soon as next week. Made in partnership with Jaguar/Land Rover, the LEGO Technic Land Rover Defender is everything you would expect a miniature block version of the vehicle to be: The jaw-dropping scale model features an incredibly detailed exterior featuring authentic rims, tires, body panels and a removable roof rack with extra accessories, but the interior is where it’s really at. As with all LEGO Technic vehicles, you can open the…

Get that stretch out of your system with this week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist. It’s fashioned up, ready to make you pull your shoulder blades back and knock out another week of meaningful work while you bob your head to the beat. Whether you’re in the shop milling aluminum, sketching the latest product prototypes or modeling up a 3D storm, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week on SolidSmack Radio we’re getting things rolling with the classic “Windowlicker” from Aphex Twin. From there, we’ll follow up with a grab bag of chilled out tracks including those from Four Tet, Massive Attack, YACHT, and others before wrapping…

Though a remotely-controlled telepresence robot on wheels with your face on it may help assert one’s presence in a meeting room on the other side of the world, there’s no denying that the people on the other end doing the whole “interacting” thing with said robot might find it a bit off-putting—creepy, even. Double Robotics, one of the first companies to develop the earliest iterations of this tech, has come up with the newest iteration of their flagship Double series of telepresence robots. The Double 3 still works very much like its predecessors but with a couple of new changes: While both the original Double and Double 2 required a separate iPad…

As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack. What We’re Reading This Week: Older Americans Are Starting More Businesses Than Ever Retire, reboot, become…

Huddle around the computer a little bit, your digital detox is a farce! How can you stay away from great stuff that you can read and chew on … mentally that is! We got you covered, while you were away, busy with your digital detox diet. Don’t be shy, take a look at the week that was, right here on SolidSmack. Cause we are ROCKIN! This Full-Cycle Orange Juice Kiosk Turns Orange Peels Into Cups We can all (mostly) agree that being environment-friendly and leaning towards sustainable manufacturing methods is a good thing. So is eating well and being healthy. So by the unspoken rules of the universe, doing both…

Save for the gluten-free militia, just about everybody loves pasta. It’s filling, reasonably easy to cook, and you can still eat it long after your teeth have fallen out from old age. But would your obsession for the Italian dish run so deep that you’d make a working PC out of it? If not, then you clearly don’t love pasta as much as Micah Laplante, the sole owner, and creator of Laplanet Arts. What started as a joke made by his wife eventually drove Micah to try his hand at making a working computer out of a variety of pasta: To be clear, only the outer parts of the PC are…