E-ink is supposed to be the electronic version of dead-tree paper, but there’s one enormous difference: how you get your images and text onto it. For paper, you print on it. E-ink? Well, it depends on what it’s hooked up to. If it’s an ESP32C3-based Xteink X4 and X3, then you can just print to that, too, thanks to [Nishant Joshi]’s fork of the popular CrossPoint firmware.

The fork implements the Internet Printer Protocol, IPP, on the ESP32-C3. It makes loading documents a breeze: select the printer in your operating system, and press print. To the computer, the reader advertises itself as a printer that provides monochrome, single-sided output at 300 DPI on A5 paper, and accepts Apple raster and PWG raster formats. Of course these raster images are enormous compared to the paltry RAM available on the microcontroller, so pixels are received and written row-by-row — both to the screen directly, and to the SD card for later perusal. That makes a folder on the SD card the equivalent of a printer’s output tray.

This interface is amazing in its simplicity, and we’d love to see it in other E-ink devices. It reminds us somehow of AlphaSmart word processors — which are still relevant today in large part because their ‘file transfer’ mechanism is to pretend to be a USB keyboard and type the document onto your computer. As long as IPP is available, so too will you be able to get documents onto this e-reader.

[Gadget Industry] bills it as “a PC inside a Mouse“, but that depends on your definition of a “PC”. This is a Personal Computer inside a mouse, yes, but there’s nothing IBM-compatible about the tiny ARM board he squeezes inside what’s normally a peripheral — it actually started life as a smartphone, which only takes this build up a notch compared to starting with a single-board computer like a Pi.

Specifically, he starts with a Galaxy S21 5G. Starting with a Samsung means he can leave the stock Android alone and just take advantage of Samsung’s DeX desktop mode, rather than layer a Linux environment on top or replace the operating system entirely with something like Postmarket OS, which are both viable options.

With the battery compartment removed, the phone guts fit with shocking ease in the once-wireless mouse. Of course that’s not a great thermal environment, but that’s what the brass is for. It acts as a heat spreader, which is about as much thermal management as the phone had from the get-go, so it should work well enough. It seems to in the video, certainly. If thermal throttling is a concern, while it’d be hard to fit in a mouse, there’s no beating liquid cooling.

A surprising number of things we use in everyday life retain most of their design cues from their 19th century ancestors. The bicycle retains the same basic design as it had in 1890, as does the sewing machine, the toilet, the car, and of course, the keyboard and the QWERTY layout from old typewriters. But we aren’t doomed to have our technology perpetually living in the past. [Paul] wanted a keyboard designed around human hands, rather than being designed around a machine, so he built this unique split keyboard.

The design of this specific keyboard went through around 50 iterations before he was comfortable with it. Other design goals here were for it to be portable, and the split nature of this certainly makes it more compact as does the use of low-profile switches. Each finger’s column is angled and spaced based on the needs of that finger, with the ring finger keys sitting higher and the index finger columns angled inward. Each thumb has access to three keys, one of which is the spacebar and the other two layer keys, which is what enables this design to get down to only 36 total keys.

When thinking about it for any length of time, the modern keyboard’s design holdovers from the 1800s are fairly wasteful compared to this split, ergonomic version. Especially when looking at the spacebar, which ties up both thumbs and only performs a single task, there’s a lot of opportunity for modern designs to be more efficient, more portable, and easier on one’s body. Feel free to take this to the extreme and use all three dimensions, as long as you aren’t particularly concerned with portability.

The Steam Controller is a device capable of many interesting feats. It’s intended to act simply as an input device, and yet, it can run games all on its own. As [Owen Feldman] has demonstrated, by having the Steam Controller play Zork.

[Owen] took quite an interesting route to get the there: he wrote a Rust program to emulate the Intel 8080 CPU and CP/M, as one does. This was ported to the Steam Controller, which emulates the CPU and memory on its own internal processor. I/O is streamed over USB, since the Steam Controller lacks a keyboard or screen. The CP/M disk lives in the controller, but the Zork disk data is streamed over USB as well.

If you’re wondering how [Owen] got all this running on the controller, he explains on his personal website. He used what appears to be an undocumented tool included with Steam that allows flashing firmware on the device. Helpfully, Valve also include the original firmware in the same folder, unsigned and only relying on a simple CRC checksum. [Owen] bricked his controller a couple times experimenting with this tool and loading his own firmware, but all came good in the end.

The Steam Controller is probably the oddest device to run CP/M for a while, but hey—it’s a neat party trick. Not much is going to top the auto-docking hack from a few months ago, though.