Awesome Leisure

Enjoy a leisurely nap anywhere with this portable hammock stand from Kammok. The 15 pound stand packs up into a slim carrying bag and adjusts to fit any size hammock. It even works on rough terrain. A hammock is not included, but Kammok offers a variety of sizes and colors starting at $75.

Carnivores, you need this cookbook in your kitchen. Created by Cook’s Illustrated, the book Meat Illustrated provides a detailed yet understandable guide to working with every kind of cut of meat. The 440-page hardcover book is organized into 72 different cuts and includes more than 300 kitchen-tested recipes for beef, pork, lamb, and veal.

There’s a concept in the LEGO community of an “illegal” build – using construction methods that go against the traditional conventions of LEGO stacking. Brick Bending shows off a challenging but impressive technique that involves carefully combining dozens of 1×3 plates to form a robust, spine-like structure that ultimately gets turned into a wheel.

It’s always fun to hear our favorite albums played with video game sounds. FXSnowy took the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 smutty masterpiece Blood Sugar Sex Magik and covered it using the 16-bit sounds from the Super Nintendo games Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, and 3. All the best tunes are here, from Funky Monkeys to Breaking the Gorilla.

We recently stumbled upon the EZ Band, and we’re glad that we did. This Houston-based group of musicians has many talents, among them the ability to take alternative music and spice it up with their Norteño sound. This cover of The Strokes’ Last Nite is one of our favorites, but you should also check out their Smiths and My Chemical Romance tracks too.

A car-nut fantasy came true for Wayne Dick of Alberta, Canada, whose custom Chevrolet Corvair Rampside Truck won top honors at Hot Wheels’ El Segundo HQ in the toymaker’s coast-to-coast Hot Wheels Legends Tour quest to find real wild cars to recreate as genuine Hot Wheels toys.

Gin has been an anchor in Holland America Line’s history dating back to the cruise company’s start 150 years ago. To toast its big anniversary, HAL launched De Lijn gin to be exclusively served and sold on board its fleet. The result is a premium gin made in America and inspired by the Netherlands.

A lot has changed with music over the past 60 years, but memorable melodies will always be a thing. Music teacher Milo Andreo sat down at his electric piano and synthesizer to play the introductions to a single famous song from each year since 1963. Close your eyes and see how many you can name without looking at the titles.

Sliding, swinging, garage, barn. There are lots of different kinds of doors. The Brick Experiment Channel shows us how to make various kinds of doors using LEGO Technic parts and how to automate them to open and close with the twist of a dial. That sectional garage door works a lot like a real one does.

Daft Punk made music that was decidedly more joyful and danceable than the industrial metal sounds of Rammstein. That didn’t stop Talkbox Gus from mashing up the two groups. His performance of Du Hast sounds like a bonus track from Random Access Memories. His Daft-ified version of KISS’ I Was Made for Love You perfectly suits the disco-rock track.

Are you or someone you know a fan of classic TV shows? The book Behind the Screens: Illustrated Floor Plans and Scenes from the Best TV Shows of All Time features artist Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde’s hand-drawn floor plans and architectural renderings of iconic sets from 35 shows, including The Golden Girls, Friends, Seinfeld, and Sesame Street.

Chaos mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm revisits the fateful events of Jurassic Park. Only this version is told with LEGO minifig characters and is a bit goofier than Spielberg’s original dino thriller. We’re not 100% certain, but it appears that Jeff Goldblum voices the character he made famous. Streaming on Peacock 10.10.2023.

This slimline cooler bag lets you carry a six-pack of beer with you when you hit the links. It’s skinny enough to fit inside the outer pouch of many golf bags or can be carried solo by its handle or shoulder strap. Its interior is insulated, and it includes two ice packs to ensure drinks stay cool for all 18 holes.

Two of our favorite shops, Craighill and Art of Play have teamed up to create this perplexing puzzle. Its unique design allows it to be solved in two different ways. Option 1: arrange the eight aluminum pieces to fit inside a clear acrylic cube and set it on its stand. Option 2: fit the same pieces inside the cube, but this time, fit the stand in there as well.

Now you’re cooking with candy! This cookbook offers 40 dessert recipes that incorporate Toblerone candy. The unique mix of Swiss milk chocolate, nougat, honey, and almonds takes your sweet treats to another level compared to ordinary chocolate. Toblerone brownies and cupcakes, oh my!

We can always rely on lighting designer Tom BetGeorge for the best Halloween light shows. For his 2023 show, he kicks things off with a brilliantly illuminated performance of System of a Down’s Toxicity, complete with singing pumpkins, light-up spiders, gravestones, and fire cannons. Tom’s got more videos on the way, so subscribe to his YouTube channel.

Not to be confused with this Xmas classic, Joel Kinnaman stars in Silent Night, a bloody, violent holiday flick from famed action director John Woo. It follows the story of a man hellbent on revenge after his child is gunned down in the middle of a gang war. In keeping with its title, the film is all action without any dialogue. In theaters 12.1.2023.

The guys from FliteTest created a small aircraft called the Orbit. They have since been commissioned to build a much larger version of the round-winged aircraft. In this video, you’ll see how they took the design and scaled it up using foam and curved plywood ribs to reinforce its unconventional wing.

Marble machines can be so much fun to watch in action. The 3D Printer Academy shows how they built a neat marble machine from modular components that hold together with 3D-printed thumbscrews. It took a little trial and error to get it all working smoothly and without jamming, but eventually, it worked perfectly.

Mark Rober and his pals made one of the largest NERF guns ever. This time, he went in the opposite direction, putting the popular toy through the shrink ray so many times it’s only visible with an atomic force microscope. After using a compliant mechanism to engineer a simplified version that can fire a dart, he worked with scientists to make NERF guns from DNA.

This water slide in Tianjin, China, gives riders a chance to float down the side of a mountain in a raft. The slide is made with glass panels on its sides and bottom and offers 360º views of the tree tops and surrounding scenery. For more thrills, there’s a more sketchy looking slide that hugs the side of a cliff.

Violinist Dmitry Rotkin lets his fingers do the talking in this brief pizzicato jazz improvisation, inspired by Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing). His finger-plucked performances of Misirlou and his original composition, Mad Fingers Pizzicato, are incredible as well.

(PG-13: Language) Drumeo frequently invites percussionists to improvise rhythms to songs they’ve never heard or played before. In this session, they asked Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith to take on the Thirty Seconds to Mars song The Kill (Bury Me), and he totally nailed it despite his lack of familiarity with the track.