Awesome Amazon

Pastry artist Amaury Guichon’s Amazon orders don’t come in regular boxes. That’s because everything in his life has to be edible and delicious. Amaury shows how he made a picture-perfect replica of a shipping box with caramelized white chocolate cardboard and filled with layers of caramel, cremeux, mousse, and marshmallow packing peanuts.

Add Amazon Alexa capabilities to more spots in your house with this bargain price on a refurbished Amazon Echo Dot. This compact speaker can play music and offers voice assistant features for smart home, news, weather, and more. It also has a 3.5 mm audio output for connecting a larger external speaker.

This wildly inventive 60-second promo spot for Amazon Music combines a variety of different filmmaking techniques including stop-motion, 2D and 3D animation, rotoscoping, and even puppetry – each executed with top-notch quality. Directed by Stevie Gee & Essy May for Blink.

This larger version of the Amazon Echo hangs on the wall like a picture frame. Its 15.6″ FHD display lets you choose from widgets for news, weather, notes, recipes, and more. It works as a smart home control panel and music controller too. It can be mounted horizontally or vertically, or on an optional tabletop stand.

This tabletop speaker features iconic Marshall amp styling, with the usefulness of a built-in Amazon Alexa voice assistant. It has a 30-watt class-D amplifier, Airplay 2, Bluetooth, and Spotify Connect capability, and you use them to create a multi-room audio system. A Google Assistant version is also in the works.

The Smart Cuckoo Clock is one of the Day1 Editions Amazon will build if it garners enough pre-orders. The stylish wall clock has an analog face, a swinging pendulum, and a mechanical cuckoo, along with digital chimes and alarms. It also has an LED timer that can be controlled with a nearby Amazon Echo device.

How’d you like to score $10,000 to spend on whatever you want at Amazon? Our friends at Dream Giveaway are offering one lucky winner a $10,000 Amazon Gift Card, while helping to support charities with your entries. Sweepstakes ends 10.27.2020, so enter now! Plus, Awesomer readers get double entries.

We already know what Siri might have been like back in the 1980s, now Squirrel Monkey imagines another virtual assistant existed during a time when voice synthesis and voice recognition were in their infancy. We love how it uses a cassette recorder to download songs from Amazon Music.

Amazon Prime Day 2020 is upon us, so there’s no better time to upgrade your daily loadout than now. Our pals over at Everyday Carry have done the hard work for us, and rounded up a bunch of awesome Prime Day deals on flashlights, multitools, keychains, gadgets, watches, wearables, and more.

Amazon’s Alexa-powered speaker is now an orb, which not only looks cooler, but improves audio quality. The room-filling speaker can stream music from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, SiriusXM, and more, and can control smarthome devices via voice commands. There’s also a spherical Echo Dot and a Echo Dot for kids.

Amazon announced a bunch of new gadgets for 2020, including this home security camera that can fly around your house. The drone cam sits on its base until needed, and can be remotely piloted to investigate concerns and possibly scare off intruders. It’s not available yet, but you can register your interest on the Ring website.

Sign up for 2 months of Amazon Music Unlimited ($19.98 total), and get a 3rd-gen Echo Dot Clock (a $59.99 value) for just $9.99. The smart speaker provides access to Alexa voice commands, music playback, and can display the time, outdoor temperature, or timers. (Limited time offer, subscription auto-renews)

Amazon’s largest Echo speaker is a direct shot across the bow of Apple’s HomePod – for a hundred bucks less. It uses five speakers to fill your room with rich, dynamic sound, and self-calibrates to your space. It supports lossless audio streaming, Dolby Atmos, and 3D audio formats. Naturally, it works with Alexa.

Amazon’s value-priced, compact Echo device plugs into any outlet, adding Alexa voice assistant capability unobtrusively to any room. It provides smart home control, weather, traffic, and other information, and has a built-in USB port for powering other devices or attaching a 3rd-party motion sensor or smart nightlight.

This little gadget from Amazon fills in a gap in your living room or home theater system. It works in concert with your Fire TV or Echo to enable voice remote control for your infrared-enabled entertainment equipment like TVs, satellite boxes, and audio receivers. Device compatibility explained here. Available 12/11/19.

Add an Amazon Alexa voice assistant to your car with this tiny 3.3″ x 1.9″ gadget. It has 8 microphones to ensure Alexa can hear you over music and road noise (within reason), and lets you ask questions, stream music and audiobooks, and much more. Requires a Bluetooth or aux input, and can mount on many car air vents.

Anker teamed up with Amazon to create a 2.1 channel soundbar that has Fire TV and Alexa technology built in. It supports full 4K UHD content with Dolby Vision and HDR10+, while it cranks out 100 watts of sound and has built-in dual subwoofers for cinematic sound. Drops 11/21/19.

The 5.5″ version of Amazon’s visual voice assistant is a bargain compared to its big brother. In addition to music playback and smarthome control, it’s a bedside alarm clock, displays news, weather, videos, and offers video calling. This model also gets a camera privacy shutter. Ships 6/26/19.

Our desire to use = voice commands on our Amazon Fire TV means we have multiple remotes sitting around. The F2 attaches to your Fire TV remote, expanding its capabilities with 11 buttons that can learn commands from other IR remotes. Sadly, it only works with the 1st gen Fire TV remote.

Amazon’s Blink XT2 security camera has two-way audio, so you can talk to whoever’s on the other end through your smartphone or tablet. It retains all of the XT’s features, such as a two-year battery life, 1080p recording, night vision, and free cloud storage.

(Gore) From Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn and award-winning comic book writer Ed Brubaker comes a dark action series on Amazon Prime. In Too Old to Die Young, Miles Teller stars as a cop who gets roped into a world of assassins. Premieres 6/14/19.

Learn everything you need to know to set up, maintain and scale servers and services with Amazon Web Services. This bundle of courses provides training for sysadmins, developers, and solutions architects. Save an extra 15% with code MADNESS15 (through 3/31/19).

The TV series adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s book looks like a real hoot, as an angel and a demon must team up to find the missing Antichrist, end the war between good and evil, and keep the world from collapsing. Drops 5/31/19 on Amazon Prime.