If there’s one thing that annoys me about using a smartwatch outdoors, it’s squinting at the screen under bright sunlight. Whether I’m checking directions on a walk or glancing at a notification while cycling, a dim display can quickly turn a premium smartwatch into a guessing game.

That’s why the latest Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 leak immediately caught my attention. But after reading through it, I couldn’t shake one nagging thought: all these upgrades probably won’t come cheap.

Finally, a smartwatch that can outshine the sun?

According to a new leak from tipster Ice Universe, Samsung’s next flagship smartwatch could arrive with a display capable of hitting an eye-watering 5,000 nits of peak brightness. If that figure holds up, it would be a meaningful leap over the current Galaxy Watch Ultra and one of the brightest smartwatch displays we’ve seen. The leak also suggests Samsung will use its newer On-Cell Film (OCF) OLED technology. Beyond making the screen brighter, the newer panel is designed to be more power efficient while taking up less space inside the watch. That’s the kind of upgrade I like seeing because it improves the everyday experience.

But there’s more to it! The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is also rumored to receive an IP69K rating, offering enhanced protection against high-pressure water jets and harsh environments. Most people may never intentionally blast their smartwatch with hot water, but tougher protection is never a bad thing on a wearable that’s meant to accompany you almost everywhere.

Every upgrade comes with a price tag lurking nearby

The leak doesn’t stop there. An 800mAh battery is also reportedly in the cards, a sizeable jump from the original Galaxy Watch Ultra’s 590mAh cell. Pair that with a more efficient display and whatever processor Samsung chooses next, and the result could be noticeably longer battery life. That’s exactly what I want from an Ultra smartwatch.

Still, there’s one reason I’m keeping my excitement in check. Bigger batteries, brighter displays, and tougher hardware rarely arrive without affecting the final price. Samsung has steadily pushed its Ultra branding toward the premium end of the market, and these rumored upgrades only reinforce that direction. Of course, this is still a leak, so it’s worth taking every detail with a healthy dose of skepticism until Samsung makes things official. If recent rumors are accurate, we won’t have to wait long: the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is expected to debut alongside the Galaxy Watch 9 lineup and Samsung’s newest foldables at its next Unpacked event. For now, I’m all for a smartwatch that’s easier to read in the sun. I just hope my wallet doesn’t end up feeling the heat instead.

Bridges are a part of our constructed landscape that we take for granted. And bridges by themselves aren’t especially important. What is important is that bridges let you get from one place to another. Technology is often the same. We get from point A to point B through some bridge technology that, probably, most normal people never even notice.

Years ago, point A was commercial 3D printing. Industry had stereolithography, selective laser sintering, fused deposition modeling, and other rapid-prototyping technologies. These were not toys. They were expensive industrial systems used by companies that needed prototypes badly enough to pay serious money for them.

Fast Forward to Today

Today, you can go to a big box store and buy a 3D printer for well under $1,000, and often far less. Modern machines are almost plug-and-play and tend to do all the hard parts for you. That’s point B. How we got between points is a story of hackers who had a dream, and many Hackaday readers lived through it and even played a part in that bridging.

For a long time, RepRap was synonymous with hobby-level 3D printing. The project, started by [Adrian Bowyer] at the University of Bath in 2005, was built around a powerful idea: a machine that could print many of its own parts, thereby helping make more machines. RepRap Darwin reached its early self-replicating milestones in 2008, and the movement produced a thicket of descendants, variants, and arguments about rods, belts, bearings, extruders, firmware, and what “self-replicating” really meant. Of course, the machine could only print some of the parts you needed, but it was still impressive how much of a printer you could make with one printer.

Without RepRap, the desktop 3D printer boom would have looked very different. It created a common pool of ideas: Cartesian frames, printed brackets, hobbed bolts, heated beds, RAMPS boards, Marlin firmware, and a whole common vocabulary. It also created the expectation that a 3D printer was something you could understand, modify, repair, and improve. That expectation would not survive everywhere, but it defined the early culture.

Kicking Kickstarter

By the early 2010s, 3D printing had the right ingredients for a crowdfunding explosion. The technology was visible enough to be exciting, but not yet mature enough to be boring or attract big players. Hackerspaces were multiplying. Arduino had made embedded tinkering feel approachable. Laser-cut plywood, stepper drivers, and commodity motion hardware were easy to source. There were enough RepRap veterans to know what worked, and enough newcomers to believe the next machine would finally make 3D printing simple.

Kickstarter was a perfect amplifier. A desktop 3D printer looked good in a campaign video. It moved. It made things. It appeared to turn imagination directly into plastic. Printrbot was one of the defining examples. [Brook Drumm’s] original Printrbot campaign launched in 2011 and became one of the notable early 3D printer crowdfunding successes, raising far beyond its initial goal. The pitch was seductive: a printer you could afford, build, and actually use. Not an industrial system, not a laboratory instrument, but your first 3D printer.

I had a Printrbot Plus built from a kit, and that experience says a lot about the period. It was not a toaster. It was not even quite a drill press. It was more like buying a small CNC machine from a bright, optimistic friend who assumed you owned calipers, weren’t afraid of firmware, and could recognize when a machine was racking itself out of square. You can see some very old YouTube videos of my machine below.

The Printrbot was charming because it was so direct. There was very little mystery in it. It was made from wood! Even some of the gears were wooden. You could see the rods, belts, pulleys, endstops, and wiring. You could also see the compromises. The Printrbot used LM8UU linear bearings that were, in some cases, held in place with zip ties. This was not necessarily as terrible as it sounds; zip ties are a valid engineering material if your tolerance stack and expectations are sufficiently charitable. But the bearings could be a little loose. The folk remedy was equally period-correct: jam a bit of 3 mm filament in there as a wedge to keep the bearing from wiggling.

That little trick captures the mood of the time. The printer came from a factory, or at least from a company, but it still expected you to meet it halfway. It was full of these tiny bits of tribal knowledge. Blue tape on glass. Hairspray. Kapton. ABS juice. Tighten the belts, but not too much. Level the bed with a piece of paper, unless you had a feeler gauge, unless the bed was warped, in which case all bets were off. If the extruder skipped, maybe the nozzle was clogged, or the filament was too fat, or the hot end was too cold, or the hobbed gear was packed with dust, or the phase of the moon was affecting your controller board. Ok, maybe not the last one.

Solidoodle

Solidoodle was another emblem of that period. Founded in 2011 by [Sam Cervantes], the company pushed hard on affordability, with early machines such as the Solidoodle 2 attracting attention partly because they promised a usable enclosed printer at a price that seemed startling at the time. Wired covered the Solidoodle in 2012 as an assembled $499 machine, which was exactly the sort of price that made people start thinking desktop 3D printing might jump from hackerspaces to ordinary homes.

The Solidoodle story also shows the danger of that moment. The market wanted cheap, reliable, attractive, assembled, easy-to-use machines. The technology could supply maybe three of those at once. Companies were trying to scale production, support beginners, improve hardware, and hit aggressive prices while the entire field was still learning what “reliable” even meant for a low-cost filament printer. Solidoodle eventually suspended operations in 2016, a fate that befell more than one early desktop 3D printing company.

Part of Solidoodle’s problem was that they were too invested in the original RepRap idea. I almost bought a Solidoodle because I was fearful of trying to put a kit together with so many mechanical parts. Why didn’t I? Because RepRap lead times were enormous. At least part of the problem was that they were using Solidoodle printers to produce parts for Solidoodle printers.

Say you have ten printers. You get orders for 100. Great, right? But getting parts for those 100 printers done on your ten printers will take a long time. Of course, you could take the first ten to help, but now you can only ship 90 printers. If you only had 100 orders, you’d be fine. But in the printer-starved 2010s, a cheap printer like Solidoodle or Printrbot would get orders faster than they could fill them, and had to decide if they’d fill orders faster or try to make do with their existing printer farms. There really isn’t a right answer to that question. We heard that [Brook], for example, expected to sell 50 printers through Kickstarter. They wound up with a backlog of over 1,000 printers. Within a year they had $2 million in sales and it went up from there. Until, of course, it didn’t.

MakerBot

MakerBot deserves mention here, too, although it occupies a slightly different lane. It started in the open-source maker world and became the company most associated with the dream of consumer 3D printing. For a while, it seemed like MakerBot might become the Apple II of 3D printers. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about trying to turn a hacker tool into a mass-market appliance too quickly. The machines got slicker, the company moved away from its open-source roots, and the consumer revolution failed to arrive on schedule. By 2016, even mainstream coverage was asking what happened to the 3D printing revolution that had been promised.

But failure is too simple a word. The Kickstarter-era machines did not fail in the way that, say, a fad diet fails. They moved the ball down the field. They trained a generation of users. They revealed what mattered: rigid frames, better motion systems, predictable extrusion, heated beds that stayed flat, slicers that didn’t require a sacrificial offering, and firmware that could recover from ordinary user behavior. They also created demand. People who bought a Printrbot or a Solidoodle might have cursed it, modified it, and eventually replaced it, but they knew what they wanted next.

And what they wanted next was cheaper and better. That leads to the next wave: the low-cost commodity printers. The Monoprice Select Mini was one of the machines that made people do a double-take (see the video below). It was small, inexpensive, and not especially glamorous, but it was also a complete 3D printer at a price (around $200) that, up to that point, had seemed impossible. The Anet A8 represented another branch of the same tree: a very cheap kit printer, descended in spirit from RepRap machines, that put a large-ish build volume within reach of people willing to accept risk, tinkering, and sometimes questionable electrical design.

The End?

These machines were not the end state either. The cheap printers democratized access, but many still required an operator rather than a mere owner. The Anet A8 in particular became infamous not just for its low price but for the upgrades people considered mandatory: better firmware settings, frame braces, MOSFET boards, power supply caution, and general fire-safety paranoia. Still, it mattered. A rough kit at $150 or $200 changes a market. It lets students, hackers, model builders, repair-minded homeowners, and the merely curious take a chance. My A8 is unrecognizable today with an aluminum frame and a 32-bit controller board, a proper 24V power supply, a custom hot end mount, and other enhancements.

You can see my original A8 (and a peek at the Printrbot in the background) in the video below.

A few years later, it looked like this video.

The real consumer-ready printers came later, after years of iteration. Auto bed leveling became common. Filament paths improved. Machines got stiffer. Slicers became far better. PEI spring steel sheets replaced a lot of glass-and-hairspray rituals. Direct drive and better Bowden setups reduced extrusion drama. Enclosed CoreXY machines brought speed without quite so much ringing and finagling. Companies learned that the printer had to be a system: hardware, firmware, slicer profiles, materials, documentation, and support.

Right, Yet Wrong

Looking back, the funny thing is that the early hype was both wrong and right. Desktop 3D printers did not become like inkjet printers, and they certainly did not become like microwave ovens. Most people do not need to manufacture a plastic bracket before breakfast. Most people do not want to think about layer adhesion, nozzle wear, or whether that weird clicking noise is the extruder eating the filament.

I lived through the time when the hacker dream was that every home would have a computer. Most of us didn’t see what would really happen. Every person has at least one computer; every home has dozens. But we were on the right track; most of us just didn’t see what would drive it. But I never really thought 3D printers would become as common as personal computers.

I did think it might become like a drill press. Not everyone has a drill press. In fact, most people probably do not. But no one is amazed to learn that you have one. It is a normal thing for a certain kind of person to own. If you fix things, build things, make brackets, or restore equipment, a drill press is not exotic. It is just one of the tools that may live in the shop.

That is where 3D printing has largely landed. Not universal, but ordinary. A decade ago, saying you had a 3D printer was a conversation starter. People wanted to see it move. They wanted to know if you could print a wrench, a phone case, a toy, or, inevitably, another printer. Today, in technical circles, saying you have a 3D printer is more like saying you have a bench vise. The interesting question is not whether you have one, but what you use it for.

That normalization is the real legacy of the awkward Kickstarter era. Those machines were crude, but they were legible. They let us see the process. They forced us to learn what mattered. They converted 3D printing from an industrial service into a shop skill. A Printrbot with zip-tied LM8UU bearings and bits of filament jammed in as shims was not a consumer appliance. It was a bridge.

And like many bridges, it was not the destination. It was the thing that got us there. Of course, things continue to move. Maybe one day we will look back on the current generation of printers and wonder how we ever used them. But, like the personal computer, we probably can’t imagine what is going to drive the adoption of those new machines.

If you lived in New York City during the 1980s or 1990s, and you happened to stumble on Channel 35 after 10 pm, you would have seen her: a busty woman with dyed-blond hair in a black mesh bikini, beaming broadly as she gyrated against an adult film star or simulated fellatio on a half-naked male stripper.

You knew her theme song (the rockabilly “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box”), and you would have been able to repeat her catchphrases (“Lie back, get comfortable,” “don’t forget to wear your rubbers,” etc.).

That woman was Robin Byrd, now 71, a former adult film star who became a local celebrity with her eponymous public access show, which ran from 1977 to 1998 (and still airs in reruns, provided you have old-school cable). Featuring a garish heart-shaped set and decades-old phone sex ads, The Robin Byrd Show featured Byrd interviewing a porn star or exotic dancer, who would then perform a striptease complete with unnecessarily lingering close-up shots. She’d close the show by dancing to her theme song (during which Byrd would, more often than not, juggle a pair of comically oversized breasts). The show was charmingly low-budget, with Byrd giving her guests tapes of the show instead of paying them: “I called it tit for tat and dick for dat,” she tells me.

As beloved as Byrd is in New York City, a new HBO documentary makes it clear her impact was much wider. Directed by Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam (two self-described “Byrd-watchers”), Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story, streaming on HBO Max Tuesday, hails Byrd as a sex-positive icon who advocated for freedom of speech and the LGBTQ community, promoted safe sex during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and led a landmark lawsuit against Time Warner Cable when it tried to censor her show. The movie is also a love letter to the analog era of smut, with Byrd becoming something of a meme long before the age of dial-up.

WIRED spoke to Byrd about the documentary, internet porn, her advocacy, and, of course, how she wore boobs as a hat.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

EJ DICKSON: When Stephanie and Jyllian approached you with the idea of making a documentary, what was your initial response?

ROBIN BYRD: I had many offers before, but it didn’t feel right. And Stephanie and Jyllian, they were Byrdwatchers [Byrd’s term for fans of her show]. I raised them. They used to sneak it when they were teenagers. They got it. It was during a Mercury retrograde, and Mercury retrograde involves communication. It’s a time to renew and redo and rethink. I realized I’m not getting any younger, and my story needs to be told by the right people.

New York magazine compared you to Mister Rogers. Would you ever, in a million years, have expected to be compared to him?

Well, I compare myself partly to him, and also Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. There used to be a lady called Shari Lewis who had this puppet Lamb Chop. I was raised with that. I was raised by the TV. And look at that, I became the TV.

Your show ran for more than 600 episodes. Do you have a favorite guest or favorite episode?

The first time I had on [a trans person], nobody in the studio knew that she had a dick and she was gorgeous. And I had a gay male actor on, and when he saw her, they got into a huge fight in front of the camera, so I had to sit in the middle of them. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t know that he was going to act that way. But there was discrimination in the gay world, just like there’s discrimination in the straight world.

Focus and productivity apps abound, all to help you stave off the many distractions coming from your phone. Or the annoying people at your open-office desk. Digital well-being tools can silence notifications, limit apps like TikTok and Instagram, and help you focus on the task at hand. But you can also turn them off very easily as soon as you feel like you haven’t endlessly scrolled enough.

This is where Flipper’s Busy Bar comes in, a hardware clock with an LED screen that doubles as a clock and a dedicated timer. Slap the big button in the middle, and the screen displays a bright red “BUSY” sign or another message that lets the people around you know you’re, well, busy. (Maybe try “GO AWAY” or “GET OUT OF MY ROOM, MOM.”) The bar goes on sale today and costs $249.

“How do you let people know politely, yet firmly, that you don’t want to be disturbed?” says Callum Tennent, a creative writer at Flipper. “We decided the politest way to do it was a massive red light on your desk.”

Courtesy of Flipper Devices

Flipper Devices made the Flipper Zero, a $200 portable hacking tool that got big on TikTok in 2022 for using a Tamagotchi-esque dolphin character to detect wireless frequencies and potentially break RFID-controlled locks. It was a device that raised a variety of security concerns. Canada proposed a ban on the device out of fear that it might enable car thefts. In 2023, the US Customs and Border Protection seized 15,000 Flipper Zero devices, then ultimately released them. Flipper is currently working on another model, the Flipper One, that has even more advanced capabilities.

In between those more controversial devices comes the Busy Bar. The bar also works with the separate Busy app, yet another one of those productivity and focus tools living on your phone. What it doesn’t have is the capability of hacking anything. “It’s being made by us here at Flipper, but there’s no real connection to them,” Tennent says. “They’re totally disconnected products.”

Fundamentally, the Busy Bar is a pricey “On Air” light. It offers many of the same productivity capabilities that are likely already baked into your phone’s operating system—like blocking notifications on your phone. But Flipper is making the case that—much like the Brick, a hardware gadget you tap to block access to certain apps—having a hardware option to shut off the distractions around you is meaningfully different than just trying to use software productivity tools on your device.