Every kid who grew up with Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express remembers that moment where the story stops behaving like a story. A train just shows up, chugging straight out of the snow and into a kid’s actual bedroom, and suddenly bedtime reading feels a little bit dangerous in the best way. That’s the exact energy LEGO builder CrazyInventor is chasing with Winter Express, and yes, I see what you did there with that title, very smart way to dodge a certain mouse-shaped legal team while still getting the reference across loud and clear. Except here the train doesn’t stop at bursting out of the pages. It runs straight through the whole book, cover to cover, like the story just wasn’t big enough to hold it.

The result looks like someone left a hardback open on a shelf and a Victorian steam engine decided to use it as a shortcut. Gold trim, a red ribbon bookmark, snow dusted across the back cover like a sky full of stars, this thing reads more like a diorama that happens to be shaped like a book than a book that happens to have a train in it. And once you spot the tiny second train hiding inside the pages, you’ll understand why this project cracked 1,000 supporters in about three days flat.

Designer: CrazyInventor

The book itself steals the show before the train even enters the conversation. It’s a navy blue hardback with rounded gold corner guards and matching gold bands running down a curved spine, the kind of cover treatment you’d expect on a leather-bound classic rather than a pile of ABS plastic. A gold plaque on the front reads “Winter Express” in a wood-grain frame, and a red ribbon bookmark hangs off the top edge like someone set the book down mid-chapter and wandered off to make tea. Flip to the back cover and it’s scattered with pale blue round studs, doing double duty as either falling snow or a starry winter sky, depending on how you’re feeling that day.

A black and gold Victorian locomotive takes over from there, complete with a glowing headlamp, a cowcatcher up front, and Technic side rod detailing, coming straight out of a snow-capped rock tunnel carved into the front cover. A matching passenger coach trails out the other side through the spine, decked out in scrollwork trim with its own lit lanterns and a roof stacked with skis and sleds. Snowy pine trees, cobblestone tiles, and two working lampposts fill out the base, along with a frozen little pond built from trans-blue tiles.

My favorite detail is buried in the pages themselves. Look closely at the tan interior spread and there are cutout windows revealing a second, micro-scale train crossing a tiny stone viaduct, a whole miniature railway hiding inside the book that the big train is currently smashing its way through. It’s a small touch, but it’s the kind of layered thinking that separates a fun MOC from a genuinely great one.

Winter Express landed on LEGO Ideas on September 15 and has already pulled in 1,291 supporters, cruising well past the first 1,000-vote milestone toward the 5,000 mark it needs next. If cozy winter dioramas with a little bit of chaos baked in are your thing, go to the LEGO Ideas page and add your support and watch this one keep climbing.

The post Gorgeous LEGO Book Nook Has a Steam Train Blasting Straight Through Its Snowy Pages first appeared on Yanko Design.

Microsoft is testing automatic Light and Dark Mode switching in Windows 11, with scheduling based on sunrise, sunset, fixed times, or PC activity.

The post Microsoft May Soon Fix Windows 11’s Obvious Dark Mode Automation Gap appeared first on TechRepublic.

The original Xbox is turning 25, and Mattel is marking the occasion with a collector’s piece that transforms Microsoft’s first gaming console into a 1:1-scale building set. Created under the premium Mattel Brick Shop, the Microsoft Xbox Building Toy Kit recreates the chunky 2001 console from 3,509 pieces, complete with its oversized Duke controller and a surprisingly elaborate interior.

At first glance, the model is designed to look remarkably close to the original hardware. The familiar black rectangular body, recessed side grilles, front controller ports, X-shaped top panel, and central green Xbox logo are all recreated in brick form. The accompanying Duke controller is also buildable and connects to the console, with working buttons, a D-pad, and movable analog sticks. It is a display model rather than a functional gaming machine, but the physical interaction is part of what makes the set more than a static replica.

Designer: Mattel

The set also follows a growing interest in turning gaming hardware into physical building objects. A few years ago, we covered a LEGO Xbox Series S concept that treated the console itself as a customizable canvas for brick-built artwork. Mattel’s new creation takes a detour from the conventional brick-building approach, though, as it employs bricks to personalize a console, using thousands of them to recreate an entire piece of gaming history.

The more interesting details are hidden inside the console. Opening the model reveals three removable dioramas inspired by some of the original Xbox’s most recognizable games: Halo: Combat Evolved, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Psychonauts. Each scene comes with small NanoWorld figures representing characters from the games, with 12 figures included across the set. The dioramas can also be removed and displayed independently, giving the enormous console a modular quality rather than making its interior purely decorative.

Mattel has also given the model a modest interactive layer. Pressing buttons on the connected Duke controller activates four different light-and-sound sequences, including the original Xbox opening sequence and effects associated with the three game-inspired scenes. A concealed button combination triggers an additional lighting sequence, adding a small Easter egg for builders who spend time exploring the finished model.

The choice of games is particularly evocative. Halo helped define Xbox as a gaming platform, while Morrowind and Psychonauts represent different sides of the console’s early library. Rather than simply reproducing the hardware, Mattel has effectively turned the console into a compact museum of its formative years, with the games physically embedded into the machine they helped make memorable.

For anyone who remembers the original Xbox as a piece of hardware rather than simply a platform, that distinction is significant. The finished model is essentially a life-size nostalgia object, one that preserves the proportions and visual language of Microsoft’s first console while hiding miniature worlds from its games inside.

The set is intended for builders aged 17 and above and is positioned firmly as a premium collector display rather than a conventional toy. It is currently available for preorder through select retailers, with a US price of $324.

The post Mattel’s 1:1 brick-built Xbox is a 3,509-piece tribute to gaming’s early 2000s era first appeared on Yanko Design.

McLaren just hit 1,000 Grands Prix, which in Formula 1 years is basically ancient royalty status. Only Ferrari has been around longer in this sport, and Ferrari acts like it too. So when a team crosses a milestone like that, you throw a party, you paint a special livery on the car, and apparently, you also get LEGO to build you a commemorative brick helmet with your driver’s face on the box.

That is exactly what happened with Lando Norris’s set, a 793 piece build that packs his signature yellow and black “blob” design (his words, not mine) onto one side of a papaya orange helmet shell. It is McLaren history and Norris’s personal branding smashed together into a display piece, and somehow LEGO made that combination look genuinely good instead of like a marketing fever dream.

Designer: LEGO Design Team, co-created with Lando Norris

What makes this one different from your average licensed tie in set is that Norris was actually in the room for it. This was not LEGO grabbing some reference photos and calling it a day. The drivers worked directly with LEGO’s design team to shape both the Norris helmet and its companion piece for teammate Oscar Piastri, and the real helmets both drivers wore trackside at Monaco were based on the LEGO designs, not the other way around. That is a genuinely rare flex for a toy company. Daniel Meehan, LEGO’s Creative Lead for F1, put it well when he said building organic helmet curves at this scale “presents exciting opportunities for exploring new building techniques and creative parts usage,” which is design speak for “yeah, this was hard and we are proud we pulled it off.”

And they did pull it off. The papaya orange half and the neon yellow squiggle half meet along a seam that somehow still reads as one continuous helmet, not two mismatched shells taped together. Printed tiles handle every sponsor logo along the brow, McLaren, Mastercard, Dropbox, OKX, all sitting exactly where they would on the real thing. The back of the helmet is where the emotional weight lives though. LEGO printed “1.000 GP” and “1963” across the rear in bold anniversary numerals, with a small nod to “Bruce / Mal Est. 1963,” a reference to Bruce McLaren founding the team over sixty years ago. “NEVER STOP RACING” runs along the base of the visor. It is a lot of history packed into a helmet the size of a grapefruit.

My favorite detail, though, is buried in the yellow side paneling where LEGO snuck in a tiny printed minifig head, smiling face and all, hidden right inside Norris’s own design pattern. It is such a small thing, but it is basically LEGO signing its own work, and it tells you the people building this actually cared about more than just slapping a logo on a shelf piece.

The set comes mounted on a black display stand with Norris’s number 1 and a printed signature plaque, plus a minifigure of Norris himself in off track team gear, reportedly the first time he has been rendered as a LEGO minifig. It also plugs into the LEGO Builder app so you can rotate and zoom your progress mid build, which is a nice touch if you like tracking your pit stops digitally.

This helmet drops right after LEGO built ten full size, actually driveable F1 cars for a stunt at last year’s Miami Grand Prix, so the brand’s relationship with the sport is clearly only ramping up. The Lando Norris McLaren Mastercard F1 Team Helmet (set 43023) is available now for $89.99 on LEGO.com and through McLaren’s official store, alongside the matching Oscar Piastri edition if you want the full garage set.

The post Lando Norris’ New LEGO Helmet Is Weirdly Emotional to Build first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pokémon has always sold us a very specific fantasy: a compact sphere you can throw into tall grass, watch shimmy three times, and hear that satisfying click. The wiggle is practically cultural shorthand at this point. So when maker Kiara’s Workshop decided to skip the wiggle entirely and build the far stranger, far older Arceus ball instead, the resulting creation landed somewhere between prop design, mechanical engineering, and sheer stubbornness. The kind of project that sounds manageable until you’re three failed prototypes deep.

For context: the Arceus ball comes from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a game set in a much earlier era of the Pokémon world. This isn’t the sleek, mass-produced Pokéball most of us grew up clicking in handheld games. It’s a more primitive artifact, made from Apricorns and Tumblestones in the game’s lore, with an aesthetic that leans ancient and earthy rather than factory-fresh. And its in-game behavior is notably different too. Instead of the classic wiggle sequence, the Arceus ball shoots into the air during a catch and releases a burst of smoke. It’s more dramatic, more theatrical, and a far more interesting design brief.

Designer: Kiara’s Workshop

Kiara’s Workshop had already built functional Pokéballs before, putting out a V1 and V2 that earned a loyal following and a comment section full of people asking when she’d make more. The V3 of the standard Pokéball was still on her list when she decided to take a detour and come back to Pokéballs a different way. The Arceus ball seemed like the simpler bet. It doesn’t have the same intricate mechanical catch sequence as the modern version, so how hard could it be? The answer, as it turned out, was very hard. The build required research, iteration, and a willingness to start over.

Getting a physical object to jump on cue and simultaneously release smoke on command is not exactly a weekend project. The ancient aesthetic of the ball adds another layer of complexity: it can’t look like it came out of a clean resin mold. It needs texture, weight, and a certain handmade quality that actually complicates production rather than simplifying it. Every element Kiara worked through pointed back to how much thought went into the original game design, even for something that appears on screen for only a few seconds at a time.

Here’s the thing about maker culture that doesn’t get enough attention: it forces a kind of reverse-engineering that’s deeply respectful of the original design, whether that original designer was a game developer or a prop team. When you have to physically build something that only existed as a rendered animation, you start noticing all the decisions that went into it. Kiara’s build is less about having a cool collectible on a shelf (though it would absolutely win any shelf) and more about understanding how design translates, or refuses to translate, between worlds. That’s a genuinely underrated form of design criticism.

Pokémon as a franchise has always been smart about its own mythology. The progression from handcrafted Apricorn balls to industrially manufactured ones mirrors real-world design evolution, from artisanal craft to mass production. What Kiara’s Workshop did was reverse that arc entirely, going from the pixel back to the physical, from the streamlined modern version to the awkward, jumping, smoke-releasing ancient one. It’s a move that requires understanding both the fiction and the fabrication. The result is genuinely impressive, not because it’s a perfect replica, but because it functions on its own terms. It jumps. It smokes. It exists in a way it never was supposed to.

Plenty of makers are building Pokéballs right now, probably on multiple continents simultaneously. But most are going for the one everyone recognizes. Choosing the Arceus ball, with all its mechanical demands and its ancient visual language, says something about what excites Kiara’s Workshop: not the familiar, but the forgotten. And for anyone who’s ever quietly preferred the stranger corners of a franchise over its most iconic pieces, that’s a choice worth appreciating.

The post A Maker Spent Months Building a Pokéball That Jumps and Shoots Smoke first appeared on Yanko Design.

The new version of PowerToys tool, comes with something you might like. If you’re interested in enhancing how your mouse works, then we suggest taking advantage of what the Mouse Utility category has to offer. With this section, you should come across two new features, and they are Find My Mouse and Mouse Highlighter. Now, let […]

The post Using Find My Mouse & Mouse Highlighter feature in PowerToys appeared first on TheWindowsClub News.

Command Not Found is a PowerShell 7 module that detects an error thrown by a command and suggests a relevant WinGet package to install, if available. It is a helpful tool, as it makes it easier to find and install the packages you need. Command Not Found utility detects command-line errors in PowerShell The Command […]

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