Retro

Remember when kids used to play stickball, marbles, and hopscotch instead of iPhone games? Well I don't either. But this Kickstarter project wants to revive a medium of simpler times -- with a modern twist.

The Can is a tin can telephone wired for IP phone use. It has a microphone, a speaker, and a jack for your computer, phone, or tablet so you can pretend you're 7 years old and it's 1939 again.

Aside from its patently ridiculous design, alternately listening to and speaking into The Can seems like more fun than just slapping a regular phone to your skull.

As the video below shows, The Can comes in Commander and Mini editions, with the former featuring an indicator light for missed calls. The Mini, meanwhile, jacks into your cell phone with a TRS connector. … Read more

CNET readers and Facebook fans are a creative bunch, and you always blow us away when we ask you to put your talents to the test in one of our artistic challenges.

Here at CNET UK, we recently threw down the gauntlet by asking you what scenes you could Photoshop our cuddly Droidy into, and we promised to post the best pictures right here on the site. As fine-art experts enthusiasts, our reactions to your splendid entries ranged from exclamations of "just sublime!" to "so profound!" to "LOL." To put it simply, they were all brilliant.

Read more of "Your best Droidy Photoshop challenge images," and see more pics, at Crave UK. … Read more

If you've got even one geeky bone in your body, the odds are you have fond memories of something Nintendo related. Whether it's Donkey Kong, the Super NES, Dennis Hopper playing King Koopa or Pokemon cereal, the Big N has bestowed precious childhood memories on every one of us.

So brace your brain for a blast from the past as we don the nostalgia goggles and celebrate the weird and wonderful, as well as all the hits and misses of Nintendo.

Read more of "Nintendo history celebrated in our nostalgia-filled video" at Crave UK. … Read more

ALAMOGORDO, N.M.--A flat plaque in cement on the ground in front of the flagpoles at the New Mexico Museum of Space History marks the final resting place for Ham the Astrochimp. I've brought flowers to spruce the place up a little bit, but it still looks very plain. This isn't quite what I expected. I thought the grave of a space pioneer might have a little more flair.

Earning a real name Ham's name is an acronym for "Holloman Aeromedical," the lab where he and other space chimps were trained. He didn't earn a real name until he successfully returned from orbit. Before that, he was Chimp Number 65.… Read more

SOCORRO, N.M.--Roswell gets all the glory. It has a UFO festival, a UFO museum, and a prominent place in the national mindset. Roswell happened back in 1947, but it wasn't really popularized until the late 1970s.

Before Roswell got famous, Socorro, N.M., made national news in 1964 after a very peculiar incident on an April evening.

Socrorro gets its own UFO Police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car near the outskirts of town when he turned off to investigate a loud roaring sound and a flame in the sky. What he initially thought was a car turned over in an arroyo turned out to be what he described as a shiny whitish object, shaped like an "O" with legs. … Read more

SANDIA PARK, N.M.--It's a good idea to raid your piggy bank for quarters before you go to Tinkertown. You'll need them to trigger the fortune teller machine, play the automated one-man band, and turn on some of the homemade animatronic displays.

Ross Ward's legacy Tinkertown is a testament to the vision, determination, and craftiness of tinkerer Ross Ward, a carnival painter who spent 40 years of his life carving figures and building miniature towns and circuses for them to live in.

One highlight of a Tinkertown visit is the Old West town. It spans a long room. Buttons along the way trigger a figure that chases a chicken, a flying Mary Poppins, and carpenters hammering away. Most of it is hand-built and hand-carved, with layers upon layers of tiny Western details recreated in miniature.

The result of all that work and creativity is Tinkertown. Tucked away in the Sandia Mountains, Tinkertown pulls in thousands of visitors every year. Ward passed away in 2002, but his widow and partner-in-tinkering Carla Ward still runs the place.… Read more

"This is my daughter, who just turned 9. She's amazing, and I want her to grow up to be a mad scientist and to take over the world."

So begins writer Jordan Stratford's Kickstarter pitch video for "Wollstonecraft," the first of what he hopes will be a series of steampunky, historical novels for kids and young adults that will "inspire a generation of girls about imagination and science."

Stratford says he wants to give young girls like his daughter "actual historical role models that show them that math and science and imagination are incredible tools that can shape their world." And he's chosen as his two heroines Mary Shelley, of "Frankenstein" fame -- the world's first science fiction writer, he calls her -- and Ada Byron, whom some regard as the world's first computer programmer.… Read more

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--Standing in front of a row of rotary telephones, a volunteer at the Telephone Museum of New Mexico tells me most kids have no idea how to use them. Most have never even seen a rotary phone before.

I'm familiar with rotary phones from my childhood, but there are even older phones here I've only seen in old movies.

This museum is the place to go to see how we got to modern smartphones from Alexander Graham Bell's cone-shaped devices that carried the first sentence by telephone in 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Bell's utterance to his assistant allegedly came as a result of spilling acid on his hand. All these years later, we still use our phones to summon help.

The Telephone Museum of New Mexico is one of those little specialty places that most people who live in Albuquerque have never heard about. It has four stories full of phones, switchboards, maintenance gear, and scale models of Telstar satellites. Be still, my geeky heart.… Read more

It feels almost quaint in this era of the smartphone (aka the new pocket watch) to see a company producing a wristwatch that's nothing more (or less) than a wristwatch.

Companies including Sony are producing smart watches, adding texts, tweets, e-mails, and the like to the information you can wear on your wrist. And with products like the Pebble appearing, it may be only a matter of time before the smart watch truly takes hold.

But there is something classic and clean about the simple wristwatch. It tells the time and that's it. That's a lot, however. The wristwatch provides us with a little ritual -- however quick and commonplace -- in which we pay our respects to the passing of time, with no other distractions.… Read more