iFixit's teardown videos show the inside of your tech, breaking it down to determine how to repair it. However, not all tech survives the teardown process, like this unfortunate Furby.
For its final teardown of 2024, iFixit takes a look inside a Furby, the creepy/cute owl-gremlin robot toy that has seen several reboots since the original was released in 1998. — Read the rest
This DIY mutant Furby by Evan and Katelyn is far more futuristic and terrifying than the original 1998 Furby model.
This spin on the beloved toy combines the original Furby body with a mechanical dog-like robot body that can run around. — Read the rest
Long Furby Farm is a treasure trove of Furby themed weirdness. I am delighted yet mildly frightened by the existence of these videos. Here's one of a Furby with tentacles giving to fuzzy worms a bath in a boiling pot of water. — Read the rest
Turns out Etsy still has stuff worth paying for on it, such as the biblically accurate Furby. Lazarus Quinn will customize one for you for £226 and up ($270).
— Read the restModeled after the original Confetti Amadeus! Prices include ordering the highest quality furby, preferably new or working, I can find (snowball or champagne) + supplies, so I will have to ship supplies to my house before I can start on the project itself.
Watch this naked, re-wired Furby doll go haywire and short circuit. Sometimes the Furby will say something that I recognize as typical Furby Language, but then it begins babbling out of control. This seems like such a fun project, I think I'll have to try it myself sometime. — Read the rest
Super weird. Sound up.
Video and music by Ghoul Skool of Everything Is Terrible!
Thank you, The Memory Hole.
Released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics, more than 40 million Furbies were sold in its first three years of life. What made this bizarre animatronic toy so damn popular?
Argentine hacker [Roni Bandini] modded a 1998 Furby so that it responds to stimulus by rattling off a random quote from Jorge Luis Borges. He calls it "Borgy."
From the galleries, the music grows louder and more complex as the slaves, surgically operated upon to sing but one perfect note each, are stimulated to more passionate efforts. Even the young emperor is moved by the sinister harmony of their song which in few ways resembles anything previously uttered by the human voice. — Read the rest
Looking remarkably like the Mogwai creatures from the 1984 film Gremlins, Furbies first hit the market in November 1998, becoming an instant success. In just the first three years of production, over 40M of these fake fur-covered robotic toys were sold. — Read the rest
When Context Labs teamed up with UK consumer group Which? to produce an outstanding report on the surveillance, privacy and security risks of kids' "connected toys," it undertook the reverse-engineering of Hasbro's new Furby Connect, a device that works with a mobile app to listen and watch the people around it and interact with them.
C/Net has video of Pleo, the ultracute dinosaur robot invented by Celeb Chung, co-creator of the Furby. (Background on Pleo in this San Jose Mercury News article from Monday.)
Link (via MAKE: Blog)
Pat sez: "Furby now had a girlfriend–a bearded clam (no, I'm not kidding)." Link Discuss
Meet Dino, an ugly plush dinosaur that comes armed with a built-in AI chatbot that records your kid's every word. For just $249, your child can share their secrets with this knockoff Barney while you eavesdrop through an app.
Let's be clear about what this is: It's literally just a lumpy stuffed dinosaur with a speaker, microphone, and chatbot crammed inside. — Read the rest
As if by some benign bureaucratic miracle, 60 pages of formerly classified NSA documents have landed in the lap of an internet information security enthusiast and furry. Last year, X (Twitter) user kotaKat filed a Freedom of Information Act request, partly as a joke, in order to gain hard evidence of an alleged NSA memorandum regarding the agencies' banning of Furbies in the 90s. — Read the rest
I know that science fiction is often looked at as a window into our future state(s).
Someone was walking around a farm when they found this old Furby covered in moss. They named it "Murby". And here's the original blog post. Forget about growing yourself a Chia Pet when you can simply toss your old furby into the foliage and then come back years later to find it broken, decaying, and covered in moss. — Read the rest
If you've ever had multiple furbies in your home, you've probably had a chuckle watching them speak gibberish to each other. The silliness of furbies talking to each other is taken to a whole new level in this conversation between 25 Furbies. — Read the rest
You know how in movies where there's a mad genius tech-wizard/hacker (often a precocious teen) who can make the most fantastical creations with seemingly no effort? It's such a great fantasy with little analogue in the real world. Sam Battle, he of Look Mum No Computer strikes me as a character from one of those films, except he is very real. — Read the rest
