Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Gag Gifts & Prank Mail

A British gift retailer and own-brand developer that made its name on outlandish presents, boozy gadgets and irreverent personalised items. It mixes licensed pop-culture goods with its own limited-run oddities.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A pocket multi-tool for exploring radio protocols and access-control systems, shaped like a toy dolphin with a virtual pet on the screen. It is fully open source and became a cult object among hardware tinkerers.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

In business since 1848 and still selling what it calls the best, the unique and the unexpected. It is the catalogue famous for oversized, faintly ridiculous luxury gadgets, backed by a lifetime guarantee.

Gag Gifts & Prank Mail

A long-running British gift site built around quirky gadgets, licensed merchandise and unusual presents. It is one of the original UK homes for the sort of gift that exists mainly to be shown to people.

Party Novelties

A licensed consumer-goods maker that turns gaming and entertainment properties into lamps, mugs, desk gadgets and novelty homeware. If a franchise has a glowing icon, Paladone has probably made a lamp of it.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A small bright-yellow handheld game console from software company Panic, with a black-and-white screen and a physical crank on the side. It ships with two dozen games delivered season-by-season over Wi-Fi.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

The long-running gadget brand behind massage chairs, air purifiers and an endless run of slightly unnecessary consumer electronics. It is the other half, with Hammacher Schlemmer, of the classic airline-catalogue gadget genre.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A Calgary electronics outfit selling DIY kits and robot parts, including the Useless Machine kit whose only function is to switch itself off. The catalogue mixes serious components with deliberately pointless builds.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A Swedish design company making unusually styled electronic instruments and audio gadgets, including the calculator-sized Pocket Operator synths. Its products look like toys and work like serious instruments.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

An Ohio maker of absurdly small open-source electronics, including working TinyTVs, miniature arcade cabinets and thumb-sized game consoles. The products are functional gadgets that are mostly funny because of their scale.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Designer Matty Benedetto builds and sells products that solve problems nobody has, then posts the demos. It is modern Chindogu with a shop attached, and a handful of the running gags get produced as real, buyable objects.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A toy and pop-culture gift inventor working with licensed brands, best known for its RealFX Puppetronic range of hand-operated animatronic characters. The company describes its mission as bringing great brands to life.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Makes pixel-art displays and Bluetooth speakers, including the Pixoo photo frames, Ditoo retro-computer speaker and Timebox. Owners draw their own animations in an app and push them to the LED grid.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Builds officially licensed arcade cabinets at roughly three-quarter scale so a real Pac-Man or Street Fighter machine fits in a living room. Also makes countercade and head-to-head table versions.

Desk Toys & Fidgets

Makes micro robotic creatures that skitter across a desk on vibrating legs, plus habitat sets and battling robot lines. The bugs are the toy that made cheap vibration-driven robotics mainstream.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Started with the widely mocked and widely bought head-enveloping nap pillow, and has grown into a range of travel and rest products. The original still looks like wearing a beanbag on your head.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A clock that spells the time out in words on a grid of letters, lighting only the ones you need. The German design house makes wall and table versions in a range of finishes and languages.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Makes miniature playable retro gaming devices: Micro Players that are tiny working arcade cabinets, joystick players and pocket handhelds, licensed from PAC-MAN, Atari, Tetris and Sonic.

Party Novelties

A UK maker of officially licensed movie and gaming merchandise, including TUBBZ collectible rubber ducks styled as game and film characters. Also produces apparel, lamps and desk items.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A crowdfunding platform devoted to original open hardware, where independent engineers launch the kind of oddball device no mass manufacturer would greenlight. Projects range from strange keyboards to niche radios and scientific instruments.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A Czech workshop that revived the manufacture of Nixie tubes, the glowing cold-cathode digits abandoned in the 1970s, and builds handmade clocks around them. Each tube is made by hand in a restored castle.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Combines magnetic levitation with product design to make objects that float and spin in mid-air, including a levitating light bulb and a levitating planter. The whole point is the wow when someone notices.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Makes the LaMetric TIME, a pixel smart clock that also shows weather, countdowns, notifications and internet radio on its LED matrix. It is a desk object that turns data feeds into 8-bit-looking tiles.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

An invention kit that turns any conductive object into a computer key, so a banana becomes a piano and Play-Doh becomes a game controller. It is sold as an education tool but is mostly used to make deliberately ridiculous interfaces.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Makes Bittle the robot dog and Nybble the robot cat, palm-sized open-source quadrupeds that walk, and can be programmed in Python or blocks. They are marketed as coding kits but function as very good desk pets.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

The product studio of Simone Giertz, the inventor known online for deliberately terrible robots. Yetch sells the ideas that actually work, described as unique solutions to everyday problems, including the Every Day Calendar.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A modern take on the split-flap departure board, built as a connected wall display that clacks through messages you send from an app. It is an expensive, very satisfying piece of mechanical theatre.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

Builds handcrafted Nixie tube clocks and sells the tubes themselves, including ZIN18, ZIN70 and IN-14 designs. The clocks put orange glowing numerals on a desk and ship worldwide.

Desk Toys & Fidgets

Builds kinetic sand tables where a magnet drags a steel ball through sand to trace endless patterns, sold as furniture-grade art objects. Sizes run from coffee table down to desk.

Weird Tech & Useless Gadgets

A small wood-framed LED display that shows transit times, weather and other glanceable feeds so you can leave your phone in your pocket. The app catalogue is community-extensible.

Gag Gifts & Prank Mail

Makes the original selfie toaster, which burns your face into every slice, plus the Jesus toaster it first became known for. Custom plates are cut from a submitted photo.