Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Logitech G413 SE mechanical keyboard.

Logitech introduced two mechanical keyboards to its lineup on Monday. Shipping in February, the boards are part of the company’s PC gaming brand, but with their $70 starting price and classic, toned-down look, they’re also interesting candidates for someone seeking a productivity keyboard with mechanical switches.

The Logitech G G413 SE and G413 TKL SE are $80 and $70, respectively, offering a reasonable entry point for people who might think mechanical keyboards are too expensive. Logitech, specifically its G gaming brand, isn’t afraid to overload its keyboards with RGB lighting, but the backlight on these boards comes in white only. The standard G413 is available with an all-white or all-red backlight.

You can get the non-SE G413 with a red backlight. (credit: Logitech)

A subdued appearance continues with a top case made of aluminum-magnesium alloy with a brushed black finish that matches the black PBT keycaps. The plastic should be an upgrade from the non-SE G413’s ABS plastic keyboards, as PBT is generally more resistant to degradation over time.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Wordle players trying to avoid foreknowledge of tomorrow’s puzzle solution. (credit: Adam Drobiec / EyeEm)

If you’re one of the many, many people hooked on Wordle—and especially if you’re someone who likes to share your spoiler-free results publicly each day—we have a word of warning for you. There are people who are determined to spoil your good time by shoving tomorrow’s Wordle answer in your face.

The spoiler Twitter account Wordlinator was one of the most prominent trolls on the scene, describing itself as “sent from the future to terminate wordle bragging.” @Wordlinator would reply to seemingly random Wordle-results tweets with impolite messages designed to “teach you a lesson” by including the answer to the next day’s game (as archived here).

It’s not hard

Wordlinator and its ilk take advantage of Wordle‘s less-than-secure Javascript coding, which lists the answer to all 2,315 of the game’s five-letter puzzles in daily order in a plaintext array buried in publicly viewable files referenced in the webpage’s source code.

Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket)

Nvidia may be walking away from its acquisition of Arm Ltd., the British chip designer, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The blockbuster deal faced global scrutiny, and Nvidia apparently feels that it hasn’t made sufficient progress in convincing regulators that the acquisition won’t harm competition or national security. “Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private,” Bloomberg reported.

In a further sign that the deal is likely to be abandoned, SoftBank is also working to take Arm public, according to the report.

Enlarge / All those supports require a lot of aluminum. (credit: Longhua Liao)

Once solar panels are operative, they produce electricity without carbon emissions. But making and installing them involves some emissions. Most of the worries about solar panel production have focused on the elements that go into the panels themselves, like gallium, cadmium, germanium, indium, selenium, and tellurium. But according to new research, the massive amount of aluminum needed to house the solar rigs of the future could create further problems.

“I hadn’t realized just how much aluminum was required for the frames and the modules, mountings, and inverters,” Alison Lennon, a researcher at UNSW Sydney’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, told Ars. She added that aluminum is often used because it is lightweight and corrosion-resistant.

In 2020, the World Bank released an oft-cited analysis called “Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.” In this report, the authors identified aluminum as one of the minerals that would need to have its production scale by a large amount for the world to meet its climate goals. “PV was a large contributor,” Lennon said. “[This] made me think about the problem a bit more.”

Enlarge / Intel’s 12th-generation Core chips are coming to laptops. (credit: Intel)

We were impressed with Intel’s top-tier 12th-generation desktop chips. Though still power-hungry compared to competing AMD Ryzen processors, their combination of big performance cores (P-cores) and clusters of small efficiency cores (E-cores) helped them shine under all kinds of workloads, including games that favor fewer, faster cores and video encoding and rendering tasks that benefit from every core you can throw at them.

The laptop versions of those chips, which Intel announced at CES earlier this month, don’t have access to a desktop computer’s huge power supply or beefy cooling systems. They also don’t benefit from being compared to mediocre predecessors. 11th-generation Core desktop processors backported a new CPU architecture to Intel’s decrepit 14nm manufacturing process with unimpressive results, while 11th-generation Core laptop chips benefitted from the newer 10nm process and correspondingly lower heat and power consumption. The 12th-generation chips use the same process, though it has been re-dubbed “Intel 7” to close the PR gap between Intel’s 10nm process and TSMC’s 7nm process.

The first Alder Lake laptop processor to find its way into our hands is the tippy-top-end Core i9-12900HK, the fastest of the bunch. In our testing, we tried to see whether the laptop version of Alder Lake strikes the same performance balance as the desktop version—fast cores when you need fast cores and lots of cores when you need lots of cores.