Author name: Rejus Almole

russia-is-about-to-do-the-most-russia-thing-ever-with-its-next-space-station

Russia is about to do the most Russia thing ever with its next space station

iss, nauka, rOS, russia, Space, space station / /

Meanwhile, the Russian core will fly onward. Some elements will have been in orbit for more than 30 years.

Some in Russia are not happy

In a scathing article on the decision, the Russian newspaper New Izvestia explored its consequences. The article, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, recalled comments from Orlov in 2022 about the dangerous bacteria and fungi that have accumulated on the International Space Station over its extended lifetime. Because of these microorganisms from hundreds of visiting astronauts, he said, there is danger to both humans and degraded electrical components. At the time, Orlov was seeking to justify funding for a new station. “Have bacteria and fungi suddenly become less dangerous over the past three years?” the Russian article asks.

There may also not be much time for new research. Russian cosmonauts on the space station currently spend about 50 percent of their time on station maintenance due to the aging infrastructure.

So, at a time when China will have its own Tiangong space station, NASA should have one or more privately operated space stations to visit, and India may also begin the construction of its own orbital outpost, Russian cosmonauts will be left with what, exactly?

“Russia, meanwhile, will be left to carry on the legacy of the ISS, with all its problems,” the New Izvestia article states. “We won’t have a new orbital station with modern capabilities yet, and the Vostochny Cosmodrome is losing much of its significance, meaning investments in a launch pad for manned flights could go down the drain. But let’s be happy for Kazakhstan—its authorities will continue to receive rent from Baikonur.”

This is clearly a money-saving move for Russia. Given its war-strapped economy, the country cannot afford major investments in civil space projects. It has been clear for some time that ROS was largely a vaporware project. However, basing a new station on decades-old elements of the space station, which have shown signs of cracking and leaking, is remarkable even for Russia’s threadbare space program.

Russia’s justification for the change is amusing. Manturov and the chief of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov, have said that putting ROS at an inclination of 51.6 degrees would enable interaction with an Indian station, which may fly in a similar orbit. So maybe there can be some collaboration in the time before Russia’s station falls apart and India’s begins to fly?

That is thin gruel, indeed, upon which to justify such a monumental decision.

Russia is about to do the most Russia thing ever with its next space station Read More »

bytedance-confirms-tiktok-will-be-controlled-by-us-owners

ByteDance confirms TikTok will be controlled by US owners

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, national security, Policy, tiktok, tiktok us / /

According to Trump, the deal ensures that TikTok complies with the divest-or-ban law, but the White House is still not providing more details. Instead, the Trump administration “referred questions about the deal to TikTok,” Reuters reported.

If the deal closes as expected on January 22, the new US company will have an estimated value of $14 billion, Vice President JD Vance noted in September.

At that point, the deal will likely face mounting scrutiny from lawmakers, including Republicans, who aren’t yet sure if the US operation resolves all national security concerns. Chinese control of the algorithm was a particular sticking point for critics, who claimed that Trump was giving China exactly what it wanted: international recognition for exporting leading technology to the US.

In September, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) vowed to take a “hard line” and oppose the deal’s framework if it violates the divest-or-ban law. Already, Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, is planning to hold a hearing next year with US TikTok leadership.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has accused Trump of handing over “even more control of what you watch to his billionaire buddies,” through the TikTok deal, which she likened to enabling a “billionaire takeover of TikTok.” Many TikTokers likely share her concerns, after Trump suggested he’d like to see his hand-picked investors tweak the algorithm to be “100 percent MAGA.”

Questions remain until the exact terms of the deal become public, Warren said.

ByteDance did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

With the terms obscured, it’s unclear how quickly TikTok may change in 2026 under US ownership. In July, the Information reported that when approximately 170 million US users get ported over to the new US-owned app, it could be buggy.

ByteDance confirms TikTok will be controlled by US owners Read More »

google-lobs-lawsuit-at-search-result-scraping-firm-serpapi

Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, search / /

Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.

SerpApi and similar firms do fulfill a need, but they sit in a legal gray area. Google does not provide an API for its search results, which are based on the world’s largest and most comprehensive web index. That makes Google’s SERPs especially valuable in the age of AI. A chatbot can’t summarize web links if it can’t find them, which has led companies like Perplexity to pay for SerpApi’s second-hand Google data. That prompted Reddit to file a lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity for grabbing its data from Google results.

Google is echoing many of the things Reddit said when it publicized its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims it’s not just doing this to protect itself—it’s also about protecting the websites it indexes. In Google’s blog post on the legal action, it says SerpApi “violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content.”

It’s worth noting that Google has a partnership with Reddit that pipes data directly into Gemini. As a result, you’ll often see Reddit pages cited in the chatbot’s outputs. As Google points out, it abides by “industry-standard crawling protocols” to collect the data that appears on its SERPs, but those sites didn’t agree to let SerpApi scrape their data from Google. So while you could reasonably argue that Google’s lawsuit helps protect the rights of web publishers, it also explicitly protects Google’s business interests.

Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi Read More »

trump’s-energy-secretary-orders-a-washington-state-coal-plant-to-remain-open

Trump’s energy secretary orders a Washington state coal plant to remain open

Science / /

The year-end emergency that does exist in Washington state has been caused by record-setting rainfall and widespread flooding. (President Donald Trump has declared a federal emergency and authorized disaster assistance.) Thousands of people have been displaced and damage to major highways will take months to repair.

“It is so ironic, when we have a real emergency, that they picked this time to fabricate an energy emergency,” said KC Golden, a member of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, an interstate agency created by Congress to ensure reliable power while protecting the environment.

While there is no emergency electricity shortfall in the Pacific Northwest, the region, like much of the United States, does have a serious and worsening long-term electricity supply problem.

Washington and Oregon are home to about 100 data centers. Oregon is second only to Virginia in data center capacity, and the centers consume 11 percent of Oregon’s power supply, nearly three times the national average, according to the Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank.

Energy use is rising along with the region’s booming high-tech economy, its outsized appetite for electric cars (The Seattle Times reported that 26 percent of new cars registered in Washington in October were EVs) and the climate-change-driven growth of home air-conditioning. The Northwest could face a 9-gigawatt shortfall of power by 2030, according to a recent utility-funded report by the energy consulting group E3. Nine gigawatts is roughly the electricity load of Oregon.

“We are facing a real energy supply challenge and we have been slow to take up that challenge,” said Golden, who represents Washington state on the Northwest power council.

The Pacific Northwest gets more of its power from hydroelectric dams than any other part of the country (60 percent in Washington), and the region has long been blessed with cheap electricity rates. But drought and changing weather patterns (less snow, more rain) have hammered the reliability of the system, which draws most of its power from big federal dams on the Columbia River, North America’s largest hydroelectric resource.

Trump’s energy secretary orders a Washington state coal plant to remain open Read More »

we-asked-four-ai-coding-agents-to-rebuild-minesweeper—the-results-were-explosive

We asked four AI coding agents to rebuild Minesweeper—the results were explosive

Agent, AI, AI gaming, Claude Code, coding, gaming, Gemini, test / /

How do four modern LLMs do at re-creating a simple Windows gaming classic?

Which mines are mine, and which are AI? Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The idea of using AI to help with computer programming has become a contentious issue. On the one hand, coding agents can make horrific mistakes that require a lot of inefficient human oversight to fix, leading many developers to lose trust in the concept altogether. On the other hand, some coders insist that AI coding agents can be powerful tools and that frontier models are quickly getting better at coding in ways that overcome some of the common problems of the past.

To see how effective these modern AI coding tools are becoming, we decided to test four major models with a simple task: re-creating the classic Windows game Minesweeper. Since it’s relatively easy for pattern-matching systems like LLMs to play off of existing code to re-create famous games, we added in one novelty curveball as well.

Our straightforward prompt:

Make a full-featured web version of Minesweeper with sound effects that

1) Replicates the standard Windows game and

2) implements a surprise, fun gameplay feature.

Include mobile touchscreen support.

Ars Senior AI Editor Benj Edwards fed this task into four AI coding agents with terminal (command line) apps: OpenAI’s Codex based on GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude Code with Opus 4.5, Google’s Gemini CLI, and Mistral Vibe. The agents then directly manipulated HTML and scripting files on a local machine, guided by a “supervising” AI model that interpreted the prompt and assigned coding tasks to parallel LLMs that can use software tools to execute the instructions. All AI plans were paid for privately with no special or privileged access given by the companies involved, and the companies were unaware of these tests taking place.

Ars Senior Gaming Editor (and Minesweeper expert) Kyle Orland then judged each example blind, without knowing which model generated which Minesweeper clone. Those somewhat subjective and non-rigorous results are below.

For this test, we used each AI model’s unmodified code in a “single shot” result to see how well these tools perform without any human debugging. In the real world, most sufficiently complex AI-generated code would go through at least some level of review and tweaking by a human software engineer who could spot problems and address inefficiencies.

We chose this test as a sort of simple middle ground for the current state of AI coding. Cloning Minesweeper isn’t a trivial task that can be done in just a handful of lines of code, but it’s also not an incredibly complex system that requires many interlocking moving parts.

Minesweeper is also a well-known game, with many versions documented across the Internet. That should give these AI agents plenty of raw material to work from and should be easier for us to evaluate than a completely novel program idea. At the same time, our open-ended request for a new “fun” feature helps demonstrate each agent’s penchant for unguided coding “creativity,” as well as their ability to create new features on top of an established game concept.

With all that throat-clearing out of the way, here’s our evaluation of the AI-generated Minesweeper clones, complete with links that you can use to play them yourselves.

Agent 1: Mistral Vibe

Play it for yourself

Just ignore that Custom button. It’s purely for show.

Just ignore that Custom button. It’s purely for show. Credit: Benj Edwards

Implementation

Right away, this version loses points for not implementing chording—the technique that advanced Minesweeper players use to quickly clear all the remaining spaces surrounding a number that already has sufficient flagged mines. Without this feature, this version feels more than a little clunky to play.

I’m also a bit perplexed by the inclusion of a “Custom” difficulty button that doesn’t seem to do anything. It’s like the model realized that customized board sizes were a thing in Minesweeper but couldn’t figure out how to implement this relatively basic feature.

The game works fine on mobile, but marking a square with a flag requires a tricky long-press on a tiny square that also triggers selector handles that are difficult to clear. So it’s not an ideal mobile interface.

Presentation

This was the only working version we tested that didn’t include sound effects. That’s fair, since the original Windows Minesweeper also didn’t include sound, but it’s still a notable relative omission since the prompt specifically asked for it.

The all-black “smiley face” button to start a game is a little off-putting, too, compared to the bright yellow version that’s familiar to both Minesweeper players and emoji users worldwide. And while that smiley face does start a new game when clicked, there’s also a superfluous “New Game” button taking up space for some reason.

“Fun” feature

The closest thing I found to a “fun” new feature here was the game adding a rainbow background pattern on the grid when I completed a game. While that does add a bit of whimsy to a successful game, I expected a little more.

Coding experience

Benj notes that he was pleasantly surprised by how well Mistral Vibe performed as an open-weight model despite lacking the big-money backing of the other contenders. It was relatively slow, however (third fastest out of four), and the result wasn’t great. Ultimately, its performance so far suggests that with more time and more training, a very capable AI coding agent may eventually emerge.

Overall rating: 4/10

This version got many of the basics right but left out chording and didn’t perform well on the small presentational and “fun” touches.

Agent 2: OpenAI Codex

Play it for yourself

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate those chording instructions at the bottom.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate those chording instructions at the bottom. Credit: Benj Edwards

Implementation

Not only did this agent include the crucial “chording” feature, but it also included on-screen instructions for using it on both PC and mobile browsers. I was further impressed by the option to cycle through “?” marks when marking squares with flags, an esoteric feature I feel even most human Minesweeper cloners might miss.

On mobile, the option to hold your finger down on a square to mark a flag is a nice touch that makes this the most enjoyable handheld version we tested.

Presentation

The old-school emoticon smiley-face button is pretty endearing, especially when you blow up and get a red-tinted “X(“. I was less impressed by the playfield “graphics,” which use a simple “*” for revealed mines and an ugly red “F” for flagged tiles.

The beeps-and-boops sound effects reminded me of my first old-school, pre-Sound-Blaster PC from the late ’80s. That’s generally a good thing, but I still appreciated the game giving me the option to turn them off.

“Fun” feature

The “Surprise: Lucky Sweep Bonus” listed in the corner of the UI explains that clicking the button gives you a free safe tile when available. This can be pretty useful in situations where you’d otherwise be forced to guess between two tiles that are equally likely to be mines.

Overall, though, I found it a bit odd that the game gives you this bonus only after you find a large, cascading field of safe tiles with a single click. It mostly functions as a “win more” button rather than a feature that offers a good balance of risk versus reward.

Coding experience

OpenAI Codex has a nice terminal interface with features similar to Claude Code (local commands, permission management, and interesting animations showing progress), and it’s fairly pleasant to use (OpenAI also offers Codex through a web interface, but we did not use that for this evaluation). However, Codex took roughly twice as long to code a functional game than Claude Code did, which might contribute to the strong result here.

Overall: 9/10

The implementation of chording and cute presentation touches push this to the top of the list. We just wish the “fun” feature was a bit more fun.

Agent 3: Anthropic Claude Code

Play it for yourself

The Power Mod powers on display here make even Expert boards pretty trivial to complete.

The Power Mod powers on display here make even Expert boards pretty trivial to complete. Credit: Benj Edwards

Implementation

Once again, we get a version that gets all the gameplay basics right but is missing the crucial chording feature that makes truly efficient Minesweeper play possible. This is like playing Super Mario Bros. without the run button or Ocarina of Time without Z-targeting. In a word: unacceptable.

The “flag mode” toggle on the mobile version of this game is perfectly functional, but it’s a little clunky to use. It also visually cuts off a portion of the board at the larger game sizes.

Presentation

Presentation-wise, this is probably the most polished version we tested. From the use of cute emojis for the “face” button to nice-looking bomb and flag graphics and simple but effective sound effects, this looks more professional than the other versions we tested.

That said, there are some weird presentation issues. The “beginner” grid has weird gaps between columns, for instance. The borders of each square and the flag graphics can also become oddly grayed out at points, especially when using Power Mode (see below).

“Fun” feature

The prominent “Power Mode” button in the lower-right corner offers some pretty fun power-ups that alter the core Minesweeper formula in interesting ways. But the actual powers are a bit hit-and-miss.

I especially liked the “Shield” power, which protects you from an errant guess, and the “Blast” power, which seems to guarantee a large cascade of revealed tiles wherever you click. But the “X-Ray” power, which reveals every bomb for a few seconds, could be easily exploited by a quick player (or a crafty screenshot). And the “Freeze” power is rather boring, just stopping the clock for a few seconds and amounting to a bit of extra time.

Overall, the game hands out these new powers like candy, which makes even an Expert-level board relatively trivial with Power Mode active. Simply choosing “Power Mode” also seems to mark a few safe squares right after you start a game, making things even easier. So while these powers can be “fun,” they also don’t feel especially well-balanced.

Coding experience

Of the four tested models, Claude Code with Opus 4.5 featured the most pleasant terminal interface experience and the fastest overall coding experience (Claude Code can also use Sonnet 4.5, which is even faster, but the results aren’t quite as full-featured in our experience). While we didn’t precisely time each model, Opus 4.5 produced a working Minesweeper in under five minutes. Codex took at least twice as long, if not longer, while Mistral took roughly three or four times as long as Claude Code. Gemini, meanwhile, took hours of tinkering to get two non-working results.

Overall: 7/10

The lack of chording is a big omission, but the strong presentation and Power Mode options give this effort a passable final score.

Agent 4: Google Gemini CLI

Play it for yourself

So… where’s the game?

So… where’s the game? Credit: Benj Edwards

Implementation, presentation, etc.

Gemini CLI did give us a few gray boxes you can click, but the playfields are missing. While interactive troubleshooting with the agent may have fixed the issue, as a “one-shot” test, the model completely failed.

Coding experience

Of the four coding agents we tested, Gemini CLI gave Benj the most trouble. After developing a plan, it was very, very slow at generating any usable code (about an hour per attempt). The model seemed to get hung up attempting to manually create WAV file sound effects and insisted on requiring React external libraries and a few other overcomplicated dependencies. The result simply did not work.

Benj actually bent the rules and gave Gemini a second chance, specifying that the game should use HTML5. When the model started writing code again, it also got hung up trying to make sound effects. Benj suggested using the WebAudio framework (which the other AI coding agents seemed to be able to use), but the result didn’t work, which you can see at the link above.

Unlike the other models tested, Gemini CLI apparently uses a hybrid system of three different LLMs for different tasks (Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, 2.5 Flash, and 2.5 Pro were available at the level of the Google account Benj paid for). When you’ve completed your coding session and quit the CLI interface, it gives you a readout of which model did what.

In this case, it didn’t matter because the results didn’t work. But it’s worth noting that Gemini 3 coding models are available for other subscription plans that were not tested here. For that reason, this portion of the test could be considered “incomplete” for Google CLI.

Overall: 0/10 (Incomplete)

Final verdict

OpenAI Codex wins this one on points, in no small part because it was the only model to include chording as a gameplay option. But Claude Code also distinguished itself with strong presentational flourishes and quick generation time. Mistral Vibe was a significant step down, and Google CLI based on Gemini 2.5 was a complete failure on our one-shot test.

While experienced coders can definitely get better results via an interactive, back-and-forth code editing conversation with an agent, these results show how capable some of these models can be, even with a very short prompt on a relatively straightforward task. Still, we feel that our overall experience with coding agents on other projects (more on that in a future article) generally reinforces the idea that they currently function best as interactive tools that augment human skill rather than replace it.

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

We asked four AI coding agents to rebuild Minesweeper—the results were explosive Read More »

reminder:-donate-to-win-swag-in-our-annual-charity-drive-sweepstakes

Reminder: Donate to win swag in our annual Charity Drive sweepstakes

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How it works

Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or picking an item from the Amazon wish list of a specific hospital on its donation page. Donate as much or as little as you feel comfortable with—every little bit helps.

Once that’s done, it’s time to register your entry in our sweepstakes. Just grab a digital copy of your receipt (a forwarded email, a screenshot, or simply a cut-and-paste of the text) and send it to [email protected] with your name, postal address, daytime telephone number, and email address by 11: 59 pm ET Friday, January 2, 2026. (One entry per person, and each person can only win up to one prize. US residents only. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. See Official Rules for more information, including how to enter without making a donation. Also, refer to the Ars Technica privacy policy (https://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy).

We’ll then contact the winners and have them choose their prize by January 31, 2026 (choosing takes place in the order the winners are drawn). Good luck!

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For the lazy techie: These are Ars staff’s last-minute holiday gift picks

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Two wireless mice, two external hard drives, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The holidays have snuck up on us. How is it already that time?

If you’re on top of things and have already bought all your Christmas gifts, I commend you. Not all of us are so conscientious. In fact, one of us is so behind on holiday prep that he is not only running late on buying gifts; he’s also behind on publishing the Ars staff gift guide he said he’d write. (Whoever could we be talking about?)

So for my fellow last-minute scramblers, I polled Ars writers and editors for gift ideas they know will be solid because they’ve actually used them. As such, you’ll find gift options below that Ars staffers have used enough to feel good about recommending. Further, I made sure all of these are available for delivery before Christmas as of today, at least where I live.

For each gadget (or whatever else it might be), we have a brief description of how or why we’ve been using this particular thing and why we would recommend it. Note that the prices we’ve listed here represent where they were at the time this article was written, but online retailers often vary prices based on different factors, so you might see something different when you click through.

Ars Commentariat: If you feel inclined, feel free to share some other ideas. I genuinely might take advantage if you share something good.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs. (We won’t affiliatize any shared links in the comments, of course.)

Under $50

Tiny USB-A to USB-C adapter pack – $8

Somehow, amazingly, we are still living in a split USB-C/USB-A world all these years later. No one’s thrilled about it, but there’s no end in sight. Some folks in the Apple ecosystem turn to Apple’s first-party adapters, but there are two problems with them in my view: first, they’re weirdly expensive, as you’d expect. And second, they’re larger than they need to be.

I have about a dozen of these little adapters sitting around my house. The only downside is that because they’re shorter, they’re thicker, so you can’t always put two right next to each other in the MacBook Pro’s USB-C ports. But in the aforementioned mixed-use quagmire we all now occupy, odds are good you can just put it next to something that actually uses a USB-C connection. If you’re like me, you’re at about 2/3 USB-C and 1/3 USB-A at this point.

There are a bunch of brands for these, but they’re all pretty interchangeable, and I’ve not had any problems with these in particular.

– Samuel Axon

The Thing on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray – $12

People often debate whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. (I definitely think it is.) But there’s another movie I often watch during the holidays: John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ll freely admit it’s not holiday-themed in any way, but it’s at least filled with snow and winter gloom!

I don’t buy every movie on physical media—I’ve accepted that a lot of my library is going to be on Apple’s TV app or coming and going on streaming services—but I try to collect the lifelong favorites to make sure I’ll still have them decades down the road. (As long as they keep making Blu-ray players, anyway, which unfortunately is starting to look as uncertain as whether a favorite film stays on Netflix.)

A screengrab from The Thing

MacReady is admittedly not known for his holiday cheer. Credit: Universal

For me, The Thing definitely qualifies as a favorite that’s worth holding onto for years to come.

– Samuel Axon

Acer USB C Hub, 7 in 1 Multi-Port Adapter – $18

Modern laptops with only two USB-C ports basically require a hub. This Acer turns one port into HDMI (4K@30Hz), two USB-A ports for legacy gear, SD/microSD slots, and 100 W passthrough charging. At $18, I keep one in my bag and one on my desk. It’s not fancy, but it earns its keep the first time you need to dump a memory card or plug into a TV set.

– Benj Edwards

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell – $20

Originally published in 2019, it’s an amazing testament to how strong this book is that even after all that’s happened, the 2025 reissue doesn’t change much. Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, nails this historical summary of how we got to this point through multiple AI springs and AI winters.

She carefully explains the concepts and research underpinnings of contemporary developments in machine learning, large language models, image generation, and so on, while amplifying key voices from several of the people who contributed to progress in this field—both doomsayers and boosters alike—with a technically rigorous and ethically informed point of view.

If you or someone you know is just getting started learning about AI as we know it today, there are a lot of books they could read, and some of them are surely more contemporary. But I can hardly think of any that make a better foundation.

– Samuel Axon

Pinecil soldering iron – $40

Every self-respecting geek should own a soldering iron. Even if you aren’t making your own PCBs or recapping old electronics, it’s the kind of thing that just comes in handy. Especially around the holidays, when people are getting out their old battery-powered decorations that come with a lot of memories, wear, and flaky power terminals. Be the hero that brings a treasured light-up keepsake back to life!

When you don’t need a full-on soldering station, though, it’s nice to have something compact and easy to slip in a drawer. Enter the Pinecil, conveniently powered over USB-C, with a slick little screen allowing for easy temperature control (in F or C) and firmware that auto-sleeps if you forget to unplug it.

– Aurich Lawson

Anker 67 watt USB charger and Anker USB-C silicon power cable – $25 and $16

If you already have a suitable USB-C power supply (you really want at least 60 watts) and a USB-C cable, you’re set. If not, this power supply from Anker—a reliable brand, in my experience—is compact and folds up for easy storage. Not all USB-C cables are up to the task of transmitting the magic wall juice, so if you’re not sure you have an appropriate one, pick up the above cable, which is sheathed in silicon to keep it nice and floppy so you’re not wrestling with a stiff cord while using your iron.

– Aurich Lawson

Knog Bike Bells – $22 – $33

While a lot of my road bike’s miles are spent on actual roads, it’s hard to do any long rides in my area without spending a little time on a cycle trail—one shared by pedestrians, runners, scooter riders, casual cyclists, and random others. Even if the rules of most of those trails didn’t specify using a bell, it’s a smart idea to have one—especially one that’s loud enough to cut through whatever’s coming out of the headphones that most people wear.

But real estate on my handlebars is limited. They already host a cycling computer and a light, and two cables and two hydraulic tubes snake their way through the area, emerging from under the handlebar tape before diving into the frame. Finding a bell that both works and keeps out of the way turned into a bit of a challenge. And then a solution presented itself: A company called Knog sent me an email about their bell offerings.

A bike bell against a white background

One of Knog’s bike bells. Credit: Knog

All of Knog’s options are mechanically simple—just a half circle of metal that follows the circumference of the handlebar and a spring-loaded hammer to strike it—and loud enough to catch even headphone wearers’ attention. They’re also low-profile, barely sticking out from the handlebars themselves, and they’re narrow enough that it was easy to find space for one without bumping it into any of the cabling. It’s all unobtrusive enough that I forget mine’s there until I need it. Yes, you can find lots of cheaper alternative designs (the Knogs run between $20 and $45), but for me, it’s worth paying an extra $10–$15 for something that suits my needs this well.

– John Timmer

Razer Orochi V2 wireless mouse – $34

This is the mouse I’m using right now as I type this. I wanted a mouse that could cross basically every domain: It needed to be good enough for gaming, but conveniently wireless, while also working well across macOS, Windows, and Linux—and it needed to be portable and not too embarrassing in a professional context because I fly to far-flung cities for work at least a dozen times a year. Razer’s Orochi met all of those goals, and I appreciate that it looks neat and professional, despite the fact that it’s very much a gamer mouse.

The only area where it fumbles is that Razer’s app seems to crash and cause problems for me on both macOS and Windows, but it works just fine without the app, so I uninstalled it, and everything’s been golden since. (To be clear, you don’t need to install it to use the mouse.)

It wins points for versatility; I don’t think it really compromises anything across all the situations I mentioned.

As of this writing, it’s on sale for $34, but the typical price is $70—still not bad for what you’re getting.

– Samuel Axon

Pricier picks

OWC Express 1M2 – $90

I set up a home studio this year to record my righteous jams, and as part of that process, I needed an external SSD both to back up project files and to hold many hundreds of gigs of virtual instruments. I wanted something 1) blazingly fast, 2) good-looking, 3) bus-powered, 4) free of all (and all too common) sleep/wake glitches, 5) unlikely to burst into flames (these things can get hot), and yet also 6) completely fanless because my righteous jams would be far less righteous with a fan droning in the background.

A durable hard drive enclosure

The OWC Express 1M2 is used for backups for Nate’s “righteous jams.” Credit: OWC

Those criteria led me to OWC’s Express 1M2, an SSD enclosure that transfers data at 40Gb/s over USB 4, matches the look of my Mac mini perfectly (and works with PCs), and is bus-powered. It has never given me a sleep/wake problem; it gets warm but never palm-searingly hot, and it dissipates heat through a chonky, milled-aluminum case that requires no fan.

I love this thing. It was ludicrously easy to install my own NVMe M.2 drive in it (though you can also pay a small premium for pre-installed storage). I’ve never had a moment of trouble—nor have I ever heard it. Yes, the enclosure costs more than some other options, but it’s a well-made piece of kit that can transfer data nearly as fast as my Mac’s internal SSD and should last for years. If someone in your life needs an SSD enclosure, they could do far, far worse than the Express 1M2.

– Nate Anderson

Kagi subscription – $108/year

It’s been about a year since I switched full-time to Kagi for my search engine needs, leaving Google behind in a cloud of dust and not looking back, and it was the correct choice, at least for me. Kagi’s upsides are many—including and especially search that works how it’s supposed to work instead of by fabricating garbage or tricking you into buying things—but the big downside is that while Kagi has a free tier, real daily usage requires money.

But if you’re a happy Kagi user like me and you want to tempt others into using the service, Kagi has gift subscriptions! If you’ve been trying to tempt a friend or relative into abandoning Google’s sinking AI ship but they’re balking at the price, throw some money at that problem and knock that barrier down! A “pro” Kagi subscription with unlimited search costs about a hundred dollars a year, and while that obviously isn’t nothing, it’s also not an unfair price—especially for something I use every day. Kagi: It’s what’s for Christmas!

– Lee Hutchinson

Philips Hue Bridge Pro – $99

Unlike Kagi, I’ve been using Philips Hue lights for a long, long time—13 years and counting, and most of those old first-gen bulbs are still operational. But the bridge, the Hue component that actually connects to your LAN, has long had an annoying problem: It can hook up to a max of about 50 Hue bulbs, and that’s it. (The reason has to do with cost-saving choices Philips made on the bridge design.)

Thirteen years has been enough for me to accumulate at least 50 Hue devices, so this limit has been problematic for me—but it’s a problem no more! After a decade and change, Philips has finally released an updated “Pro” bridge that handles far more Hue devices—and it comes in stylish black! The new bridge brings some new capabilities, too, but the big news is that new device limit—something long-time customers like me have spent years pining for. Now I can festoon my house with even more automatic lights!

– Lee Hutchinson

The Logitech MX Master 4 – $120

The Logitech MX Master 3S and the newer MX Master 4 remain two of the best productivity mice on the market. Both use an 8,000-DPI Darkfield sensor, the excellent MagSpeed electromagnetic scroll wheel, and Logitech’s deep customization stack. The 3S has been our long-standing recommendation, but the MX Master 4 brings a few quality-of-life improvements that may justify the upgrade. Most notably, it replaces the 3S’s soft-touch palm coating, which wears quickly and tends to attract grime, with more durable textured materials. The redesigned switches also make the 4 one of the quietest mice you can buy, with muted clicks and a near-silent scroll wheel.

A hand moves a mouse against a white background

Logitech MX Master 4, the mouse used by Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher. Credit: Logitech

The more ambitious addition is the new haptic system, meant to provide tactile feedback for shortcut triggers and app-specific “Actions Ring” menus. In practice, though, software support remains thin. Productivity apps haven’t yet embraced haptic signaling, and months after launch, the plugin ecosystem is still limited. The MX Master 4 is a well-executed refinement, but its headline feature is waiting for the software world to catch up.

– Ken Fisher

Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer glasses – $247

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses may look bulkier than a standard pair of Wayfarers, but the added hardware delivers a genuinely interesting glimpse at where mobile computing is headed. After spending time with them, it’s clear that eyewear will likely follow the same trajectory as smartwatches: once niche, now a viable surface for ambient computing. The multimodal AI features are impressive, and the built-in camera produces better-than-expected 1080p/30fps video, though low-light performance remains limited by the small sensor.

These are still early-stage devices with the usual growing pains, but they’re a compelling gift for early adopters who want a front-row seat to the future of wearable interfaces.

– Ken Fisher

Samsung T9 external SSD (2 TB) – $235

As I once again attempted to make the Sophie’s Choice of which Steam game to uninstall because I ran out of disk space, I realized that part of my problem is that I have two computers (a macOS laptop and a Windows desktop) and I’ve doubled up on storing certain things—like the absolutely enormous eXoDOS collection, for example—on both machines so I could access them regardless of where I was at.

The best thing I could do to help my constant space woes was to consolidate anything that I needed on both machines into an external drive I could share between them. I went with Samsung’s T9 external SSD, and so far, I’m happy with it. As planned, I now have a lot more breathing room on both computers.

– Samuel Axon

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

For the lazy techie: These are Ars staff’s last-minute holiday gift picks Read More »

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Physicists 3D-printed a Christmas tree of ice

3D printing, evaporative cooling, Physics, Science / /

Physicists at the University of Amsterdam came up with a really cool bit of Christmas decor: a miniature 3D-printed Christmas tree, a mere 8 centimeters tall, made of ice, without any refrigeration equipment or other freezing technology, and at minimal cost. The secret is evaporative cooling, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

Evaporative cooling is a well-known phenomenon; mammals use it to regulate body temperature. You can see it in your morning cup of hot coffee: the hotter atoms rise to the top of the magnetic trap and “jump out” as steam. It also plays a role (along with shock wave dynamics and various other factors) in the formation of “wine tears.” It’s a key step in creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

And evaporative cooling is also the main culprit behind the infamous “stall” that so frequently plagues aspiring BBQ pit masters eager to make a successful pork butt. The meat sweats as it cooks, releasing the moisture within, and that moisture evaporates and cools the meat, effectively canceling out the heat from the BBQ. That’s why a growing number of competitive pit masters wrap their meat in tinfoil after the first few hours (usually when the internal temperature hits 170° F).

Ice-printing methods usually rely on cryogenics or on cooled substrates. Per the authors, this is the first time evaporative cooling principles have been applied to 3D printing. The trick was to house the 3D printing inside a vacuum chamber using a jet nozzle as the printing head—something they discovered serendipitously when they were trying to get rid of air drag by spraying water in a vacuum chamber.  “The printer’s motion control guides the water jet layer-by-layer, building geometry on demand,” the authors wrote in a blog post for Nature, adding:

Physicists 3D-printed a Christmas tree of ice Read More »

openai’s-new-chatgpt-image-generator-makes-faking-photos-easy

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT image generator makes faking photos easy

AI, AI image generator, AI image generators, API, Biz & IT, chatgpt, Deepfakes, generative ai, Google, image synthesis, machine learning, multimodal AI, openai / /

For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that reduces the process to typing a sentence.

It’s not the first company to do so. While OpenAI had a conversational image-editing model in the works since GPT-4o in 2024, Google beat OpenAI to market in March with a public prototype, then refined it to a popular model called Nano Banana image model (and Nano Banana Pro). The enthusiastic response to Google’s image-editing model in the AI community got OpenAI’s attention.

OpenAI’s new GPT Image 1.5 is an AI image synthesis model that reportedly generates images up to four times faster than its predecessor and costs about 20 percent less through the API. The model rolled out to all ChatGPT users on Tuesday and represents another step toward making photorealistic image manipulation a casual process that requires no particular visual skills.

The

The “Galactic Queen of the Universe” added to a photo of a room with a sofa using GPT Image 1.5 in ChatGPT.

GPT Image 1.5 is notable because it’s a “native multimodal” image model, meaning image generation happens inside the same neural network that processes language prompts. (In contrast, DALL-E 3, an earlier OpenAI image generator previously built into ChatGPT, used a different technique called diffusion to generate images.)

This newer type of model, which we covered in more detail in March, treats images and text as the same kind of thing: chunks of data called “tokens” to be predicted, patterns to be completed. If you upload a photo of your dad and type “put him in a tuxedo at a wedding,” the model processes your words and the image pixels in a unified space, then outputs new pixels the same way it would output the next word in a sentence.

Using this technique, GPT Image 1.5 can more easily alter visual reality than earlier AI image models, changing someone’s pose or position, or rendering a scene from a slightly different angle, with varying degrees of success. It can also remove objects, change visual styles, adjust clothing, and refine specific areas while preserving facial likeness across successive edits. You can converse with the AI model about a photograph, refining and revising, the same way you might workshop a draft of an email in ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT image generator makes faking photos easy Read More »

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Man sues cops who jailed him for 37 days for trolling a Charlie Kirk vigil

censorship, charlie kirk, Donald Trump, false arrest, meme, Policy, social media censorship / /

While there’s no evidence of anyone interpreting the meme as a violent threat to school kids, there was a “national uproar” when Bushart’s story started spreading online, his complaint noted. Bushart credits media attention for helping to secure his release. The very next day after a local news station pressed Weems in a TV interview to admit he knew the meme wasn’t referencing his county’s high school and confirm that no one ever asked Bushart to clarify his online remarks, charges were dropped, and Bushart was set free.

Morrow and Weems have been sued in their personal capacities and could “be on the hook for monetary damages,” a press release from Bushart’s legal team at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) said. Perry County, Tennessee, is also a defendant since it’s liable for unconstitutional acts of its sheriffs.

Perry County officials did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Bushart suffered “humiliating” arrest

For Bushart, the arrest has shaken up his life. As the primary breadwinner, he’s worried about how he will support himself and his wife after losing his job while in jail. The arrest was particularly “humiliating,” his complaint said, “given his former role as a law enforcement officer.” And despite his release, fear of arrest has chilled his speech, impacting how he expresses his views online.

“I spent over three decades in law enforcement, and have the utmost respect for the law,” Bushart said. “But I also know my rights, and I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship.”

Bushart is seeking punitive damages, alleging that cops acted “willfully and maliciously” to omit information from his arrest affidavit that would’ve prevented his detention. One of his lawyers, FIRE senior attorney Adam Steinbaugh, said that a win would protect all social media meme posters from police censorship.

“If police can come to your door in the middle of the night and put you behind bars based on nothing more than an entirely false and contrived interpretation of a Facebook post, no one’s First Amendment rights are safe,” Steinbaugh said.

Man sues cops who jailed him for 37 days for trolling a Charlie Kirk vigil Read More »

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Donut Lab’s hub motor meets WATT’s battery to create new EV skateboard

Cars, Donut labs, Passenger and Commercial EV Skateboard, WATT Electric Vehicle Company / /

“The integration of Donut Lab’s revolutionary in-wheel motor technology represents a significant leap for what PACES can offer the automotive world,” said Neil Yates, CEO of WATT Electric Vehicles. “Its motors, inverter, and software systems, perfectly complement our lightweight platform philosophy. The direct, fine control of the individual wheel speeds brings an agility and that is perfectly complemented by the low mass and inertia of our chassis technology. This skateboard can produce vehicles that will set new benchmarks for EV handling.”

A hub motor in a wheel

A look at the hub motor in situ. Credit: Donut Lab

“WATT EV’s PACES platform provides the perfect canvas to showcase the full potential of our advanced motor technology,” said Marko Lehtimäki, CEO of Donut Lab. “The exceptional low mass of PACES allows our high-torque, high-power-density in-wheel motors to truly shine, delivering a driving experience that would be impossible with heavier platforms. When you combine our direct-drive precision control with WATT’s lightweight engineering expertise, you create something genuinely transformative, a vehicle architecture that’s lighter, more efficient, more powerful, and infinitely more engaging to drive.”

It almost makes me wish I were going to CES in a few weeks to check it out.

Donut Lab’s hub motor meets WATT’s battery to create new EV skateboard Read More »

google-releases-gemini-3-flash,-promising-improved-intelligence-and-efficiency

Google releases Gemini 3 Flash, promising improved intelligence and efficiency

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Gemini 3, generative ai, Google, search / /

Google began its transition to Gemini 3 a few weeks ago with the launch of the Pro model, and the arrival of Gemini 3 Flash kicks it into high gear. The new, faster Gemini 3 model is coming to the Gemini app and search, and developers will be able to access it immediately via the Gemini API, Vertex AI, AI Studio, and Antigravity. Google’s bigger gen AI model is also picking up steam, with both Gemini 3 Pro and its image component (Nano Banana Pro) expanding in search.

This may come as a shock, but Google says Gemini 3 Flash is faster and more capable than its previous base model. As usual, Google has a raft of benchmark numbers that show modest improvements for the new model. It bests the old 2.5 Flash in basic academic and reasoning tests like GPQA Diamond and MMMU Pro (where it even beats 3 Pro). It gets a larger boost in Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), which tests advanced domain-specific knowledge. Gemini 3 Flash has tripled the old models’ score in HLE, landing at 33.7 percent without tool use. That’s just a few points behind the Gemini 3 Pro model.

Gemini HLE test

Credit: Google

Google is talking up Gemini 3 Flash’s coding skills, and the provided benchmarks seem to back that talk up. Over the past year, Google has mostly pushed its Pro models as the best for generating code, but 3 Flash has done a lot of catching up. In the popular SWE-Bench Verified test, Gemini 3 Flash has gained almost 20 points on the 2.5 branch.

The new model is also a lot less likely to get general-knowledge questions wrong. In the Simple QA Verified test, Gemini 3 Flash scored 68.7 percent, which is only a little below Gemini 3 Pro. The last Flash model scored just 28.1 percent on that test. At least as far as the evaluation scores go, Gemini 3 Flash performs much closer to Google’s Pro model versus the older 2.5 family. At the same time, it’s considerably more efficient, according to Google.

One of Gemini 3 Pro’s defining advances was its ability to generate interactive simulations and multimodal content. Gemini 3 Flash reportedly retains that underlying capability. Gemini 3 Flash offers better performance than Gemini 2.5 Pro did, but it runs workloads three times faster. It’s also a lot cheaper than the Pro models if you’re paying per token. One million input tokens for 3 Flash will run devs $0.50, and a million output tokens will cost $3. However, that’s an increase compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash input and output at $0.30 and $2.50, respectively. The Pro model’s tokens are $2 (1M input) and $12 (1M output).

Google releases Gemini 3 Flash, promising improved intelligence and efficiency Read More »