Month: August 2022

Enlarge / We can't show you Google's likely new Nest Wifi router because it's confidential. But "white" and "spherical" are pretty good bets. (credit: Google (video still))

Google has a new device awaiting approval at the FCC, and all signs point to it being an updated Nest Wifi router that not only addresses the notable lack of Wi-Fi 6 on its last model but leapfrogs ahead to Wi-Fi 6E.

In FCC documents made available yesterday, Google asked the FCC to keep confidential its schematics and operational details, including an "Internal Proprietary Antenna Solution consisting of 6 antennas." As pointed out by Android Police, the fillings also show support for the 6 GHz frequencies of Wi-Fi 6E. There are also the standard 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, Bluetooth Low-Energy, and the 2.4 GHz frequencies that smart home connection standard Thread relies upon.

The model number—A4R-G6ZUC—is akin to other Nest products, and 9to5Google says it has confirmed that this is the number for the next Nest Wifi router.

Enlarge / Don't worry, there are English legends, too. (credit: Drop)

Middle-earth has seen more than its share of trials and challenges, but perhaps none more pressing today than a lack of mechanical keyboards that any of its various peoples can actually read. For ages, everyone from elves to dwarves had to make do with keyboards carrying legends of unknown languages. Today, keyboard and audio brand Drop released two prebuilt mechanical keyboards to rule them all—or at least speakers of Elvish and Dwarvish.

The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord of the Rings licensing, Drop said in its announcement today. The keyboards build on Drop's November release of The Lord of the Rings keycap sets, also written in Elvish and Dwarvish, and follow Drop's Lord of the Rings artisan keycaps made from resin.

Drop's new prebuilt keyboards target people who want a keyboard J.R.R. Tolkien would be proud of but don't necessarily want to go on a Tolkien-style epic journey to build their own.

Enlarge / Technologists think that allowing cars to communicate with each other could eradicate traffic collisions. (credit: metamorworks/Getty Images)

The long-running saga of V2X (vehicle to everything), a system that uses part of the wireless spectrum to allow vehicles to communicate with our road infrastructure and each other, appears to finally be over. On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the Federal Communications Commission can go through with its plan to free up part of the spectrum previously set aside for vehicles and infrastructure to talk to each other. Instead, that bandwidth will be turned over to Wi-Fi instead.

The FCC set aside the 5.9 GHz band for V2X back in 1999. A communications protocol that vehicles could use to alert each other to dangers sounded like a great idea at the time, and the plan was to use dedicated short-range radio communication (DSRC) wireless to power the system.

Originally, the technology was meant to be fitted just to vehicles, but engineers got ambitious and decided that instead of just V2V, vehicles should be able to talk to things like traffic lights as well. This would lead us to a traffic utopia, where congestion and crashes are things of the past. There was even thought given to making pedestrians dependent on DSRC to avoid being flattened by speeding cars.