Month: June 2023

Enlarge / Abandon all hope, ye who choose a password here. (credit: Neal.fun/Neal Agarwal)

I once worked at a small-town newspaper, part of a micro-chain of four publications. There was one young guy who oversaw "IT" for all four sites, and he occasionally tried to impose IT-like rules, like making us change our publication software passwords every few weeks. Did "password1234" protect our ink-stained souls, whereas "password123" would have meant doom? Who can say?

I chafed at this occasional performative security. In a fit of pique, I decided my rotating password scheme would be the IT manager's license plate, followed by whatever I had for lunch that day. I thought myself quite clever, even if, a few months later, I forgot I had typed in "turkeyhoagie" instead of "turkeysub" earlier that new-password day, and I had to call said IT manager for a reset. I have no idea if he saw my password before he provided the replacement. I still felt clever, even in defeat.

"Clever, yet defeated" came rushing back to me as I marched through The Password Game, a web-based text box of tears from Neal Agarwal. The game has been trending its way through social media since its official release yesterday, and understandably so. We only get so many of these "Pure enjoyment on the web" moments each year, so I recommend you avail yourself of it as soon as you can.

Enlarge / Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11, which not-confusingly-at-all feature 13th-generation Intel Core processors. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon has long been one of our favorite ultrabook designs, combining a generous array of ports, a nice keyboard and trackpad, and a larger-than-typical 14-inch screen into a thin-and-light package.

Last year's Gen 10 iteration had a major flaw, though—a big step down in battery life, at least partially attributable to a more power-hungry 12th-generation Intel processor. (Yes, before we get any further, Lenovo's ThinkPad generational designations don't align with Intel's processor designation, so a Gen 10 ThinkPad uses a 12th-gen Intel CPU, and the Gen 11 ThinkPad uses a 13th-gen CPU.)

This year's Gen 11 X1 Carbon refresh mainly has one job: retain all the good stuff about last year's refresh and the X1 Carbon lineup generally but get the battery life closer to where it was before. The Gen 11 partially does that job. That means the performance gains from last year are negligible (and sometimes even a small step backward). It's an acceptable sacrifice for improved battery life, and the X1 Carbon is still one of the best all-around portable laptops you can buy. It's just that the Gen 11 model still can't quite manage to feel like an across-the-board upgrade from the Gen 9 X1 Carbon from two years ago.

Enlarge / A selection of Nintendo consoles that can not play software designed for the previous Nintendo console... (credit: Getty Images)

As we've gotten further from the Switch's early 2017 release, there has been a lot of chatter and speculation about the system's inevitable successor. And among Switch owners, there's plenty of concern over whether an upcoming "Switch 2" will be backward compatible with the thousands of games already available on the current Switch.

For now, Nintendo is remaining frustratingly vague on that key question. In an investor Q&A (partially translated by Twitter user Cheesemeister), Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said that "while our company is always considering various specs for future hardware, I will refrain from making specific comments about future hardware here... Our company wants to continue offering unique ways to play with its integrated hardware and software business, so please look forward to it."

It's hard to read too much into that non-answer, considering that Nintendo hasn't formally announced any details about its next console hardware yet. Later in that same Q&A, though, Furukawa noted that "as for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next-generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account."