Another day, another NYT Connections puzzle to tackle. In order to win, you need to put all sixteen words into the proper categories, and the words themselves won't make that easy on you. The rules of Connections might be simple, but completing this puzzle never is.

Assassin's Creed Shadows features two important point systems within its skill tree mechanic. The first, Mastery Points, is a typical skill point earned through experience. The second point system is based around Knowledge tiers, which dictate the skills that are currently available to unlock. There are a variety of ways to get Knowledge Points, but one of the most common is through the finding of Lost Pages at temples. In this guide, we'll be exploring where to find all three Lost Pages at the Tennouji Temple inAssassin's Creed Shadows.

Riot Games has used the League of Legends client to host other projects before, like new game modes, summer events, and associated visual novels. Its a fun way to interact with the universe beyond just playing League of Legends. For instance, Arcane was accompanied by a point-and-click adventure game in the League client called Jinx Fixes Everything. On March 19, Riot added a new game to the client called Demons Hand, and its unlike anything Ive ever seen from Riot before although it does bring the surreal, twisting card game Inscryption to mind.Demons Hand is diegetically set in the world of League of Legends, specifically on the ancient Noxian plains. A mysterious, bandaged man sits across from me at the card table, and feeds me morsels of lore on the conquest of Sahn-Uzal, the demon Atakhan, and my own, mysterious identity. I dont know who I am, but after I beat the first boss of Demons Hand, I look down at my hands as they sprout wicked claws and clench with a hidden fury.This strange, unsettling narrative is backed up by the mechanics of the card game, which draw a lot from poker. As someone who spent far too much time recently on Balatro, I took to Demons Hand fairly easily. The game itself is stylish; I play with painted, wooden slabs, each showing the face of Noxian soldiers or creatures. Low horns and drums punctuate the action, making each turn feel important and ominous. My masked, mysterious guide sits with his back to the sun, which slowly warps and shifts along with my body. Its a really cool little game, though a short one my first playthrough lasted about 20 minutes, and I cant see myself doing more than one or two more runs.It was surprising to see an Inscryption-like narrative experience in my League of Legends client, but Im certainly not complaining. League and Demons Hand are both free-to-play, and its worth giving this weird experiment a spin if youre into card game roguelikes and League lore.

Assassins Creed Shadows is the latest Assassins Creed game to take place in a vast, beautiful world so large that it can be overwhelming. For grand open-world RPGs like this, making sure the map screen is legible and pleasant to look at is a must. But just as important in a game this sprawling is the objectives screen, where you keep track of the main story tasks and the dozens of side quests that become available as you talk to NPCs and explore playable areas. Shadows objectives menu is one of my favorites so far: It continues on the franchises recent iterations on quest maps, creating one thats easy to navigate and that helps me feel more connected to the games world and story.Shadows objectives screen is an improvement on an idea the franchise toyed with and expanded on in Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage: Its laid out a bit like a family tree, with different areas of the screen representing different quest groupings, areas of the world, and people youre helping.While many games use a hidden branching objective system (where you have to complete one or multiple tasks before getting to the real one), Shadows shows it, being upfront about most tasks taking multiple steps. Because every task is laid out with a visual connection to a person or region, its a far better representation of how far you are in the game than the usual approach of a list of greyed-out tasks youve completed.And because different areas of the objectives screen portray different parts of the game or its world, as you progress, it reflects your own priorities and what youve spent your time on in a way I havent really seen before in a game. Tasks are sorted by what theyre relevant to, not the skill level required to complete the task. In my file, I prioritized assassination missions, which have are many options. So I have a lot more red Xs on my objective screen than some of my coworkers whove spent similar amounts of time in the game, but focused their attention elsewhere.I bounced off of Valhalla and didnt try Odyssey or Mirage, so Shadows is my first open-world RPG with an objective screen laid out like this. Ive really taken to it: It looks cool and not overcrowded, but it also makes me feel more connected to the world and my role in it as a player, because my tasks arent faceless to-do lists in a nondescript menu. I am doing the things Im doing in Shadows for someone specific, or to get to someone specific.My co-workers who have played more of the recent releases in the franchise agree that Shadows version of this screen is the most polished yet. There are some tired RPG mechanics in Shadows beautiful world, but the franchise keeps killing it with new ways to display your objectives. And it all makes your actions as a player truly feel like theyre making a difference in the game.

When Amazon stopped letting us download copies of our Kindle books last month, I began looking for ways to preserve e-books and audiobooks that I've paid for. Buying from Amazon really limits those options thanks to DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is designed to prevent piracy, but ends up having far bigger consequences on digital goods like e-books.Eliminating DRM effectively removes Amazon's control over what you do with your e-books. If Amazon were to go DRM-free, you'd be able read Kindle e-books on any e-book reader or app that you like. Amazon wouldn't be able to easily track your reading habits and you'd be free to keep an offline backup of all of your purchased content.That's what makes the idea of bypassing DRM appealing to so many. Given the choice, I'd love to buy audiobooks on Audible and use apps such as Bound or Prologue to listen to them. I think these apps are superior audiobook players and are better at library management than Audible's apps. It'd also be a chance for me to escape Amazon's ability to track my listening habits. Sadly, those options don't exist today.What Amazon's terms of service allow you to doOnce you pay for an e-book on Amazon, it has been licensed, not sold to you, according to the company's terms of service. This gives the company a lot of leeway in deciding what you do with a purchased e-book. The terms of service explicitly forbid bypassing the DRM and reading it on devices or apps that Kindle doesn't officially support.This isn't just an Amazon problem. Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University, told me via email that buying a book through big tech doesn't grant you ownership of your copy. "You are not in charge of how you access or read that [e-book]. It is like the difference between Spotify playlists and having a home music library. You pay money to own the [e-book], but because Amazon owns everything about the delivery pipeline and the Kindle necessary to read the purchase, you don't get to exert any choice."Similarly, Audible classifies a sale as the purchase of a license, and goes on to say that you should download the audiobook immediately after purchasing, as the company cannot guarantee that content will be available to redownload in the future. To make matters worse, Amazon forbids you from bypassing DRM on the audiobook files."The more we buy into these closed garden ecosystems, the fewer choices we havethey can and do use this power to subdue alternatives, eliminate competition, and maintain monopoly, among other things," Vertesi told me. She runs Opt Out Project, a blog dedicated to helping people find alternatives to products and services made by big tech firms.The legalities involved in bypassing DRMBypassing DRM is illegal in the US, thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), but it may be legal in other regions. The DMCA, among other things, makes it difficult to create a legal backup of the digital media you own. I reached out to Cory Doctorow, an author and vocal DRM critic, to learn more about this subject.In an email, he explained the complexities involved in understanding where the boundary lies here. "It isn't a copyright infringement to move a book from one device you own to another ([aka 'format shifting']). However, in 1998, the US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which created a new kind of copyrighta copyright that protects DRM itself," Doctorow wrote. "Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony (punishable by a [five]-year prison sentence and a [$500,000] fine) to give someone a "circumvention device" that defeats an "access control" for a copyrighted work. This law applies even if you don't violate copyright."Say I tell you that you have my permission to move a book I wrote (and am thus the copyright holder for) from your Kindle to another device. If the Kindle book has DRM, you're still not allowed to move it. The fact that I am the copyright holder has no impact on whether Amazona company that didn't create or invest in my bookcan prevent you from moving that book outside of its walled garden...In fact, if I supply you with a tool to remove DRM (like some versions of Calibre), then I commit a felony and Amazon can have me sent to prison for five years for giving you a tool to move my book from the Kindle app to a rival app like Kobo," he wrote.When you download a Kindle e-book, it's available in the AZW format, and audiobooks from Audible use the proprietary AAX format. If you download these to your computer, that is format shifting, but it may be illegal if you had to circumvent DRM to do it. Doctorow added, "that means that even though copyright law says you can format shift your books, music, videos, games, [etc.], DMCA 1201 (a "paracopyright law") makes this an imprisonable felony if you have to break DRM first."The tools that let you bypass DRM The Calibre app allows you to read and manage DRM-free e-books you've purchased. Credit: Pranay Parab Calibre offers a way to take your e-books out of digital walled gardens. It lets you download purchased books off your Kindle, convert those to any format you like, and to read them on any app or device. For Audible, that tool is Libation, a free and open-source app that backs up your audiobook library.I contacted Robert McRackan, the developer of Libation, to understand how the app works, and why it was developed. McRackan wrote, "what apps like Libation do is a service to the community that I believe in. It's also in [direct] contradiction to Audible's terms of service" Free tools like these continue to work only because the developers are able to dedicate time to keeping them up-to-date, and because Amazon hasn't decided to go after them. If that changes, it could be game over for these apps.I can't offer guidance on downloading these apps and using them to remove DRM for your e-books. But they do exist, and, as of this article, they appear to work. There's a world beyond Amazon for digital booksIf you're truly interested in owning your digital media, you should consider looking beyond Amazon for digital book purchases. There are many alternatives to the Kindle store and to Audible, and some of them offer DRM-free e-books and audiobooks. When I asked Vertesi and Doctorow about DRM-free storefronts for books, they pointed me to Bookshop.org (which has DRM-free options for e-books), Tor Books (which is entirely DRM-free) and Libro.fm (for DRM-free audiobooks). While Libro.fm is totally DRM-free and has a collection that's good enough to rival that of Audible, the picture outside of Amazon isn't always rosy. Doctorow wrote, "Even great [e-book] stores like Bookshop.org are pressured by the big publishers to put DRM on most of the books they sell." Similarly, Audible is known to push authors into signing deals that offer better royalties if they keep their audiobooks exclusive to the service. In case your favorite book is a part of such a deal, your only choice is either buy it through Audible, or try to purchase a DRM-free e-book and use text-to-speech tools to have an AI-generated voice read it to you. This is a hacky way to convert any book into an audiobook, and it doesn't come anywhere close to the skills of a great narrator, but it's a DRM-free option. If your favorite e-book is an Amazon exclusive, you can get it via your local library. Of course, you could always buy it physically: Paper is DRM-free, after all. However, without changing the DMCA, we can't expect to see real, lasting change in this space. Doctorow said as much to me: "What we really need to do is get rid of DMCA 1201, that law that makes it a crime to format shift your media...it's the same law that stops farmers from fixing their tractors, blocks independent mechanics from fixing your car, stops rivals from setting up alternative app stores for phones and games consoles...this law is a menace!"

Leftovers can be challenging. Occasionally, youll have a meal so good that you actually look forward to scarfing it down cold the next day, but that's not always the case. I usually have bits and bobs of leftoversthings I didn't care for in the first place, or stray ingredients I cant seem to get rid of. My curse however, is that I hate (hate!) tossing edible food. So over the years, Ive gotten better at reworking leftovers, and you can too. Here are my favorite ways to repurpose leftovers into incredible new meals.Recipes for using leftoversI run into two types of leftovers: leftover meals and leftover single ingredients. Lets start with leftover meals. This section is how I like to transform prior dinners or luncheslike sausage and peppers or chicken salad to give them a new life.Leftovers as pizza toppings Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Do I have a borderline problem with eating personal pizzas? Whos to say. But that continual experience has given me the confidence to say leftovers make for great pizza toppings. If pizzerias can put chopped chicken cutlets and penne on their pizza, so can you. Heres how I like to pizza my leftovers. All you need is a ball of thawed pizza dough from the grocery store and a bit of cheese to act as your glue.Egg roll emWhat do the stray container of leftover brisket, the green curry chicken from three days ago, and the sausage and peppers from Sunday have in common? Theyd all be great with a crispy egg roll shell wrapped around them. Egg rolling your leftovers is extremely simple with a pack of premade wrappers that you can buy from the refrigerated aisle of your grocery store. Once youve secured your delicious leftovers in the center, deep fry or air fry them for a wonderful lunch or dinner.Stack leftovers into a lasagnaIt helps to think of leftover food as a component that needs a new vehicle to carry it, like pizza dough or an egg roll wrapper. Pasta noodles are a versatile main ingredient too. While you could toss your leftovers with spaghetti, turning it all into a stacked lasagna is more impressive, and personally I think its more appetizing. While Im using Thanksgiving leftovers here, you certainly arent limited to that. Boil the pasta noodles and use them to sandwich each layer of leftovers, like thinly sliced meatloaf, creamed spinach, or vegan steamed dumplings. (Its okay to layer carbs with carbs.)Make a delightful brunch casserole Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Casseroles are always a wondrous mish-mash of ingredients. What makes them sliceable is the addition of some sort of flavorful binder, like eggs or cheese. I added a few eggs, a torn up English muffin, and shredded cheddar to the leftovers of my seven-layer dip recipe and baked it for about 20 minutes at 350F to make this absolutely scrumptious casserole. You can casserole anything from leftover waffles to rice and beans with this method.Risotto your leftoversI showed you how to fake risotto with leftover rice, but you can also throw your leftovers into risotto. Risotto is another one of those helpful carbs that act as a vehicle for your once-fresh food. Though this recipe is geared toward Thanksgiving leftovers, the concept stands for any leftover protein and veg. Make your risotto as usual and just after you ladle in the last bit of stock, drop in your chopped leftovers to warm up in the pot.Build a satisfying sandwichSandwiches are like old episodes of your favorite showits your back-up when you dont know what to watch (or eat, in this case). A leftovers sandwich is the solution when you cant figure out what to do with that massive casserole from your cousins brunch party. Since leftovers can be irregularly shaped (as opposed to sliced deli meats), I suggest grabbing large slices of bread and potentially leaving them untoasted. Then the soft texture can hug and hold onto the fillings better. Here are some ways you can tweak a sandwich to make it even more delightful.Make the best oatmeal of your life Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann For the longest time, I thought I hated oatmeal. It turns out, I was just not adding enough fun stuff to it. Oats are bland, which makes them a terrible main event, but a great supporting act for other bolder ingredients. Your leftover dishes from the week are already cooked and full of flavor. Simply make a batch of savory oatmeal and nestle your chicken parmesan, Thai gaeng keow-wan curry, or vegetable korma into the bowl with it. Here's my recipe for spicy, savory oatmeal with herbs and kimchi. Recipes for common leftover ingredientsThis section is devoted to my most common leftover ingredients. These are things that maybe havent made it into a full meal yetlike raw celery or cooked leftover ricebut theyre living their last moments in my fridge. Ill lean on these recipes to keep them from becoming trash.The many iterations of leftover rice Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann There was a year or two that I would order Chinese food take-out frequently, and end up with tubs of extra rice stacked up in my freezer. A day of reckoning would come once a month when I would have to figure something out, or Id have no freezer space. So I have more than one way to use up leftover rice. This crispy rice cake, this fake risotto, and this comforting rice salad are all good to have in mind.The problem with celeryCelery is one of those ingredients that will haunt your crisper drawer for 100 years. Im not even exaggerating, it actually grows more stalks while it's in there. Its only charm is how crunchy it is, so I wouldnt recommend egg rolling it or putting it on pizza. My solution for unused stalks is to make this salad which relies on thin, diagonal slices to maintain crunch but reduce stringiness. The vinaigrette adds much needed flavor, the Thai chili wakes up your palate, and the hard boiled eggs create a more satiating dish.Leftover pie crustWhether it's store-bought pie crust sitting in your freezer or you never got around to using the other half of that double-crust pie dough recipe, there's no reason to let that flaky pastry go to waste. Use it to make a filling quiche and mix in any leftover vegetables you might have in the fridge. Avoiding eggs to save money? That's fine, use this recipe to make a lazy pot pie with your leftover crust and a can of creamy chicken soup.Extra hard boiled eggs Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Boiled eggs make a great on-the-run snack, so Ill often cook up a bunch at the beginning of the week and keep them in the fridge. But some weeks will wrap up and Ill have a few that I never got to. Unless I feel like crushing three or four cold eggs, so instead Ill make a yam kai dao salad. Shallow frying the hard-cooked eggs give them an appealing crispy-chewy exterior and the lime and fish sauce dressing creates a flavor profile youll look forward to eating again with next weeks eggs.Cold plain pastaI find it infuriating that the proper serving of dry pasta is two ounces. I would like to eat a pound of it but alas, I have been shamed by society, so Ill begrudgingly put the supposed extra in a container for the next day. With this clever trick, I now look forward to leftover pasta. This works for both plain boiled pasta or pasta that has a light coating of sauce. Add butter to a frying pan and tip the cold carbs into the melted butter. Stir and loosen the pasta as it warms up and then let it fry so it gets crispy and brown on the bottom. Serve it immediately to enjoy the new crunchy-soft texture of your stir-fry-revived pasta.That half-can of coconut milkKind of like the cup of pured pumpkin I didnt need for a recipe, Ill occasionally end up with an unused portion of coconut milk in my fridge. I dont particularly like it in my coffee, but that flavorful, fatty gift from nature cannot be wasted. Although you can freeze it, I decided the best way to use it up would be to capitalize on its inherent richness and make it into a luxurious coconut pudding for one. This simple recipe uses a cherry compote to top it off but you could substitute another fruit, jam, or go without and let the silky coconut speak for itself.

Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast has laid off 30 people who built Sigil, its recently released virtual tabletop experience, Polygon reports. The app allows Dungeons & Dragons players to build virtual, 3D game boards, complete with miniatures and dice, so they can play the classic tabletop roleplaying game remotely.News of the layoffs were first shared on March 18 in a LinkedIn post from Andy Collins, the design lead on Sigil. "Today, approximately 30 talented developers (90 percent of the team) were laid off from the Sigil (virtual tabletop) team at Wizards of the Coast, including yours truly," Collins wrote. "I wish my former colleagues success in their future endeavors. I'll also be pulling for the crew left behind who'll do their best to keep improving and iterating the experience we shipped last month."The layoffs leave Sigil with a skeleton crew of three people to support the app, Rascal reports. Sigil launched in early access on February 28, 2025 as a perk for subscribers to D&D Beyond, and early reviews found it to be both limited and a little broken.The problems may have started even earlier, though, according to at least one Wizards of the Coast employee Rascal spoke to. Management at Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards of the Coast, were reportedly uninterested and "constantly moving goalposts." There may have also been a fundamental misunderstanding over what Sigil was: Hasbro didn't know the difference between a video game and the VTT (virtual tabletop) app it ultimately got.Sigil remains live and will continue to be a perk of paying for a D&D Beyond subscription, Wizards of the Coast's tool for playing Dungeons & Dragons virtually.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/hasbro-laid-off-the-team-behind-its-virtual-tabletop-app-only-weeks-after-it-was-released-214024876.html?src=rss

Boston Dynamics has treated us to a lot of impressive videos over the years and the company is back today with the latest example of its robotics mastery. In the clip above, its Atlas robot demonstrates several types of full-body movement, starting with a walk and advancing to a cartwheel and even a spot of break dancing. The different actions were developed using reinforcement learning that used motion capture and animation as source materials. At this rate, our future robot overlords will be able to out-dance and out-tumble us humans as well as out-think us one day.The video is part of Boston Dynamics' research with the Robotics and AI Institute, but it has multiple partners aiding its work. For instance, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang touched on the company's GR00T model for robotics during the GTC 2025 keynote earlier this week. Yesterday, Boston Dynamics announced that it is deepening its collaboration with the company focused on AI in robotics. It is using NVIDIA's Jetson Thor computing platform to run "complex, multimodal AI models that work seamlessly with Boston Dynamics whole-body and manipulation controllers."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/watch-the-atlas-robot-bust-a-move-in-boston-dynamics-latest-video-211329951.html?src=rss

Elecoms 9000 mAh sodium-ion battery is bulkier and pricier but safer, longer-lasting, and eco-friendly, eliminating rare metals and reducing fire risks.

Google has pushed back the Pixel 9as launch date to address a strange problem.