As I sit here, chomping away at my air-fried mac and cheese nuggets, the word that keeps popping into my head is “Cheez-Its.” That’s because the crisp coating paired with the concentrated flavor of cheddar is a dead-on match. I don’t think I’ve ever made a lazier or more gratifying snack. Consider this an early Air Fryday present.

Macaroni and cheese, much like potatoes au gratin or oatmeal, is full of starch. When chilled, the starches in these foods will thicken and set in a process called retrogradation. That’s why leftover pasta is always so stiff. Pair those cold gelatinized starches with saturated fat, like that in melted cheese, and you’ve got a solid brick. You could put a lot of work into scooping the macaroni into balls, coating them with bread crumbs, and deep frying them to make fried mac and cheese balls. Or you can do it my way. This distinctly lazier way requires no breading, but provides just as much crunch.

How to make lazy mac & cheese bites

This works really well if you baked your mac and cheese in a casserole dish because it’s already densely stacked, however if your mac and cheese was refrigerated in a bowl, that’s absolutely fine. The shape doesn’t really matter too much once you cut them into pieces. 

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Remove the entire lump of mac and cheese from its container and onto a cutting board. Use a sharp knife or serrated blade to slice the macaroni into 1-inch slabs. Turn the slabs and cut them again into 1-inch thick sticks, then decide if you want to cut them again into shorter sticks, or even into cubes. Scatter them into a preheated 400°F air fryer on the “air fry” setting, with at least a half-inch of space between them so they don’t melt together. Air fry the cubes for eight minutes, and sticks for 10 minutes, or until crisp and well browned on the corners. Cool the mac and cheese nuggets on a wire rack for a few minutes before devouring. 

Products to consider:

• Ninja 4-quart Air Fryer

• Instant 4-quart Air Fryer Oven

• Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer

These bites brown beautifully, and since they’re already loaded with cheese from the original recipe, you don’t have to add a single thing to get a crisp frico-like outer coating. Even the exposed pasta edges crisp-up nicely. If you used a good deal of cheddar in your mix, or topped a baked mac with cheddar, then you’ll get the Cheez-It flavor I’m talking about. 

The bites are crusty on the outside, but the interior is tender and soft. It’s a huge reward for doing almost no work. These would be great as a party hors d’oeuvres since they’re easily hand-held. I like my mac and cheese bites plain, but I wouldn’t fault you for serving these at a party with a bowl of french onion dip.

In which I lose my first Connections game ever. Join me for this historic moment and learn from my mistakes. If you’re looking for the Connections answer for Thursday, December 7, 2023, read on—I’ll share some clues, tips, and strategies, and finally the solutions to all four categories. Along the way, I’ll explain the meanings of the trickier words and we’ll learn how everything fits together. Beware, there are spoilers below for December 7, NYT Connections #179! Read on if you want some hints (and then the answer) to today’s Connections game. 

If you want an easy way to come back to our Connections hints every day, bookmark this page. You can also find our past hints there as well, in case you want to know what you missed in a previous puzzle.

Below, I’ll give you some oblique hints at today’s Connections answers. And farther down the page, I’ll reveal the themes and the answers. Scroll slowly and take just the hints you need!

Credit: Connections/NYT

Does today’s Connections game require any special knowledge?

Do you know what a radiotelephonic spelling alphabet is? Good, you’re all set. If you watch TV, that will help, too.

Hints for the themes in today’s Connections puzzle

Here are some spoiler-free hints for the groupings in today’s Connections:

• Yellow category – These are abbreviations. (I won’t say of what, though.)

• Green category – Watching TV.

• Blue category – Spelling words.

• Purple category – Doubled up.

Does today’s Connections game involve any wordplay?

Yes. There are abbreviations, code words, and words that can be repeated. Good luck.

Ready to hear the answers? Keep scrolling if you want a little more help.

BEWARE: Spoilers follow for today’s Connections puzzle!

We’re about to give away some of the answers. Scroll slowly if you don’t want the whole thing spoiled. (The full solution is a bit further down.)

What are the ambiguous words in today’s Connections?

• ALFA can refer to the car maker (as in the ALFA ROMEO) or it can be the letter A in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Browse that list and see if any others look familiar, hint hint.

• HI is how you say hello. It’s also what you’d need to write on a postcard to mail it to Hawaii. 

• E is a letter. It’s also a television channel about entertainment. (And it’s a party drug, but that’s not important today.)

What are the categories in today’s Connections?

• Yellow: STATE ABBREVIATIONS

• Green: CABLE CHANNELS

• Blue: IN THE NATO ALPHABET

• Purple: ____-____

DOUBLE BEWARE: THE SOLUTION IS BELOW

Ready to learn the answers to today’s Connections puzzle? I give them all away below.

What are the yellow words in today’s Connections?

The yellow grouping is considered to be the most straightforward. The theme for today’s yellow group is STATE ABBREVIATIONS and the words are: HI, LA, MA, OK.

What are the green words in today’s Connections?

The green grouping is supposed to be the second-easiest. The theme for today’s green category is CABLE CHANNELS and the words are: BET, E, HALLMARK, USA.

What are the blue words in today’s Connections?

The blue grouping is the second-hardest. The theme for today’s blue category is IN THE NATO ALPHABET and the words are: ALFA, BRAVO, ROMEO, TANGO.

What are the purple words in today’s Connections?

The purple grouping is considered to be the hardest. The theme for today’s purple category is ____-____ and the words are: BOO, POM, TOM, YO.

How I solved today’s Connections

OK, I know they are trying to trick me, with ALFA/BET and YO/LA/TANGO, among other cutesy setups. (The band, by the way, is Yo La Tengo. Nice try, Connections.) ALFA would have to be ALFA/ROMEO, the car, right? But then I remember that the alphabet used by pilots and air traffic control is designed to be readable and pronounceable by people in multiple languages, and they sometimes spell the word for letter A–Alpha–as ALFA. BRAVO, ROMEO, and TANGO are also in that alphabet. 🟦 (This is one of the random things I memorized as a child, for some reason: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel, india, kilo, lima…)

Now I feel very smart, yet I have no clue what to make of the rest. Hmm…BET and E are television channels; could they go with HALLMARK and USA? They do. 🟩 

After several more minutes of staring at the board, I think of MA-MA and BOO-BOO, children’s words. How about YO-YO and POM-POM? I’m one away. I swap POM for LA, and I’m getting colder. I make three more random guesses, and finally admit defeat. This is the first Connections game I have ever lost. TOM-TOM should have been in that group; MA-MA was not. And the rest were state abbreviations. 

Connections 
Puzzle #179
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟨🟪
🟪🟨🟨🟪
🟨🟪🟨🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟪

How to play Connections

I have a full guide to playing Connections, but here’s a refresher on the rules:

First, find the Connections game either on the New York Times website or in their Crossword app. You’ll see a game board with 16 tiles, each with one word or phrase. Your job is to select a group of four tiles that have something in common. Often they are all the same type of thing (for example: RAIN, SLEET, HAIL, and SNOW are all types of wet weather) but sometimes there is wordplay involved (for example, BUCKET, GUEST, TOP TEN, and WISH are all types of lists: bucket list, guest list, and so on).

Select four items and hit the Submit button. If you guessed correctly, the category and color will be revealed. (Yellow is easiest, followed by green, then blue, then purple.) If your guess was incorrect, you’ll get a chance to try again.

You win when you’ve correctly identified all four groups. But if you make four mistakes before you finish, the game ends and the answers are revealed.

How to win Connections

The most important thing to know to win Connections is that the groupings are designed to be tricky. Expect to see overlapping groups. For example, one puzzle seemed to include six breakfast foods: BACON, EGG, PANCAKE, OMELET, WAFFLE, and CEREAL. But BACON turned out to be part of a group of painters along with CLOSE, MUNCH, and WHISTLER, and EGG was in a group of things that come by the dozen (along with JUROR, ROSE, and MONTH). So don’t hit “submit” until you’ve confirmed that your group of four contains only those four things.

If you’re stuck, another strategy is to look at the words that seem to have no connection to the others. If all that comes to mind when you see WHISTLER is the painting nicknamed “Whistler’s Mother,” you might be on to something. When I solved that one, I ended up googling whether there was a painter named Close, because Close didn’t fit any of the obvious themes, either.

Another way to win when you’re stuck is, obviously, to read a few helpful hints–which is why we share these pointers every day. Check back tomorrow for the next puzzle!

Virtual reality is suffering from an identity problem. Users’ first experiences are generally awe-inspiring, but once the “wow” factor of entering a fully immersive 3D world wears off, you’re left with the question, “but what is it for?”

Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset does not provide a compelling answer, but it does offer some intriguing glimpses at our possible VR future. It ultimately works better as a toy than as a tool, but it’s an insanely great toy. 

What’s improved about the Quest 3?

Meta’s line of VR headsets are the only major stand-alone VR gear out, so the Quest 3’s main competition is the last generation of Meta’s VR gear, and the Quest 3 is better than the Quest 2 in every way but the price (the Quest 2’s new base price is $299.99, whereas the Quest 3 is $499.99) The 3’s display resolution is higher—2064×2208 per eye with a 90Hz refresh rate versus 1832×1920 on the Quest 2. (The Quest 3 even supports 120Hz, but Meta notes this is currently experimental only.)

The Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor is faster then the Quest 2’s first-get Snapdragon. It has 8GB of DRAM compared to the Quest 2’s 6GB. The new pancake lenses are way better than the fresnel lenses of the Quest 2. The headset is slimmer and more comfortable to wear. The controllers are lighter and feature improved haptics. It even looks cooler.

But the Quest’s 3’s most striking improvement over the Quest 2 may be its array of six front-facing cameras that take you out of the blurry black-and-white of the Quest 2 and into a possible future where augmented reality exists alongside virtual reality.

Quest 3 specs

• Processor: Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2

• DRAM: 8GB

• Display resolution: 2064×2208 per eye

• Refresh rate: 72Hz, 80Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz (experimental setting only)

• Field of view: 110 degrees horizontal, 96 degrees vertical

• Lens adjustment: Accommodated IPD range: 53-75 mm

• Cameras: 4 IR cameras and 2 RGB cameras

• Audio: Stereo speakers compatible with 3D spatial audio, 3.5mm audio jack

• Storage: 128GB or 512GB

• Battery life: 1.5–2.9 hours, depending on usage (according to Meta)

• Charge time: 2.3 hours via 18W power adapter

• Wifi: Wi-Fi 6E

• Headset weight: 515g

Recommended products

• Meta Quest 3 VR/Mixed Reality Headset

• Meta Quest 2

• Meta Quest 3 charging dock

• Zenni VR Prescription Lenses For Meta Quest 3

Virtual reality’s “thank God that’s over” effect

As advanced as the Quest 3 is, it’s up against a serious problem that I call the “thank god that’s over” effect. I’ve had great experiences in virtual reality—fake-fishing with my kid on father’s day, watching Dr. Phil re-runs with strangers, pornography—but no matter how much I enjoy anything VR, every time I take the headset off, I feel a palpable sense of relief. 

For me, and other’s I’ve spoken to, being immersed in virtual reality is mentally overwhelming. It’s partly from the bright colored lights bombarding your eyes. It’s partly from the uncanny nature of the experience itself. Then there’s the slightly queasy feeling caused by microsecond lag in motion (and I’m actually not as prone to VR sickness as many). Just the weight and snugness of feeling the thing strapped to your face can be off-putting. It all adds up to a claustrophobic, unsettling experience that some primal part of me ceaselessly wants to escape. Eventually, even the thought of attaching the thing to my face becomes a deterrent, and my shiny VR gear is relegated to a closet, to break out only for friends who have never used VR before.

A more gentle immersion into virtual reality

The Quest 3’s cameras do a lot to alleviate that sense of “I gotta get out of here.” When you start it up, instead of being fully inside the machine, your lobby is a full color, real-time video stream of your living room. It’s blurry, but way less jarring than plunging into the full-reality-separation of “immersive” VR. From there, you can choose to step into a virtual space, with the knowledge that a tap on the side of the helmet will bring you back to the living room, or stay in that half-in, half-out world for an augmented reality experience.

The front-facing cameras also allow for useful hand and finger tracking too, although in most situations, I preferred the controllers—clicking a button is easier than remembering which gesture does what. The improved controllers are lighter and more compact than the Quest 2’s, and they don’t have that weird ring thing from the last generation. For newer, non-gamer users, they’re more comfortable and intuitive.

Technology that makes people less sick

The faster processor, better resolution, and extra RAM means the Quest 3 is able to “keep up” with your face movements and display graphics with higher frame-rate and less latency. Theoretically, that means it’s less likely to make you feel queasy than previous Quest generations. I didn’t actually notice much difference in practice; it still makes me mildly ill, especially when moving quickly—stationary VR experiences like Beat Saber remain the best VR experiences. Motion-sensitivity aside, the Quest 3’s graphical and computational performance is way better than the Quest 2’s—visuals are brighter, with a 15% wider field-of-view than the last generation, and games and apps load noticeably more quickly. 

The physical design of the Quest 3 headset is way better

The Quest 3 headset’s design is a huge improvement over the Quest 2. Even though the Quest 3 is slightly heavier than the Quest 2 (515g vs. 503g), the weight is better distributed, so the headset itself is more comfortable, slimmer, and more spread out, which lessens the off-balance feeling that can make virtually reality subtly unpleasant. There are also much-needed air vents to instances of lessen fogged up lenses when the experience gets strenuous.

The improvement in weight distribution isn’t the kind of thing you notice in 30 seconds, but when you wear it for an hour or so, it’s a huge improvement, and does a surprising amount to make virtual reality feel less claustrophobic. For a bit, anyway. Even with the improved ergonomics, the Quest 3 still gives me that uncomfortable, too-hot, “why is this thing strapped to my face?” feeling after prolonged use, if less so than other headsets I’ve tried. 

The improved head-strap is easier to adjust to get a good fit to your face. With the Quest 2, buying an improved head-strap was practically mandatory, but here, the right-out-of-the-box strap works fine. (That said, it would be nice if Quest 2 accessories were compatible with the new headset, but I suppose the change in design makes that impossible.) 

Glasses-wearers are also in luck: While you can get prescription lenses for the Quest 3 (another must with the Quest 2), the device’s adjustable glasses spacer is built in and works on all but the most oversized spectacles.

All that is great, but what is the Quest 3 good for?

From a technological and design perspective, the Quest 3 is an impressive piece of kit, but none of that matters if you can’t use it for anything. To get to the soul of the Quest 3, I put it through its paces by using it for gaming, productivity, and socialization. Maybe unsurprisingly, the winner was gaming.

The Meta Quest 3 is a first-rate augmented and virtual reality gaming console

The Quest 3 is fantastic for gaming. I checked out Assassin’s Creed: Nexus for a “traditional” VR-style game and Drop Dead: The Cabin for a look at the possibilities of mixed-reality gaming. Both are excellent examples of the kind of fun you can have in virtual reality.

Without getting fully into “game review” territory, AC: Nexus is great. A lot of VR games are still glorified tech demos, but Nexus feels close to an actual game. It’s not there yet, but it’s close. Nexus is short and simple compared to “real” Assassin’s Creed games, but its 16 levels are impressively immersing. The combat, parkour, and stealth actually work, and the beefed up Quest 3 hardware makes the game run like butter. Graphically, it’s maybe on par with a PlayStation 3 title, but you can’t get inside a PS3 game.

Those aren’t my real window and door.
Credit: Soul Assembly/Stephen Johnson

But I had the most fun with Drop Dead: The Cabin. It’s a pretty standard “shoot a lot of zombies” title, but the “home invasion” mode shows off the possibility of AR gaming. You map the room you’re playing in, and the game overlays fictional elements into your house. The screenshot above doesn’t really do the impressive tech justice—you have to see it in motion. It’s got a classic coin-op arcade vibe of simplicity and ever-increasing difficulty that make it perfect for the short play-time and lack of complexity of VR gaming. 

The Quest 3 also shines when it’s connected to a PC and used as VR monitor. You’ll need a fairly powerful PC, but if you have that, you can either physically or virtually link your Quest 3 to it to play more “advanced” games than the standalone headset will allow like Half-Life: Alyx. Linking to a PC might be the Quest’s killer app, and it makes the $500 price tag seems less outrageous. A Vive headset, which doesn’t act as a standalone unit, costs nearly twice that much, and the performance is comparable. 

Can you do productive things with a Quest 3?

All the ladies love how I play “Camptown Races.”
Credit: ZarApps/Stephen Johnson

To see if I could do something “useful” with my Quest 3, I installed Pianovision and attempted to learn to a little music. The concept is solid—a virtual piano tutor allows you to you learn piano, Guitar Hero style—but it’s not great in practice. You can use Pianovision to learn to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but the fiddly adjustments needed to overlay a virtual keyboard over a real one are annoying, and I never managed to get them exactly right. Worse, the lag time between pressing a key and hearing the note is noticeable, rendering it fairly useless for true music study (unless you want to play off the beat). Playing a “keyboard” that doesn’t exist is another option, but the finger-recognition isn’t good enough to make it work, and not being able to feeling the keyboard makes playing it extremely difficult. In other words, it’s all more trouble than it’s worth.

I can’t make much of a case for using the Quest 3 for work-based productivity either. I was able to use Virtual Desktop to control my Mac from the cyber-verse, which is cool for sure, but the virtual keyboard is as awkward and slow as the air-piano, and using the Quest controller as a mouse isn’t great either. Like a virtual piano, it’s an appreciably worse experience than just using the real thing, and any benefits it offers are marginal—a lot more work with little reward. 

There are collaborative possibilities with the Quest 3, but I don’t know how realistic they are at this time. To think that anyone you work with is going to have a VR headset and be willing to strap one on when you could have a Zoom meeting instead is laughable. 

Can you use the Quest 3 to make new friends?

There are two main avenues people use to hang out in VR: Meta Horizon Worlds and VRChat. They’re both terrible, but each offers a unique flavor of awful. Horizon World’s tightly controlled social spaces and user created worlds are an empty wasteland, while VRChat’s anything-goes style attracts a lot of people, but they’re extremely annoying people. Just about everyone in either place is 10 years old, and not the kind of 10-year-olds with good parents. So pick your poison: A handful of 10-year-olds being annoying in an orderly, corporately controlled space, or 5,000 10-year-olds spamming and screaming in VRChat. I spent several hours searching for a human connection in these two social spaces, and my overall verdict is that I never want to do anything like that again for the rest of my life.

Can you use the Quest 3 to get fit?

This guy came to my house and punched me in the face.
Credit: Sealost Interactive, LLC

If you think virtual reality fitness might work for you, the Quest 3 provides a better overall experience than the Quest 2, mainly due to the improved headgear. The vents in headset means less fogged up views when things get sweaty, and the better ergonomics makes things more comfortable overall. That said, the Quest 2 is $200 cheaper than the Quest 3, and while there are new passthrough options in some VR fitness programs (including my personal favorite, Thrill of the Fight), if you’re buying it as a workout gadget, the improvements the Quest 3 offers over the Quest 2 probably aren’t worth it.

The bottom line: It’s a toy, but a really great toy

The original and still the champion
Credit: Toast Interactive/Stephen Johnson

My all-time favorite app for both the Quest 2 and the Quest 3 remains Richie’s Plank Experience. Released in 2016, this tech demo puts users in an elevator that ascends many stories into the sky. The doors slide and open to reveal a wooden plank hanging in mid-air. That’s basically it. The fun comes from letting other people try it and watching them experience the terrifying feeling of being on a board teetering 200 feet above the street. It’s not useful, deep, or life-changing, but it’s hilarious.

While the Quest 3’s technological and ergonomic improvements point to the possibility of VR becoming useful in the future, at present, it’s but a cool novelty that will make you say “wow” or “I am going to fall off this building.” It’s a cheap thrill, but sometimes cheap thrills make life feel worth living, so if you’re looking for a fun gift for the techie in your life, or if you just want to blow your Grandpa’s mind, the Quest 3 should top your gift list. If you’re expecting to live in the virtual world, you might have to give it a few years.

Frico-friends, crispy-corner mac and cheese compadres, and all crunchy fried cheese lovers, hear ye: you’ll appreciate this latest breakthrough in sandwich development. You can cover your breakfast sandwich in a crisp layer of frico, and you should do so as soon as possible. Let this inside-out waffled sausage, egg, and cheese be your guide to many more cheese-encrusted pressed sandwiches. 

Waffle irons are one of the greatest tools in your kitchen appliance arsenal. Obviously, you can make waffles in them, but even more compelling is their ability to increase the crisp-factor in everything they touch. Their unique shape is composed of multiple three dimensional cubes and tunnels, and those significantly the surface area of whatever you’re waffling. Waffle irons also provide direct, high heat. Both factors lead to an intense frico experience. 

Products to consider:

• Cuisinart 4-slice Belgian Waffle Maker

• All-Clad Digital Gourmet Waffle Maker

• Oster Belgian Waffle Maker

Frico is simply cheese that’s fried beyond the melting point. It starts to brown and then when it cools, the cheese sets and gets solid and crunchy.  You can make little frico discs to snack on if you fry them alone, or you can add cheese to the surface of foods that get cooked in pans, like pancakes, and create a thin, outer shell of crunchy, salty cheese. 

This particular breakfast sandwich combines the best parts of a hot pressed sandwich with increased frico-ing surface area from the waffle iron. I made this sandwich with sausage and egg inside, but you can do this with any savory sandwich filling that you don’t mind warming up. The magic is in the bread. Flip the bread upside down (if you’re using a roll) and add the cheese to that side. This is the surface that will press against the hot waffle iron. I think the open crumb texture holds onto the cheese and fat better than the other side of the bun. If you’re using sliced sandwich bread, either side is fine. 

How to make an inside-out frico breakfast sandwich

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Ready the components

First, heat up the waffle iron. Take the two sides of a roll and flip them so the open crumb is facing up. Spread a thin layer of mayonnaise or butter onto the roll. Sprinkle shredded parmesan or cheddar onto the mayo and press it so the cheese adheres well. Cook an egg in a frying pan. I usually break the yolk on purpose in the pan because I don’t want any surprises in the waffle iron. Fry the egg until it’s just barely set; it’ll have more time to heat in the iron. If you’re using meat, make sure you waffle your meat first.

Waffle the sandwich cheese-sides out

Assemble the sandwich so the cheese sides are facing out.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

The cheese releases plenty of fats, so you don’t have to grease the waffle iron. However, if you’ve been scarred by other waffle experiences, I totally understand. You can spritz it with oil first if you want. Place the first bun on the waffle iron, cheese-side down. Add the egg and sausage to the bread. Top the sandwich with the other side of the bun, cheese-side up this time. Close the waffle iron and press it for 30 seconds or so to ensure good contact. The divots of the waffle iron should engage with the soft bread and make some solid frico indentations.  Let this sizzle away for two to five minutes, depending on the heat of the waffle iron. 

Check for a good crust

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Check on it when you hear sizzling and see fats dripping down the side of the sandwich. Gently lift the top. The bread should easily disengage from the waffle iron and you’ll be able to see if the cheese has browned sufficiently. The cheese surface should be firm, not sticky or oozing. The color should be a dark, toasty brown, and relatively even across the entire surface. Remove the sandwich carefully with a couple of forks, and let it cool on a wire cooling rack. 

As soon as you slice the sandwich or bite into it, you’ll notice the surface of the bread is entirely encrusted with the toastiest frico you’ve ever experienced. It becomes so crisp, dense, and salty that I can only describe it as a savory version of candied cheese bread. The juicy sausage and egg inside will make you feel even more validated that this was the best possible choice for breakfast today.