Table of contents for February 2021 in APC

A group of over 225 Google and Alphabet workers have announced that they have formed a union, aiming to make Alphabet a better place for all workers. The union, called the Alphabet Workers Union, has been formed with help from the Communications Workers of America’s Campaign to Organise Digital Employees. Unlike a traditional union, the Alphabet Workers Union doesn’t aim to negotiate for a contract. Instead, workers say it is an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google. Unions have traditionally not been very successful in Silicon Valley, but things have recently started changing. Unions at Kickstarter and Glitch were formed early last year. A few months later, HCL Technologies workers who contract for Google in Pittsburgh successfully formed a union.…

Since removing the ‘Do no evil’ phrase from the forefront of its internal Code of Conduct in 2018, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have clashed quite a bit with employees over what the company should or should not be doing. So it’s perhaps not all that surprising that, after years of conflict, over 200 full time Google staffers and contractors voted to unionise in January, to have more of a say in the moral direction of the company. In 2018, an open letter signed by more than 3,000 Google employees protested the company’s fulfilment of an AI image recognition contract with The Pentagon, known as Project Maven, stating that they didn’t want Google to be “in the business of war”. Then, a year later, thousands more employees signed a…

Buried in a blizzard of buzzwords like “teraflops,” “true 4K,” and “ray tracing” is a new device – Microsoft’s statement on gaming for the next several years. It’s teardown time. MAJOR TECH SPECS • AMD custom 8-core 3.8GHz (3.66GHz with SMT) Zen 2 CPU • AMD custom RDNA 2 GPU (1,825MHz with 52 Compute Units) • 16GB GDDR6 RAM • 1TB SSD storage (with an optional 1TB Expansion Card) • HDMI 2.1 connectivity with support for 8K video at 60 Hz, or 4K 120 Hz • 4K UHD Blu-ray drive KEY FINDINGS • This year’s flagship Xbox is rocking a fuller figure and serious cooling. More grilles grace the back of the console, along with the usual ports and a new storage expansion slot. • Two bright green T8 screws…

From $1,099 | apple.com/au Since it is permanently plugged into power, the Mac mini misses out on the massive battery life boost from the new M1 processor, but it does still get the performance benefits and a decent price cut – which means it’s still a pretty impressive upgrade, on the whole. Similarly to the MacBook Pro 13 range, you can still buy the Mac mini’s Late 2018 predecessor with an 8th generation Core i5 or a Core i7 for $1,699 or $1,999, respectively – but we’d really recommend you don’t. The new M1 unit performs around 10 percent better than the i5 2018 variant in Geekbench 4 benchmarks and is only beaten by the i7 model by a similarly close margin. When you consider that the new Mac mini…

$1,699 | www.amd.com Here it is, AMD’s fastest ever graphics card: The Radeon RX 6900 XT. AMD claims this isn’t just an RTX 3080 competitor, but a 3090 competitor too. It’s a lofty claim indeed. Can it challenge for the title of the world’s fastest GPU? The 6900 XT shares a lot in common with the 6800 XT. Both share the same Navi 21 GPU, but the 6900 XT is fully unlocked with all 5,120 shaders active compared to the 4,608 of the 6800 XT. It also has 80 RT cores versus the 72 of the 6800 XT. Otherwise they both share the same cooler, 16GB memory subsystem, clock speeds and surprisingly, the same TDP at 300W. The other major difference is the price. Where the reference 6800 XT is…

$180 | www.dlink.com.au It’s strange to think how D-Link was top of the router game a few years ago – offering premium models that all brackets of the market found desirable. However, since Wi-Fi 6 routers started becoming mainstream (last year) the company has all but given up with the top-end of town and is flooding the budget market and lower-mid market with models to suit all possible price points at almost every increment. The DIR-1750 is another 802.11ac (aka Wi-Fi 5) device which means it uses last-generation technology. The 1750 refers to the theoretical 1,750Mbps maximum throughput (which invariably can’t be reached in real-world conditions) with the performance being spread across a single network that’s automatically spread across 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. At $180 it’s one of the cheapest…

Needs MacOS 10.13 or later | US$29 per year | postbox-inc.com Plenty of email apps struggle to dislodge Apple’s stalwart Mail app. Can Postbox 7 do the trick? Its US$29 (about AU$39) one-year subscription – compared to the free Mail – may suggest not. Don’t be fooled, though: Postbox is worth it. The app is light and airy, with generous spacing and judicious colour highlights on buttons and certain sidebar items. Apple’s Mail app looks positively primitive in comparison, with its dense greyscale layout. But looks are not everything. Fortunately, Postbox has top-notch features to overcome Apple’s workhorse. Take the Focus Pane, a smart column that lets you drill down into your messages. You can select favourite contacts, frequently used tags, plus smart filters and folders, and everything else gets…

2020 certainly was an intriguing year. Whether that’s the global climate, the COVID pandemic, or computing, as ever nothing stays the same. The only thing that’s seemingly permanent is impermanence. There’s nowhere else that this premise can be better observed than in the realm of processing power. From the advent of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series, to AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics cards launching, 2020 has seen some revolutionary leaps in performance. But that’s not what we’re talking about here today. It’s all about the processors, and namely AMD’s latest Zen 3 or 5000 series chips. Take a moment just think back 10 years – how far we’ve come in this last decade has been remarkable. The potency of the humble desktop has increased exponentially. Moore’s law may be coming to an…

Any media server will live or die on how easy it is to access your content from a variety of platforms and devices. Over the past year, Jellyfin has worked hard to cut the gap between it and its longer established rivals, so that most major platforms are now supported – for free. To see what platforms currently support Jellyfin, visit https://jellyfin.org/ clients/ – you’ll find a range of releases (although beware, the Jellyfin for Desktop client currently has no official releases; try Jellyfin MPV Shim instead). Both Android and iOS are covered, along with a growing range of smart TV platforms: Boxes like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV have native apps, while Apple TV owners can access Jellyfin content through the Infuse app. Also supported are Chromecast…

Like Emby, Jellyfin supports a wide range of plugins that provide access to all kinds of extra features and functions . Navigate to the Dashboard and click “Plugins” under “Advanced” to review them. You’ll see that four metadata providers come pre-installed covering your music, movie, and TV libraries. Any with a vertical ellipsis button next to its name contain settings you can tweak by clicking the button and choosing “Settings.” Switch to the “Catalog” tab to see what additional plugins are currently available through the official Jellyfin repo. You’ll see they’re split into six categories: “Authentication,” “Channels,” “General,” “LiveTV,” “Metadata,” and “Notifications.” Click one for a description and options to install it. You’ll find plenty of potential interest: If you have a USB TV tuner then you’ll find plugins supporting…

1 START MENU Searching the Start menu for Control Panel is perhaps the easiest way to find it to start with. 2 THE PANEL Each icon in Control Panel represents an applet that can be used to change numerous system settings. 3 VIEW MENU You can view Control Panel in different ways: all the applets at once, or grouping them by type of setting. 4 APPLETS Some applets open within Control Panel itself, while others will open in separate dialog windows. 5 CATEGORIES Whatever view you choose, you can browse Control Panel in Category mode by clicking the arrow in the address bar. 6 PANEL SEARCH A quick and easy way to jump to a particular setting in Control Panel is to search for…

01 BACK UP YOUR DEVICE Click Back Up in iMazing’s right-hand menu to begin backing up right away. Alternatively, click the Options button in the same menu. Here you can choose a backup schedule and location, adjust archive settings, and more. 02 PREVIOUS BACKUP To go back to an old backup, click Restore a Backup in the right-hand menu, select a file, then click Choose. Select what you want to restore from this backup and click Next, turn off Find My, then click Restore. 03 UPDATE YOUR IOS VERSION Click Update iOS in the right-hand menu. If an update is available, iMazing will download it for you. Alternatively, if you have downloaded an update file (such as in the example here), select it in the Browse panel, then click Update.…

The other day, while watching the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard was trapped on a planet with an alien who only spoke in metaphors made us think: “Hey we do that now with memes!” Memes are all over the internet and they’re great fun to drop into a tweet. With this project we can make our own meme images using Python and a module named PIL (Python Imaging Library). To make it all a little easier for users we shall also make a simple GUI. Software setup PIL comes pre-installed with Raspberry Pi OS, but we do need to install two extra packages. The first is imagemagick, used by PIL to work with images. In a terminal type the following to install it: $ sudo…

The Apple II (stylised as the Apple ][) was one of the original mass-market home computers, but would become synonymous with colour computing, distinguishing itself from rivals made by Commodore and Tandy. Unhappy with the state of personal computing, Wozniak wanted to create something “small, reliable, convenient to use, and inexpensive.” Following the stylistically crude but technologically promising Apple 1, Wozniak wanted to create a machine that was faster and more practical, with colour graphics. While Steve Jobs concerned himself with selling the machine and making it pretty, Wozniak would create a piece of engineering beauty still admired today. Widely regarded as a primary influence on the IBM PC, the Apple II created the first real platform with long-term support for home consumers, with an emphasis on open architecture and…

$59 | PC, Mac | worldofwarcdraft.com Shadowlands is one of World of Warcraft’s most ambitious expansions yet. There are times where I feel a little overwhelmed by all of its complex progression systems. When I’m not chipping away at expanding my Covenant’s Sanctum, I’m exploring its dark and dangerous new endgame zone or climbing the endless floors of Torghast. And then there’s the familiar grind of world quests, dungeons, and chasing down hidden treasures like new mounts. It’s a lot to stay on top of and at times a little too familiar, but much of Shadowlands’ endgame is varied and inventive enough to keep things fun. It might not win over jaded players who drifted away over the years, but Shadowlands is the best World of Warcraft has been in…

Free | browser | bphennessy.itch.io Brendan Patrick Hennessy’s acclaimed interactive fiction game Birdland gets a sequel in Boat Prom, which is about a prom that takes place on, er, a boat. Playing as Elizabeth Wei, a character from Birdland, you have to handle a humiliating rejection, while the people around you are having the time of their lives. This is all about the dialogue, which is some of the most effortlessly funny and lifelike in the business. With just a few stage directions, and an economical word count, Hennessy has created a diverse cast of distinct and quotable characters, including sullen protagonist Elizabeth, who manages to be self-pitying without being annoying – a spectacular feat of writing that probably deserves all the awards it can be given. Like most media…

Free | PC, Mac | bastinus-rex.itch.io Bastinus Rex’s Hamelin reimagines the tale of the pied piper – or possibly offers a sequel to it. As the rat-diverting, child-abducting wrong’un prepares to be burnt at the stake, you have to scuttle around to rescue him, avoiding guards and joining forces with your similarly bewhiskered colleagues. Hamelin is a couple of short levels of rodent-based stealth, bookended at either side by cutscenes. The first level sees your rat skittering away from a few striding guards, and up onto the eaves of a church. It’s a lovely scene, strikingly lit and with some satisfying sound design – like a single room from Thief shown from a rat’s eye view. As you proceed, you’re taken to Stage 2, which is a hell of a…

Listings in two benchmark databases reveal that Intel, or perhaps a company close to the chip giant, seems to be testing a rather mysterious unannounced graphics processor that has slightly more compute horsepower than the company’s Iris Xe Max discrete GPU for notebooks. Someone has submitted benchmark results of what is called the Intel Gen12 Desktop Graphics Controller featuring 128 execution units (EUs), clocked at 1.40GHz, and equipped with 3.03GB of memory. Given the ‘Gen12’ designation, the GPU is based on Intel’s Xe-LP microarchitecture as other Xe microarchitectures are referred to as Gen12.x in the drivers. Since Intel’s Xe-LP EUs are 8-wide, 128 EUs may be compared to 1024 stream processors of AMD or Nvidia GPUs.…

When it became public that Nvidia was in talks with ARM about an acquisition, some critics raised eyebrows, including ARM’s Co-Founder Hermann Houser who called the deal a ‘disaster.’ When the deal went through, others expressed their concern about the merger’s effect on the industry, and now, a few months later, UK authorities are investigating the US$40-billion purchase over concerns regarding competition. ARM was purchased by Nvidia from Softbank, which had previously acquired ARM in 2016 for US$32-billion, but ARM failed to perform up to investor’s expectations under Softbank’s ownership. However, unlike Softbank, Nvidia has many competitors that work with ARM technologies, which is why the deal is subject to such intense scrutiny. Nvidia has made a vow to maintain ARM’s neutrality and its open licensing model, but not everyone…

In a recent Real World Technologies forum post discussing error correction code (ECC) memory, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, openly criticised Intel for not making ECC RAM mainstream on consumer platforms while praising AMD for supporting it on Ryzen platforms. “ECC absolutely matters. ECC availability matters a lot – exactly because Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it’s horribly bad market segmentation. Go out and search for ECC DIMMs – it’s really hard to find. Yes – probably entirely thanks to AMD – it may have been gotten slightly better lately, but that’s exactly my point. Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies with regard to ECC. Seriously. And if you don’t believe…

One of the touted features of AMD’s new RX 6000 series cards is something it calls Smart Access Memory, or SAM. It essentially allows the CPU to access more of the graphics card’s VRAM which can provide a decent performance boost. AMD claims it can boost performance by up to 10 percent, or even more in some cases. We ran a quick test using a couple of games and found mixed results. We did see a nice boost in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at lower resolutions and also Borderlands 3, but saw no change in Metro Exodus. This indicates that game engines need to integrate support to take full advantage. “It essentially allows the CPU to access more of the graphics card’s VRAM which can provide a decent performance…

Logitech G15 2006 Blue backlighting and a built-in LCD panel with macro support? The G15 was ahead of its time, but it does look truly dated now. Steelseries H5v3 2013 SteelSeries has always produced solid peripherals, and the H5v3 was no exception. Leather padding, a double-braided cable, and great portability set this headset apart from the crowd. Microsoft Sidewinder X5 2008 Remember when Microsoft made gaming mice? APC remembers. It might’ve looked weird, but the 2,000 DPI optical sensor made the X5 a great purchase at the time. Antec Soundscience Rockus 3D 2.1 Speakers 2010 This piece of kit was a high-quality three-piece desktop speaker system that was capable of rich, room-filling sound thanks to its forward-firing subwoofer and the dual satellite speakers. Corsair Void Pro 2017 Our resident staff…

While it’s fair to say that the MacBook Air 13 gains the largest performance bump from the new M1 chip – if you break down the key new features for this machine, the update is nothing short of revolutionary. In addition to having more CPU power than its predecessor, the new MacBook Pro 13 also gains a transformative GPU upgrade, more than doubles its battery life, and lands at a significantly better RRP, without any real downsides. This might just be the biggest generational laptop update we’ve ever seen… Apple or otherwise. Apple seems to be passing on a lot of the savings from its new in-house chips directly to consumers, since the MacBook Pro 13 with the M1 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD starts at just…

If you read our review of the reference AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT in our previous issue, you’d have seen that it puts AMD back in the race at the high end of the market, and that the 6800 XT nips at the heels of the mighty RTX 3080. Can the tried and true premium tier designs and coolers from AMD’s partners beat out the surprisingly capable reference card? We take a look at some of the best AMD cards ever. What makes them tick Before we get to the roundup, let’s revisit some of what’s under the hood of the Radeon RX 6800 XT, AMD’s first RDNA2 GPU. The 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT are all based on the 7nm Navi 21 GPU. They share the same memory…

$3,799 | razer.com/au-en While we’ve often considered the Blade Stealth 13 to be Razer’s productivity-focused laptop, it’s always been offered with a discrete gaming-capable GPU – which was an unnecessary expense for anyone looking exclusively for a work laptop. But Razer is finally branching out into the ‘strictly business’ space with the new Book 13 line, by ditching the discrete GPU and slashing the price. It’s a solid move, but with Apple and Dell both offering price cuts on their Ultrabook offerings this year, the Book 13’s starting price of $2,199 isn’t as competitive as we’d hoped. For that starting price you’ll get a non-touch 13.4-inch 16-by-10 display at FullHD+ 60Hz, an Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, which is a couple of hundred dollars…

From $549 | shop.westerndigital.com/en-au WD has been making great strides in the portable storage space over the last couple of years, and while Seagate may have beaten it to market with a display dock that offers PCIe connected storage, the D50 Game Dock with a NVMe SSD is finally here and it’s fast. As its name suggests, the key drawcard of the new D50 Game Dock is that it comes with PCIe connected external storage allowing you to add a heap of space that is the same speed (or faster) than your primary internal hard drive. We clocked read speeds of 2,960MB/s and write speeds up to 2,319MB/s when using the D50 with a Razer Book 13 over USB-C, which is over 23 times faster than a traditional hard disk…

Remote access allows you to stream from your Jellyfin server over the internet. Unlike Plex or Emby, which use their cloud-based authentication systems to simplify the connection, you’ll need to set this up manually. It’s a good idea for security purposes to ensure all remote connections are secure (HTTPS rather than HTTP), and the easiest way to do this is through an existing reverse proxy. Start by setting up a new subdomain (jellyfin.domain. com) with a domain you own. Now delete and recreate the container, adding your subdomain to the “SUBDOMAINS =” environment setting. Once the certificate has been generated, shut down the container. Now copy and paste the code underneath “Nginx” from a subdomain’ at https://jellyfin.org/ docs/general/networking/nginx.html into a blank text file, which you should save as jellyfin.subdomain.conf. Remove…

One of lockdown’s few pleasures is watching movies together with far-flung family via Zoom. Thanks to Jellyfin’s new SyncPlay feature, it’s easier than ever to watch the same movie without fiddling about trying to sync up everyone’s playback. The prerequisites are simple: Everyone needs access to your server plus the media library that’s serving up the content. Once done, start playback on your main device and look for the “SyncPlay” button (next to “Cast”). Click this and choose “New group.” When your family launch their own instance of Jellyfin and click the “SyncPlay” button, they’ll see your movie/episode title appear as a group that they can join. Clicking this should see them join your stream at the same point you’re already at. Click play to continue watching. The sync may…

CPU temperature fluctuation I’ve been using Open Hardware Monitor to control my CPU fan. This was the only app I could find that controlled it. I have an Asus ROG Strix B450-F motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 overclocked to 4,150MHz, and the stock AMD CPU cooler. I tried to control the fan from the motherboard, but it didn’t work. I also have two NVMe SSDs, two SATA SSDs, ODD, three 140mm case fans, and a 120mm case fan, all fans blowing inward, all housed in a Corsair 110R case. My question is why does the temperature in the processor vary over a six-hour period when the voltage, fan speed, and room temp don’t change? Do I need a better cooler? Check out the six-hour graph I have attached, and you’ll…

We’re huge fans of Ulysses, the do-everything writing app for macOS and iPadOS. No matter what we’re writing – a document for review, blog post, magazine article, tutorial, book or song lyric or just a daily diary – we can write it in Ulysses and then share it in the appropriate format. Because everything we do in Ulysses is stored in plain text there’s no need to worry about using proprietary file formats; it also means Ulysses is blazingly fast. We can search our entire archive – many hundreds of thousands of words going back many years – and find what we want instantly. Version 20 is a big update to an already brilliant app. The biggest change is the new Dashboard, which is a sidebar at the right that…

Your Linux distribution is home to several nifty command-line utilities that can be used to report a variety of useful information. Everything from hard disk RPM, CPU temperature, network speed and more can be learnt with a single command. While we may well cover these utilities in future issues, our focus for now is on utilities that will reveal pertinent information about disk space. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the total disk space used and available on any given partition, the space used by different files and directories, and how you can free up space on your disk by identifying files which haven’t been accessed in a long time, read on!. “If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the total disk space used and available on any given…

$53 | PC, PS4, XB1 | dont-nod.com/en/projects Leaving time travel, telekinesis, and mind reading to the wayside, Dontnod has stepped away from the supernatural themes of its previous games for Twin Mirror, a psychological-drama of mystery and conspiracy. This genre of game should be well within the studio’s wheelhouse, but unfortunately, Dontnod’s first self-published game is a little underwhelming. It has the set up of a great detective mystery, but its unwillingness to explore difficult topics with depth leaves it feeling shallow and half-baked. Twin Mirror follows Sam Higgs, a former investigative journalist returning to his home town following the death of his best friend and fellow reporter, Nick. It isn’t long before Sam gets caught up in a larger conspiracy involving the mining town’s community, and he decides to…

$43 | PC | per-aspera.vg Per Aspera is a novel combination of planetary science simulator, hardcore management game, and dynamic narrative experience. You play as a newly awakened artificial consciousness, AMI, whose job is to establish an autonomous colony on Mars, and ultimately terraform the planet to make it suitable for ‘Earthian’ life long-term. AMI’s story plays out in audio transmissions voiced by a star-studded cast, with standout performances by the likes of Laila Berzins, Troy Baker, and Phil LaMarr. It’s a series of moral choices that lead to one of several different game endings. Most of Per Aspera is about panning around a beautifully rendered topographical globe of Mars and listening to a chill ambient and upbeat techno soundtrack. Your view is AMI’s, a vector interface with lots of…

DEVELOPER JAGEX PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE RELEASED 2001 WEB runescape.com In 2001 RuneScape launched as a browser game and never stopped moving forward, depositing old versions along the way for players who wanted to stay in the past: RuneScape Classic, which no longer exists, and then Old School RuneScape in 2013. For everyone else, the modern version is just called RuneScape, and was recently added to Steam. I’ve always had the sense that RuneScape is a bit esoteric (I’m sure I tried it back when it launched, when I was into MUDs and other relics of online gaming), but I didn’t realise just how weird the free-to-play MMO is until I gave it a try. Nearly two decades after it first released, visiting RuneScape is like entering a PC gaming pocket dimension…

Trades Union Congress concerned over new Amazon edge computing cameras Amazon Web Services releases new cameras to watch employees. Amazon is attempting to sell a new edge computing device that’ll allow employers to check in on staff to see if they’re adhering to COVID Safe practices ... and, well, potentially lots of other things too. Amazon is pitching its AWS Panorama box as an AI unit that can be retrofitted to cameras to do things like count the number of people in a shop to ensure there’s never a breach of public health rules, but a report by the UK Trades Union Congress argues that COVID-19 safety protocols are just the latest excuse to further erode worker’s privacy. People putting routers in Faraday cages to protect from 5G These EMF…

APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices. And, like you, APC’s journalists want…

Facebook is facing two major antitrust lawsuits filed by the U.S. government and 48 states demanding, among other things, that the tech giant divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp. Both suits allege that Facebook has become a social media monopoly by illegally suppressing competition when it buys potential rivals. Facebook purchased photo-sharing platform Instagram for US$1 billion in 2012 and chat service WhatsApp for US$19 billion in 2014. Now, they are three of the world’s most popular social media and messaging apps. Altogether as a company, Facebook is valued at more than US$800 billion. In the suits, state and Federal Trade Commission officials are seeking an injunction that could force Facebook to divest assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp, and seek prior approval for future deals. “For nearly a decade, Facebook…

Microsoft has been planning some major overhauls for a while now. One such undertaking will be a big visual revamp, codenamed the “Sun Valley” refresh. It’s set to be a major, and “reinvigorating” update to the operating systems UI. The project will involve the modernisation of a host of Windows 10 UI features, including (but not limited to) the “Start menu, Action Center, and even File Explorer, with consistent modern designs, better animations, and new features.” This UI update comes as part of the “Cobalt” set of releases meant for “reinvigorating” the current Win10 setup, the bulk of which is set to roll out near the end of 2021. According to bleepingcomputer, a job listing has just surfaced on the Microsoft careers page, entitled “Senior Software Engineer.” The key responsibilities…

2019 saw AMD launch Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Radeon RX 5000 GPUs on TSMC’s then cutting-edge N7 process, and 2020 brought us the Ryzen 5000 and Radeon RX 6000 chips on the same node. Nvidia opted for Samsung 8N for its RTX 30-series GPUs (and N7 for the datacenter GA100), while Intel still tries to get a handle on 10nm. The question now: Which company will be the first to release 5nm hardware? If you want to count Apple, it already launched the first consumer 5nm chips built on TSMC’s EUV-enhanced N5 node in October 2020. OK, maybe the A14 silicon doesn’t count since it’s not going into anything remotely PC. If that’s your mindset, certainly the A14-derived M1 processor at the heart of the new MacBook line qualifies. Still,…

$TBC | lg.com/au LG QNED TV LG’s LCD tech is the new neighbourino for high res TVs. LG is keeping OLED front and centre of its flagship offerings this year, but for most of us, 4K LED is where the value is… and for anyone in this space QNED is an interesting proposition. QLED is Samsung’s leading LED technology that allows it to get better efficiency and contrast from a quantum dot filter over blue backlights, and it seems LG is interested in getting in on the action here by blending it with a NanoCell MiniLED backlighting aray. QNED – as LG’s new-diddly-do mashup is called – uses 30,000 MiniLEDs to create 2,500 zones which will significantly boost dynamic contrast ratios, colour and perceived darkness. $379 | bose.com.au Bose Sleepbuds…

Of all the M1 devices Apple released in this initial range, the MacBook Air is the one that benefits most from the updated processor. Now on par with the MacBook Pro 13, the MacBook Air is just 23 percent off last year’s Core i9 MacBook Pro 16, which is a little bit ridiculous for a $1,600 passively-cooled ultrabook. It’s also now the record holder for the longest battery life laptop we have on file. At 19 hours and six minutes in 1080p movie playback it’s more than double the average current ‘long-lasting’ ultrabook lifespan. “The 13.3-inch Retina display is a little duller than the MacBook Pro 13’s at 400 nits, but the device gets the same 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution and even includes the full DCI-P3 colour gamut for…

$6,199 | dell.com/en-au Weighing in at close to 5kg with a thickness of 3.2cm, the Alienware Area 51m R2 is a gaming laptop that harkens back to the dog days of unwieldy, ‘portable’ gaming devices. Of course this kind of behemoth allows you to have PC-level gaming in a unit that you can actually move if you are ever required to do so, but it’s not something you’re going to throw in a backpack. In addition to being unpleasant to move, the Area 51m R2 has a price tag that means you have to have an unwavering need for the most powerful device available, no matter the premium you’ll pay for it. The unit we tested came in at a painfully high $6,199 price point, but while there won’t be…

Chrome | Free | www.google.com/chrome Firefox | Free | www.mozilla.org/firefox For the longest time everyone used Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then one day, around 2013, the world woke up and everyone was using Chrome. How did that happen, and should we care? Google launched Chrome in late 2008, when Firefox from the non-profit Mozilla was pootling along at 30 percent market share and IE at a seemingly insurmountable 70 percent share. Jump forward four years and Chrome had half the market – and increasing – with IE and Firefox fighting for second and third place. Chrome’s unstoppable success seems like a combination of agile development – quickly embracing the latest open-source technologies and standards – Google’s dominant search position, its growing online tool suite, and its mobile success with Android. Google…

Linux | www.kaosx.us First things first: KaOS doesn’t identify itself as an Arch-based distro. The project reasons that it borrows aspects not just from Arch but also from various other projects, and identifying it with one would be wrong. KaOS instead calls labels itself as a built-from-scratch distro since all packages in each of its repositories are compiled by the project for the distro. The real difference between the two is that unlike Arch, KaOS isn’t afraid to make choices on behalf of its users. The distro targets KDE users who prefer quality over quantity and are happy with a limited set of quality tools for a particular purpose rather than a collection of them. KaOS’ approach to putting together a distro is the antithesis of Arch. KaOS is what…

These days it’s one of the less-crazy conspiracy theories that the world isn’t real and that all of this – peers around the decaying APC office – is an elaborate virtualised simulation run by some bored alien teen on their Apple IIq quantum computer. Brushing aside simpler questions such as, “Why?” and, “Could they bump up my pay cheque please?” it shouldn’t mask that the modern world is in fact now largely run in a virtual world. This text is being run as part of a Java Virtual Machine inside a browser. It’s stored in the “cloud” as a managed virtual storage pool that’ll be maintained as part of a Kubernetes orchestrated virtual containerised system. The webpages we’ve read to research this will have been served off high-availability load-balanced virtual…

Anyone who loves to stream media from their own personal library will have heard of Plex or Emby. Both offer an amazing user experience and powerful features, but they also come with one major pitfall: The need to pay a subscription to access their best features, such as live TV and DVR support, as well as hardware-accelerated transcoding. Those subscription costs can soon mount, but the good news is that there’s a completely free and open-source pretender to their crown coming up fast in the rear-view mirror. The usurper in question is Jellyfin. Although it only came into existence a mere two years ago – forked from the last open-source release of Emby – it’s developed swiftly into a genuine rival to its established peers, boasting all their best features,…

Your media server uses the filenames of your media to help identify and tag them correctly. Jellyfin follows the same naming conventions as Plex and Emby, so if you’re migrating from these you should have little trouble with most of your content. The only exceptions are likely to be TV series that share the same name as an earlier show, and any movie extras you have into the same folder as your original movie following Plex’s naming conventions (see https://support. plex.tv/articles/https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/). Regarding the latter, Jellyfin follows Emby’s convention: Here, you simply create a subfolder called “Extras” inside the main movie folder, then move all your extras into there. You’ll also need to rename the file – for example, “Avatar-deleted.mp4” should be renamed “Avatar Deleted Scenes.mp4” or even just “Deleted Scenes.mp4,”…

“The obvious addition is a dedicated graphics card, which you may want if you need your system to be capable of any 3D-rendering tasks. Bear in mind that without upgrading the PSU and CPU, this system can only support a relatively conservative GPU.” The obvious addition is a dedicated graphics card, which you may want if you need your system to be capable of any 3D-rendering tasks. Bear in mind that without upgrading the PSU and CPU, this system can only support a relatively conservative GPU. An Nvidia GTX 1650 or AMD RX 560 would both be a good fit, for around $250. If you’re not looking for improved graphical oomph, you may want to investigate the potential of a more powerful processor. The Core i3-10300 clocks a little higher…

Ahhh that ancient and mystical Windows Control Panel, it’s that one area that should’ve always remained sacrosanct to the Windows operating system. In fact it’s been around in some form or another since 1985 and the launch of Windows 1.0. In those early editions of Windows, Control Panel was where you’d turn to if you wanted to change all manner of system-related settings. Whether that was hardware tinkering, trying to set up that pesky printer, or configuring a VPN to tunnel into your own home network when out and about, it’s been an integral part of the Windows experience since its conception. With Windows 10, however, Microsoft has attempted to largely replace the Control Panel for some unknown reason, with the far inferior Settings window. We say “largely” because although…

“iMazing adds features like a profile manager and file system browser that are simply not available from Apple. These provide an extra level of functionality for managing and maintaining your device.” Apple likes to keep your iOS device firmly locked down, and for the most part that is fine. Most of us are not interested in jailbreaking our devices and the risks that come with that, after all. But gaining more control does not have to entail risks – with iMazing 2, you can take a deep dive into your device and keep it well-maintained in a safe and easy way. The various tools provided in iMazing allow you to do several useful things that Apple will not let you do, whether that is through Finder or in the Music,…

On a long-enough timeline, everyone runs out of disk space. This is the law. While you can’t outrun this outcome, you can fend it off by being on the lookout for unnecessary files. For this tutorial, and because that’s the purpose agedu serves, we define files that haven’t been accessed in quite a while as unnecessary. The utility is offered in the default installation by most desktop distributions. You can, however, install it using the software repositories. If you’re running Debian/Ubuntu or a derivative distro, run the sudo apt install agedu command to install it. Users on rpm-based distros can similarly run the dnf install agedu command. Before you start looking up files that haven’t been accessed in a long while, you have to let agedu build an index of…

There’s nothing wrong with ‘shiny and new’, but there’s a lot to be said for learning to recycle your old tech, knowing how to repair what you can, having those restoration projects and re-using the tech you’ve got in new applications. The skills you learn can stay with you for a lifetime. Recycle These days, there’s no excuse for tech disappearing into landfill. Even if you no longer have use for it, there are many ways to responsibly off-load your old kit. For starters, try turning it into some cold, hard cash via Ebay, Gumtree or your local Facebook community swap-sell page. The trick is knowing the prices for brand-new systems and pricing yours accordingly. PCs are a lot like new cars – they lose value as you’re walking out…

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla quietly adds better PS5 haptic support in new update The biggest change appears to be a new implementation of the adaptive triggers when you’re wielding the bow: the right trigger now provides some resistance when Eivor pulls back an arrow, simulating the tension of the bowstring. Some players report more of the general rumbling haptic feedback when attacking with melee weapons as well. Epic Games buys an abandoned mall Epic Games announced in early January that it has purchased a 980,000 square-foot abandoned mall in Cary, North Carolina. The 87-acre ruin, known as Cary Towne Center to locals, will be converted to a new Epic Games campus by the end of 2024. Aside from the sheer scale of the new site, it’s not a huge move for…

Free | PC | papercookies.itch.io/chain The concept behind C.H.A.I.N. is fascinating. It’s a daisy chain of interconnected horror games: 20 games from 20 developers, each of whom had only an inkling of what the other games were about. It begins with Torch (or, if you like, Specimen #01), a simple establishing shot that plonks a woman inside a tomb, and that ends with an ominous door opening. At that point, the game was passed along to the second developer in the daisy chain, who continued the story, as they saw it, with another short game bearing the popular PlayStation aesthetic. And so it went until 20 games had been created, and half a year had passed. The collection was ultimately bundled as C.H.A.I.N., which has some of the most gorgeous…

$53 | PC, Mac, PS4, XB1, Switch | empireofsingame.com Empire of Sin makes a good first impression. It’s clearly born out of a fascination with the prohibition era, and as a management game it tries to capture the breadth of the illegal businesses and shady deals that kept these underground empires going – but it’s even more interested in the people that join and run them. It’s as much an RPG, and each boss has their own storyline and missions that lets you shape the kind of crook you want them to become. Sit-downs are where Empire of Sin’s criminal cast really gets to shine, letting you meet rival bosses to shoot the shit and make deals. They’re hammy and immensely fun conversations, taking advantage of each gangster’s personality and…