Table of contents for May 2021 in APC

As Chris explains in his Two Bits column on page 18 of this issue, we’re switching out the main testbed PC used in the APC Labs from Intel to AMD. The main reason is to take advantage of the PCIe 4 support that AMD’s AM4 platform offers, and has offered long enough for it to be mature, stable and reliable. Intel will surely get there in time too, but with an increasing number of PCIe 4 SSDs being released it’s important we have a platform we can trust for those reviews. “A simple little upgrade can often be a big deal, and sometimes it’s just nice to get something new.” We change the testbed platform once a year or so. Unlike my main gaming / desktop rig at home, which…

“Microsoft and Discord are in exclusive talks and could complete a deal soon, assuming the negotiations don’t fall apart,” the WSJ reports after speaking with sources familiar with the deal. There’s no guarantee that Microsoft and Discord will reach an agreement soon, or indeed at all, and even if the acquisition does go through, we likely won’t see any changes to Discord as a service for some time. The acquisition could be a huge boon for the newly renamed Xbox Network, to say nothing of the Windows brand on PC, but Microsoft’s plans for Discord remain to be seen. That said, you don’t spend US$10 billion on a communications app to not beef up your own social network.…

The ongoing drought in Taiwan has already affected the production of chips such as GPUs and DRAM as well as other components in the country. Apparently, the situation is getting worse as local authorities plan to start rationing water supply starting in April. For now, the production of computer chips and displays is proceeding as usual as companies like AU Optronics and TSMC are trucking water in and drilling wells, but the situation may get worse any time now. Production of chips and display panels requires massive amounts of pure water. Some water can be recycled, but manufacturers still require a steady water supply. SMT (surface mounted technology) electronics assembly, such as production of motherboards, graphics cards, memory modules, SSDs, and other devices featuring PCBs also requires quite a lot…

With a name like AirPods, we had to know: will the AirPods Max be serviceable to any degree? Or did Apple spend a good chunk of the $900 price on over-engineering them into knots? MAJOR TECH SPECS Two 40 mm Apple-designed dynamic drivers Two colour-matched magnetic ear cushions Two Apple H1 chips Eight microphones for active noise cancellation Bluetooth 5.0 with support for the Apple-friendly AAC codec KEY FINDINGS • Along the bottom edge you’ll find a few holes, but none are the round 3.5mm kind. Instead, wired listening is handled by the Lightning port, pulling double duty for listening and charging. • The first step in disassembly is removing the magnetic ear cushions. Underneath the ear cushions: holes! And are those screws? We’re not fighting glue yet. These are…

It’s a really tough time to be a PC gamer. Buying any kind of current generation GPU over the last couple of months has been difficult, if not impossible at RRP. It’s almost as bad on the CPU side and the wider semiconductor market beyond that. Industries that require chips for production are increasingly being bottlenecked by supply constraints. Restricted supply contributes to empty shelves, but when you combine this with unprecedented demand for GPUs, it’s a real one-two punch. It comes down to crypto currency mining. The surge in value of mineable coins such as Ethereum means that miners are happy to pay massively inflated prices in the hope that they will pay for themselves, while also hoping that ETH and other coins continue to rise in value. All…

“The MSI RTX 3060 Gaming X is a perfect example of what a mid-range card should embody. It’s a step above the budget cards while keeping well below crazy 3060 ti price levels.” $849, www.msi.com Sitting in between the ultra-premium Asus and the budget Gigabyte is the MSI RTX 3060 Gaming X. It’s still a premium offering but it eschews some of the characteristics of the top end cards. It’s aimed at buyers who scoff at the premium pricing of top tier cards but still want a quality design that’s more tailored to the characteristics of the GA106 GPU. The MSI Gaming X features a dual fan design. It sits above the mid-range Ventus and below the Gaming X Trio. It features an atypical compact PCB with a six-phase VRM,…

$1,098 | acer.com The headline feature of Acer’s new Swift 3x is undoubtedly the fact that it features Intel’s new discrete GPU – the Iris Xe Max Graphics – which can supposedly work in conjunction with the integrated GPU to deliver even better graphical performance. Intel has stressed that the discrete Xe Max Graphics was not designed for gaming, but is instead optimised for things like image rendering, AI processing and media encoding. Despite this performance focus, there only seems to be Swift 3x configurations available with 8GB of RAM, which seems like a bit of a strange decision for a device looking to appeal to people wanting more bandwidth for creative tasks. The Swift 3x is available exclusively through Harvey Norman as either an i7 with a 1T SSD,…

$549 | netgear.com The big news with this Nighthawk model is the Wi-Fi 6 (the friendly name for 802.11ax), which tops out at a theoretical 4.8Gbps if you’re using a 4x4 client card that can use the 160MHz band. That’s pretty good, though in practice you’ll only get near it with a very recent PCIe card. A recent MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, or PlayStation 5, or the more common 2x2 cards, can still potentially transfer data at gigabit speeds over the airwaves, though we found that it tends to go in bursts of speed and drops down to around 1Mbps in between. Despite all this Wi-Fi tech, there’s a fairly standard arrangement of ports at the back of the XR1000. Four gigabit LAN ports, one WAN connection, one USB 3.0,…

McAfee Total Protection 2021 1GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 500MB free hard drive space, Windows 10. | $231/year for 10 devices | mcafee.com Norton 360 1GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 300MB free hard drive space, Windows 10. | $89.99/year for 3 devices | au.norton.com Once upon a time, this head-to-head would have been billed a clash of the titans. Nowadays, however, both McAfee and Norton find themselves squeezed by an increasingly crowded market. Nevertheless, both continue to hold their own, so for this match-up we’ve paired their premium products – McAfee Total Protection and Norton 360 Deluxe – against each other. We’ll see how their core protection matches up, plus which one delivers the best range of features. “We also put both products through their paces with some real-world malware on an…

Needs DeepPRIME AI, selective adjustment tools, watermarking feature, support for multiple Raw formats | US $99 | from dxo.com When shooting in low light, your camera can use a high ISO setting to make it more sensitive to light. However, this can increase the presence of luminance and colour noise in the captured photo. Photo-fixing apps such as Photoshop and Lightroom use lens profiles to help smooth out noise and counteract distortion. What gives PhotoLab 4 the edge is the application of DxO DeepPRIME AI tech. The app’s AI has been exposed to millions of images produced by different camera and lens models. This enables PhotoLab to learn how to smooth out noise without sacrificing detail, reduce the presence of colour fringing (chromatic aberration), and more. We opened a Canon…

It’s hard to know just how much we’re handled with kid gloves these days as computer users – and this journalist says that from a Linux user’s perspective. It’s likely that many APC readers will remember children’s electronic kits from the 1970s, like Radio Shack’s Science Fair Microcomputer Trainer. You had to handwire components to create a suitable circuit, then program the CPU by inputting single commands and variables in hexadecimal. Horrifying, but fun! It’s the sort of barebones introduction to computing electronics that will suitably traumatise a young child into wanting to learn to program. It’s also about as far away from how current children are introduced to the subject via sanitised iPads and touchscreen devices. Where’s all the fun if there’s no screaming “What do you mean I…

Haha, fit a graphical OS on a floppy disk, crazy talk, right? It is until you go and look at http://menuetos. net which is a graphical OS that fits on a floppy disk. Like many of these alternative tiny operating systems, it’s entirely written in assembly and yet supports 64-bit CPUs, 32GB of RAM, USB 2.0 devices, a full TCP/IP stack, full GUI toolkit and 1080p in 24-bit colour. But can it play Crysis? No, no it can’t. There is a small but active world of alternative operating systems. Some like AROS.org are education-based projects spun out of an older operating system, an API-compatible implementation of AmigaOS but entirely open source and for modern hardware. Others like MikeOS (http://mikeos. sourceforge.net) are created by highly intelligent people that fancy the challenge…

People have done bad things with computers for decades. Even before personal computers, people (“phreakers”) used to abuse telephone systems. The hacking journal 2600 takes its name from the 2600Hz tone required to trick AT&T phone lines into giving free calls in the 1960s. This was possible because the same line carried both voice and connection-management signals. Such in-band signalling was done away with in the 70s when a new signalling system was introduced. This enabled different networks to send this data out of band. This system, known as SS7, is still in use today, and is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. This has been exploited to allow second-factor SMS codes to be intercepted, and accounts to be compromised. The Morris Worm is widely regarded as the first self-replicating worm…

Why would you want to build your own NAS server? You can easily pick up a decent off-the-shelf model in the form of a QNAP or Synology NAS, complete with its own operating system, range of apps and all the rest. Why? Because you’re an APC reader, do you need any other reason? Of course not, but we’ll give you some anyway. QNAP and Synology are very good at what they do, but you’re tied into their ecosystems, which limits you to their choice of hardware, software, and even proprietary filesystems. None of this sits well with us, particularly when our TS-251+ proved so poor at hardware transcoding. The beauty of the self-build system is that you’re in complete control, from choosing the components that make up your turbo-powered NAS,…

We’re sticklers for backing up at APC, so we’re not going to let you off the hook. Every now and then you might want to try something on your server that either fails to work or breaks something else in the process. Thanks to timeshift you can roll things back, just like Windows’ System Restore: Type “timeshift” after installing to get a rundown of all available commands, but the following will perform your first backup, which will be stored your boot partition: Scheduling backups from the command line is tricky – you’ll need some working knowledge of crontab – but it’s easy enough to run manually on demand, such as before major updates or installations. Then, should you ever need to restore a backup, simply issue the following command: You’ll…

The back of your PC probably has both analog and digital audio outputs. Then there are Bluetooth headphones, USB headsets, the speakers on your monitor connected over HDMI, even external sound-processing boxes. For something that can’t generate more than a harsh beeping noise unaided, your PC can actually find many ways to make a noise. Windows doesn’t always make it easy to switch between them, though, and is always liable to blast audio through your speakers when you don’t want it to, or to remain stubbornly silent when you try to connect something to its digital optical output. SoundSwitch is an open-source utility that sets your PC’s audio output, and lets you choose a hotkey so you can swap the noise from speakers to headphones quickly. And it does the…

Terminal emulators and a text environment are quite different. For one, you don’t have the luxury of using a mouse on a text environment, and you can’t run launch multiple windows. Try one of your virtual terminals by pressing Alt-Ctrl-F1. The subject of this tutorial is Twin, which enables you to launch multiple windows in a text environment. Twin (Textmode WINdow environment) is a window environment with mouse support and features a window manager and terminal emulator. It’s different from tmux, which enables you to split your terminal into different panes and perform a variety of different tasks in each. In a nutshell, Twin is no different than having multiple windows open simultaneously on a graphical desktop environment. For those of you who worked with DOS, back in the 80s,…

Changing desktop wallpapers in Chromium OS gets its own app, accessible from “Settings >= Personalisation.” It’s filled with desktop backgrounds, and a few have the option to refresh daily. There are some beautiful options available, but sadly they don’t appear in the Files app. Right-clicking on the desktop gets you a menu, with only three options: to show or hide the dock (actually called the “shelf”); to position the shelf on the side of the screen; and change the wallpaper, which brings up the Wallpaper app. Image files saved to the Downloads folder can be set as a wallpaper by right-clicking them and choosing the appropriate option. Beyond this, there isn’t much personalisation, apart from changing the picture that appears by your account name.…

So far we’ve been covering home computing’s big hits, but we also want to highlight some of the more under-appreciated computers, in the hope that we can generate more interest toward these retro machines. This month we’re covering the Commodore 128, the underrated follow-up to the phenomenal Commodore 64. Although there’s plenty of business and desktop software for the machine, very little exists in the way of native games or demos. We hope to change that. The Commodore 128 provides a great opportunity for any C64 coders who want to enhance their existing titles with extra features and content. After we take you through a brief history of the machine, we will show you how to emulate it. With any luck we can inspire you to learn the machine’s workings,…

“It’s easy to get tunnel vision and zero right in on Horizon Zero Dawn as the star here, but if you have a PSVR headset and haven’t played Astro Bot Rescue Mission yet, oh my.” The next round of free PlayStation Play at Home titles are on the way, including your chance to nab Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition. Before Aloy joins the program this month, you’ll be able to claim nine free games. The selection represents indie favorites from across PS4 and PSVR, and they’re all live now. Here are the regular PS4 games, all of which are playable on PS5 as well through backwards compatibility: Abzû, Enter the Gungeon, Rez Infinite, Subnautica, The Witness And here are the free PSVR titles, which are also playable on PS4 and…

While speaking at a virtual AMA session during the GDC Showcase, Sucker Punch’s Brian Fleming was asked which Ghost of Tsushima feature was the most difficult for the team to work on. “Easy answer and the answer is combat. The combat system was something that the team that worked on that – the handful of programmers and designers and animators – you know they worked nonstop for six years and built multiple versions of it with multiple approaches.”…

YouTuber puts Tenet on Game Boy to spite director This isn’t Christopher Nolan’s first choice for watching the Tenet movie. While artistic integrity is often broadly championed, Christopher Nolan’s assertion that his film Tenet “really needs to be enjoyed in your theatres on the big screen” was perhaps a little tone deaf considering it arrived in the throes of a global pandemic. YouTuber Bob Wulff was so disgruntled by the comment that he dedicated hours to modifying the film for the smallest screen he could think of… the Game Boy Advance. The two and a half hour feature has to be split across five GBA cartridges and was shrunk to a 192x128 pixel resolution that runs at a not so buttery-smooth 6fps. Cherry goes back to the future with new…

Sometimes the toughest problems have the easiest solutions. Nvidia might claim that its hash limiter on the GeForce RTX 3060 is unhackable, but that doesn’t mean that a workaround doesn’t exist. Cryptocurrency miners have seemingly found the solution to the limiter, and it only costs $5.99. Nvidia almost gave away the keys to its own kingdom when the chipmaker accidentally released a GeForce beta driver that partially disabled the limiter. The driver detects if a monitor is connected to the graphics card, but it can’t tell the difference if it’s a real display or not. Therefore, an HDMI dummy plug, which retails for as low as $5.99 on Amazon, easily tricks Nvidia’s driver into thinking that a display is effectively present when in reality, it isn’t.…

YouTuber stacksmashing has successfully repurposed his old Game Boy paired with a Raspberry Pi Pico to mine Bitcoin. Since the Game Boy lacks the required wireless connectivity, the handheld gaming console is unable to communicate with the Bitcoin network without the help of a middle man. That’s why a $12 Raspberry Pi Pico is hooked into the contraption. The Game Boy is equipped with an 8-bit Sharp LR35902 processor clocked at 4.18 MHz. The chip puts up a performance of approximately 0.8 hashes per second. For comparison, modern ASIC miners typically offer up to 100 terahashes per second. Therefore, the Game Boy is only 125 trillion times slower. Calculations reveal that it would only take a couple quadrillion years to eventually mine a single Bitcoin.…

It is well known that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Foundry dominate the market of contract chip production. They are the only companies to offer leading-edge process technologies and have the largest capacities. Meanwhile, TSMC and Samsung Foundry are on track to become the dominant manufacturers of advanced chips as nobody, including Intel, can match their capital expenditures. TSMC: big can only get bigger Founded in 1987, TSMC was the world’s first pure play foundry that manufactured chips for others. In 34 years of its history, the company has grown from a small entity with one fab to a multi-billion corporation with five 300mm fabs, seven 20mm fabs, and one 150mm production facility. Having developed dozens of process technologies throughout its history and having installed vast production capacities, TSMC…

$240 | www.rog.asus.com Asus ROG Bezel Free Kit Cast an invisibility spell on your bezels. If you play on a triple-screen setup, you hate bezels. This is the solution. The two plastic lens strips cover the area where the bezels meet, and using light refraction remove the bezel from visibility, leaving nothing but wraparound screen. They take but a minute to install and APC’s sim racing editor has been road testing them and is impressed. The lenses themselves don’t quite let all the light through, so you’re aware of their presence, and there’s a little distortion at the top and bottom of the screen where your eyes aren’t level, but fine tuning the screen angles can almost eliminate that. Yes, a bit expensive for two plastic strips, but a lot…

“The Asus Strix is packed to the hilt with top shelf specs and features. Its boost clock is 1,912MHz in its maximum software applied OC mode, though out of the box it clocks in at 1,882Mhz, easily the highest of the roundup.” $1,059 | www.asus.com You can always rely on Asus to produce a card that’s worthy of being described as a flagship. The ROG Strix RTX 3060 OC has the lot. It’s the fastest, the coolest, the quietest and it has the best feature set. But it carries a significant price premium. We’re trying not to judge current pricing too harshly as all GPUs will certainly drop over time, but do be aware that the Asus will cost you a pretty penny. When normal times return, it will likely…

$2,599 | asus.com/au Asus’s TUF Gaming A15 is back again in 2021 with 5000 series AMD CPUs and RTX 30 cards and the partnership couldn’t be sweeter. AMD has been ramping up its presence in the laptop market over the last couple of years with pretty staggering performance and efficiency margins over comparable Intel products and Asus’s TUF gaming laptops have been some of the first devices to showcase them. This year the TUF Gaming A15 is fitted with an 8-core 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, 16GB of RAM and either an Nvidia RTX 3060 or 3070 GPU. The former goes for $2,099 locally while the upgraded GPU will add another $300 to that total. Both these configurations come with a 15.6-inch FullHD IPS display that runs at 144Hz,…

$549 | www.terra-master.com/global TerraMaster is a new name for APC but it didn’t take us long to be impressed: the brushed, aluminium chassis looks classy despite it being less discreet than rivals. Physically setting it up is simple thanks to the quick-release, plastic front panels, but you’ll need the included screwdriver to attach the drives to the bays. We plugged it into our router using one of the two gigabit Ethernet ports, went to the quickstart-guide-recommended setup webpage, downloaded the TNAS discovery app, found the NAS and ran through the simple “TOS” operating system setup instructions. We tested using two, 12TB drives and were soon prompted to choose either Btrfs or Ext4 file systems before selecting a RAID array. Soon, we were looking at the TOS desktop. The TNAS app…

$399 | www.msi.com Depending on who you ask, the B in B550 stands for business or budget. There’s nothing budget about the MSI MEG B550 Unify though. It’s a premium board through and through. MSI divides its gaming motherboards into three lines, there’s MAG at the lower end, MPG in the middle and MEG at the top. The MEG series includes the premium (and expensive) Godlike and Ace, so the fact that MSI includes the B550 Unify in its top product tier alongside its very best motherboards indicates we’re looking at a serious piece of kit. The B550 Unify features an all-black design, with no RGB lighting. Isn’t that a surprise in these gamified times! The power delivery system wouldn’t be out of place on a board that costs twice…

Linux | rebornos.org There are several distros that want to extend the flexibility of Arch Linux to the average desktop user without inundating them with endless options. Manjaro is our current favourite, and the now-defunct Antergos was another. In many aspects, RebornOS is the spiritual continuation of Antergos. It’s put together by a team of developers that maintained the Antergos Deepin Community Edition, and builds on the unique aspects of the discontinued distro. By its own admission, RebornOS wants to extend Arch’s famed customisability to its users without forcing them to flip through manuals or drop down to the terminal. They take a swing at this lofty goal through a couple of things. The first is the custom installer based on Antergos’ Cnchi. The thing about Cnchi is that unlike…

According to recent research by networking specialist Cisco, nearly two-thirds of the global population will have internet access by 2023. That’s around 5.3 billion souls, a huge leap from the 3.9 billion that had access in 2018. But here’s the kicker. Wireless network growth is expected to be even more explosive. Cisco reckons that there were 169 million wireless hotspots globally in 2018, but the number is set to quadruple to 628 million by 2023. That’s a whole lot of new Wi-Fi. Of course, it’s not just humans that are bandwidth hungry. In 2018 there were around five billion connected devices that fell into the M2M, or machine-to-machine, connectivity category. In other words, machines talking to each other with no humans involved. In 2023, the number of connected M2M devices…

Before you can do anything you’ll want to start the ISO downloading for the Arch Linux install image. Head to www. archlinux.org/download and grab one of the torrents, or else scroll down to one of the localised mirrors. Best practice is to run an integrity check on the download file – this ensures that it’s downloaded correctly but also that no one has interfered with the stored file. Technically the ISO file and checksum hash should be stored on different systems, so it’s harder to compromise both. The easiest way is to use a hasher, such as IgorWare Hasher (www.igorware.com/hasher) for Windows types, load the ISO file and click “Calculate.” The generated SHA-1 and MD5 hash should match that on the Arch Linux download page. You can copy and paste…

In the past we’d have directed you to hack by setting up the Metasploitable virtual machine and attacking it. We’d encourage you to do that too, (you’ll find all the information you need at https://github.com/ rapid7/metasploitable3). But this time around we’re going to do something different. The Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) is exactly what you might expect: it’s a PHP application riddled with security holes. It requires a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack to run, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing you want to deploy on an internet-facing server. So rather than set all that up from scratch, we’ll cheat and use the Docker image. Just follow the simple three-step guide (below). We can’t get enough of Portainer, so if you’re similarly enamoured with this container…

Baiting attackers towards your own hardware might not seem a particularly good idea, but if that hardware has nothing of value on it, and is suitably isolated from your other machines, then you can more or less lure them in with impunity. The goal of setting up a honeypot is not to revenge-hack attackers, but rather to detect attacks, and distract those responsible from more valuable targets. Opening your home network up to the internet isn’t something that should be done lightly, though. If the honeypot machine was to be compromised, then it could be used as a staging post for attacking any services running on your network, including your home router. If you were foolish enough to run a honeypot on your desktop PC, then it’s possible that an…

If you’re looking to build your own NAS from scratch, then there are two key considerations: chassis size, and power draw. A NAS is designed to be run 24-7, so a low-powered CPU like Intel’s Atom range seems a logical choice. But if you want to use your NAS as a Plex or Jellyfin media server, you need a processor with decent hardware transcoding support. This is where Intel’s Pentium Silver J5040 chip comes into its own: quad-core, with onboard Intel UDH Graphic 605 ensures that the hardware transcoding produces watchable streams, while its miniscule power draw means the chip can be cooled by heatsink alone. Our server was built around the Asrock J5040-ITX motherboard (pictured above), which comes with the J5040 chip onboard with heatsink. It technically supports up…

If you want to run some calculations and conversions on your Mac, Apple’s Calculator app and even Spotlight are decent places to start. But neither of those options offers anywhere near the level of depth, customisation, and power you get with PCalc. If you find they’re missing the mark, PCalc is what you need. The long-lived app has been around since 1992 – nearly 30 years! – yet is still going strong and feels right at home in macOS Big Sur thanks to its dedicated developer. It comes with a range of useful tools for almost any calculating need: switchable modes between binary, hexadecimal, octal and others, quick access to mathematical constants for use in your calculations (or simply for reference), conversions between numerous formats, and much, much more. Despite…

You can connect a mouse or touchpad to the Pi. Touchpad use is almost exactly the same as in Windows. Tapping with two fingers gets you the right-click menu, and scrolling involves dragging two fingers down the pad. If you want to reverse this, there’s an option in “Settings >= Mouse,” from where you can also adjust the pointer speed. Pressing the Windows key brings up the Launcher, from where you can choose between recent applications or search for a new one, and there’s a circle button in the bottom-left corner that does the same thing. “Settings >= Keyboard” contains a great many options for mapping a Windows keyboard to the Chromebook standard, enabling you to change the behavior of Ctrl, Alt, Esc, Backspace, and more. Finally, Google Assistant can…

The director of Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda has left BioWare. Jonathan Warner announced the news on Twitter last month. “So, today is my last day at BioWare, I’m moving on to do new things,” Warner wrote. “BioWare has been home to my grateful heart for nearly 10 years and I want to wish them all the best.” Publisher Electronic Arts and BioWare announced in February that they will cease development on Anthem, which launched in early 2020 to widespread negative criticism. A plan to reinvigorate the live service loot shooter was also abandoned in February, with BioWare focusing on new Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. In addition to his work on Anthem and Andromeda, Warner is also credited as a director on the original Mass Effect trilogy, which…

Little else was revealed in the latest Dying Light 2 update, but we did get a few moments of gameplay and... some sort of Mean Tweets style montage of the devs reading off profanity-laced complaints from impatient fans. The devs also talked briefly about when we can expect more info, directing fans to the game’s Discord where they can submit questions for an upcoming Q&A. At the end of the video, the 2021 release window flashes across the screen. Though, there seems to be some confusion about whether the devs were saying the game is releasing in 2021 or if they just meant more info is coming this year. Personally, I would hope it’s a given that we’d at least hear from the devs on Dying Light 2 this year,…

$19.99 | PC, Mac, Linux | loophero.com Loop Hero This charming micro RPG is one of this year’s first true gems. From the moment its 16-colour title screen fades in alongside dramatic chiptunes, Loop Hero feels like some forgotten, VGA-era fantasy RPG, a game that contains the mystery and difficulty of 1991, gently modernised to 2021. Behind that charming intro screen isn’t empty, indulgent nostalgia, but a novel gameplay format that’s strangely engrossing, considering much of your time playing Loop Hero is hands-off. I want more games like this. The setup is dead-simple: you send one of three heroes (warrior, rogue, or necromancer) on repeated expeditions to an empty road. As your little hero auto-walks around this stone path, you populate the blank world around it by playing cards like…

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…

Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger made several big announcements about its 7nm tech at the Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future event in late March, revealing that the company has solved the primary issues that have resulted in an untenable delay to its 7nm products. As a result, Intel will tape in its first 7nm compute chip for desktop PCs, Meteor Lake, in the second quarter of this year, with the first chips shipping to customers in 2023. Intel also divulged that it will also ship its 7nm Granite Rapids data centre CPUs in 2023. Intel says that 7nm’s issues stemmed from difficulties with series of steps in its manufacturing process and that it has leaned more heavily on EUV manufacturing to rearchitect that series of steps and simplify the design…

Micron announced that it is selling its 3D XPoint fab in Lehi, Utah, bringing an end to its production of the radical new memory technology that it developed with Intel. The company plans to sell the fab by the end of 2021 and exit the 3D XPoint business entirely. Micron will cease all further development of 3D XPoint-based products due to lacklustre demand that the company says has “insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialise 3D XPoint at scale.” The company recently divulged that it lost US$400 million this year alone due to the lack of demand for 3D XPoint. Intel and Micron developed the revolutionary 3D XPoint persistent memory, which melds the speed and endurance of DRAM with the persistence of…

$829 | www.gigabyte.com If you’re looking to upgrade but don’t want to spend the bigger bucks on a premium-tier card, the Gigabyte RTX 3060 Eagle OC may be exactly what you’re looking for. It’s Gigabyte’s entry level card. There are two models available, one with the Nvidia reference clock, and the OC model that we have on hand for this roundup which features a boost clock of 1,807MHz. This is quite a way below the Asus at 1,882MHz and the MSI 1,837MHz, but then don’t forget that Gigabyte offers highly overclocked Aorus cards too. It features a compact PCB that’s surrounded by a grey shroud and backplate. The rear of the card features a large cut out to allow air to pass out the back and into the path of…

$897 | lenovo.com/au Chromebooks are a great alternative to Windows 10 S for anyone looking to get all the functionality of a modern laptop without having to fork out thousands for a premium Ultrabook, and Lenovo seems to be dominating the space locally. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex i5 Chromebook is a 13.3-inch convertible laptop that uses Google Chrome OS based on Android 9. While not every app is perfectly optimised for the system – we much prefer to use the browser based Google Docs than the Chrome OS app, for example – it does at least have broad compatibility with anything you can get on the Google Play Store or as a Chrome browser extension. The OS is built around the GSuite office apps which are a great free alternative…

$549 | www.dlink.com.au We’ve been somewhat unimpressed with D-Link’s middling Wi-Fi offerings in recent times, but here’s a three-node, Wi-Fi 6 system that costs significantly less than its rivals. Could this be the product to buy? The three nodes are identical and quite large. They also feel a bit cheap, plasticy and lightweight but from a distance, they’re relatively unobtrusive and would fit well into most stylish living rooms without blighting their appearance. Set-up is very simple: you download the app, scan a QR code in the box and follow the instructions regarding setting-up passwords. After the first node is complete, simply powering on the other two sees them added to the network automatically. You’re then invited to update the firmware and are good to go in about ten minutes.…

$799 | www.asus.com The AM4 socket is now in the twilight of its career. Since its debut in September 2016, the AM4 socket has played host to four generations of Ryzen CPUs. X570 is likely to be the last high end AM4 chipset, and that means all of the tweaks, fixes, updates and lessons learned over the years are incorporated. Here for review we have the Asus Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. It’s one of very few X570 boards that were optimised for the Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs. Having spent some time with it, and ignoring the fact that this is only the introduction, we’re happy to say that it may not only be the best X570 board of all, but a contender for the best AM4 motherboard ever made.…

No matter how hard we try, we all accumulate far too much fluff on our iOS devices. That’s compounded the longer we use them, with duplicate photos, incomplete contacts, and tons of unwanted emails flooding our devices and eating up storage space. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Add a few handy apps to your arsenal and you can quickly reclaim the space and declutter your device for good. Here, we have rounded up six apps that do just that – and best of all, most are free. Set them loose on your iPhone or iPad, and your digital life will be the most ordered and organised it has ever been. Clean Email Free (IAPs) | NEEDS iOS 11 or later We all amass email newsletters, spam and…

Have you ever wondered what makes a PC start and run, I mean really run? Not just hand-waving “the processor boots the operating system” dismissive nonsense, which isn’t any more enlightening than saying that stuff is made of atoms. The nuts and bolts when you press the power button and the PSU fires up its 12, 5, and 3-volt lines to the motherboard – how does the processor even know what to start running, and how is that even loaded into memory when there’s nothing to run to do that? We are talking (semi) software level here. If you want to know how individual hardware components work then that’s another world of glorious pain to explore – gawping at the level of insanity of the Intel 8088 architecture that leaves…

If all of this sounds super-crazy, back in 1983 Richard Stallman created the GNU Project (GNU is Not Unix), and the first items to be developed were the GNU C compiler GCC (it remains one of the leading compilers today), the EMACS text editor, the GNU Coreutils (file manipulation), the GNU Bash shell, and the GNU C library glibc, which provides the basic function calls to enable C to work on a system. All of these tools developed 35 years ago are still used within most open-source operating systems to one degree or another today. So while this might seem just a bit of silly fun, it does genuinely outline the basic building blocks and steps required to boot a computer. And absolutely with older BIOS systems this is the…

The tools we’re going to show you can be installed on pretty much any Linux distro, but we’re going to use Kali Linux. This is primarily because it has all these tools installed already, and there’s excellent documentation if you want some more information about it. Kali is probably not something you’d want to use as a daily driver, although if you look online you’ll see a lot of posts by budding haxors that do just this. Up until the end of last year Kali used the root account by default, since many tricks such as handcrafting network packets require this. It would be a terrible idea if you were running, say, your mail client as root and you clicked a dodgy link. Using the root account was sound practice…

01 RUN THE IMAGE Use the official instructions to get Docker installed. Then run the image with: $ docker run –rm -it -p 8080:80 vulnerables/ web-dvwa In a moment you should find the server running on port 8080 of the host machine. Click the “Create/Reset Database” button to begin the fun. 02 BEGIN SLEUTHING Log in with the super-secure combination admin:password and go to the SQL Injection page from the menu on the right. This appears to be some kind of user query utility. Try entering “1” into the form. You should see some information about the admin user. See what else you can find out from here. 03 STEAL A COOKIE We’re going to attack this web app using SQL later on in the tutorial, but to do that…

Most of what we’ve covered here will be more of interest to those wanting to defend their services than to home users. It’s hard to give general advice for protecting your home network. We’ve always told users to keep their software updated and to be wary of emails from princes needing somewhere to stash their fortunes. And in general that advice goes a long way – those princes aren’t real, and popular applications are patched quickly. The Linux kernel has second-to-none security processes, even in the face of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that will be here for a long time. We put a lot of trust in our home routers, though, and perhaps that’s misplaced. Imagine if all the machines on your network were subject to the same probing and…

Traditionally, software is installed on Ubuntu via package archives known as repositories, and these remain a vital tool for getting software onto your server. Ubuntu provides three official repos by default for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS: focal, focal, focal-updates, and focal-backports. You can browse their contents at https:// packages.ubuntu.com, and these can all be installed from the command line as soon as you log into Ubuntu Server for the first time. The biggest issue with Ubuntu’s package archives is that many applications found here are frozen at the point of Ubuntu 20.04’s release, so any subsequent developer updates are ignored until your next major upgrade (22.04 isn’t due until May 2022). One prime example of this is Cockpit, which is ‘stuck’ at version 215 in Ubuntu 20.04 (27 updates have been…

Are you carbon neutral? Apple is set to be completely carbon netural by 2030, and its global corporate operations already are. And with the Eevie app, you can head in that direction too. From driving cars and heating our homes to buying a brand new MacBook, the things we do have an environmental impact and lead to increased carbon emissions. Fortunately, we are now becoming more and more aware of the changes we need to make. We can change our habits in two ways. One, we can take steps to reduce our environmental impact; and two, we can offset our carbon emissions by contributing to projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as tree planting. A little goes a long way As we’ll discover, Eevie helps you with both.…

The beauty of single-board computers is that they can be switched between operating systems easily – it’s just a case of swapping a microSD card over and switching it back on. The operating systems are easy to install too, flashed to a card from your PC with a user-friendly piece of software. You can certainly install a full 64-bit operating system like Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi, and get real work done on a diminutive PC. This time, we’re going to do the same thing, but to the opposite extreme. Chromium OS – an open-source version of the Chromebook OS – is as minimal as things come without being a command line, as it’s just the Chrome browser. But that doesn’t mean it’s particularly limited. There’s a full office suite…

It’s still pretty amazing to think that when astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, he got there with a navigational computer having less processing power than an Arduino Uno makerboard. However, that same year, a Japanese business machines maker and a fledgling U.S. chipmaker would embark on a project that revolutionised computing forever – the Intel 4004 CPU. Just another calculator? During the 1960s, if you coveted the latest in technology, you had an all-electronic calculator. Forget adding machines and slide rules – the calculator was the ‘iPhone 12 Pro’ of the day and many well-known big-name brands were churning them out – Casio, Canon, Sony, Toshiba, Sharp, IBM, along with a smaller player that would go on to have a bit to do…

Another game has fallen afoul of the Australian Classification Board, and this time it’s a game that Aussie PC users have been able to buy and play for years. In the lead up to its late March ‘ The Final Cut’ reissue, which adds voice acting and a slew of other quality of life improvements, the board has refused classification. Like several other games that have received an RC ruling, Disco Elysium features drug use as an incentive, though factors such as addiction, crime, cruelty and violence were also listed by the board. While the original game was not manually assessed by the board due to being a digital only PC release, the Final Cut is due for release on consoles and also a physical editions. If you already own…

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been upscaled to 8K with ray-tracing enabled by a YouTube channel that specialises in applying next-gen graphics and photorealistic visuals to modern games. The channel responsible for making Hyrule look so beautiful is Digital Dreams (tinyurl.com/APC493ZEL), who have also upscaled other games including Immortals Fenix Rising at 8K, and Star Wars Battlefront 2 with photo-realistic visuals.…

DEVELOPER BIOWARE PUBLISHER LUCASARTS RELEASED 2003 WEB bit.ly/starwarsknights Like many people, I recently finished season 2 of The Mandalorian and was left with a hunger for more Star Wars in any form. I rewatched the original trilogy, read a selection of graphic novels and books (including Steve Perry’s brilliant Shadows of the Empire), and – and best of all – decided to replay BioWare’s classic Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic. The last time I played KOTOR was around the time of its release in the autumn of 2003, and it was the perfect antidote to the disappointing prequel trilogy. George Lucas was two films deep by this point. Attack of the Clones was released the year before and I was not a fan, to put it mildly.…