Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2024 in APC

TECH BRIEF If someone had asked you early last year to predict the key figures in a hypothetical war between Russia and Ukraine, you probably wouldn’t have named Elon Musk. But as we’ve seen over the past 18 months, the mogul behind Tesla, SpaceX and now Twitter, has played a surprisingly pivotal role in the war thanks to Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite broadband network. “Starlink gives one person the ability to turn off a system that’s being used by a country that’s fighting for its self-defence.” First deployed in 2019, the Starlink network now has more than 4,000 satellites in orbit around the Earth, and the company continues to launch a couple of dozen or so on a weekly basis. Unlike previous attempts at satellite internet, what makes Starlink unique is…

Until very recently, the handheld gaming PC market was essentially just the Steam Deck, with not enough contenders to round out a Top 5 list. Now, they’re coming from all corners, and it’s not hard to understand why. The ability to play your favourite PC games wherever you are clearly appeals to a lot of buyers, but how do you make sure you get the best bang for your buck? By buying one of our picks below, of course. 5 AYANEO AIR 1S Go for the Ayaneo Air 1S because it’s incredibly portable, coming in at just 21.6mm thick and weighing only 450g. You needn’t worry about its inclusion in your luggage if you’re traveling long distances. Its size isn’t at the cost of power, thanks to the beefy AMD…

THIS ISSUE 33 Apple iMac (M3) 34 Allied Stinger A 35 Fitbit Charge 6 36 Thermaltake TH240 V2 Ultra 37 Team Group Xtreem DDR5 48GB 8200 38 Qnap TVS-h674T NAS 39 Synology Cloud services 42 Meta Quest 3 44 Lenovo Legion Go APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over 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…

PRICE $259.95 WEB fitbit.com/global/au/home The Charge range from Fitbit has maintained its dominance in the fitness wearable space thanks to a great balance of features, battery life and cost. At $259.95 this fitness tracker is one of the best value offerings you can get, featuring advanced heart rate, connected-GPS and blood oxygen tracking to give you easy-to-understand data on your workout intensity, cardio fitness and your daily exercise readiness score. “The new Charge 6 builds on this solid foundation by harnessing Google AI algorithms to improve the heart rate tracking by up to 60% in particular exercises.” All this information helps you work out the most efficient times, durations and intensity of workouts to ensure you’re working efficiently. The new Charge 6 builds on this solid foundation by harnessing Google…

PRICE $3,849 WEB www.qnap.com QNAP’s TVS-h674T fulfils the NAS-based promise of Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. It’s aimed at creators and small studios who want multiple users to be able to upload, edit and share UHD video across a network without relying on the traditional bane of multiple, expensive, shared, single-connection, tethered hard drives. There are six, tool-less, lockable and hotswappable, 3.5-inch drive bays (included screws are needed for 2.5-inch SSDs). There are also two M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slots for fast NVMe drives that can be used for super-fast storage or SSD caching. For the latter, they can be optimised for virtualisation and database applications (Random I/O) or file serving and media streaming (All I/O). “QNAP states that using six, 22TB drives provides a maximum 110TB of formatted storage capacity but…

PRICE $1,299 WEB lenovo.com The Lenovo Legion Go is an all-in-one handheld PC, aimed primarily at gamers. So why, you might ask, is it basking in a two-page review within APC? The answer is that it has enough versatility to also serve as a general-purpose computing companion. It’s not the only such system out there. Asus released its ROG Ally earlier this year and the Steam Deck remains a great choice if all you want to do is play games from your Steam library. Where the Go stands apart is that this is a slick and well-engineered device that I can imagine someone choosing to bring with them on a business trip rather than a laptop. Big is beautiful The Legion Go is a sizeable thing, measuring 299mm from end…

DEVELOPER The Tails Project WEB tails.net LICENCE GNU GPLv3 Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian-based security-focused Linux distro. Although its creators are keen to stress that there’s no such thing as complete anonymity online, Tails can come very close if used properly. Tails is a live OS designed to be booted from a DVD or USB stick. This means it runs entirely in RAM, which in theory means there’s no digital footprint left on the machine once you’ve finished using it. Upon shutdown, the OS even overwrites most of the used RAM data to prevent it being recovered through a cold boot attack. Naturally, this works both ways, in that you also can’t save any downloaded files, bookmarks or Wi-Fi password in live mode, which is why…

Contrary to what some Twitter (sorry, X) threads would have you believe, getting up at 5am and taking cold showers is not the only path to a productive day or week. In fact, simply making a note of all the tasks to be completed for a day or week can lead to being more productive – provided you do the work and complete the tasks. Released under the BSD licence, Calcurse is a text-based organiser that features an Ncurses-driven interface. You can use the tool to keep track of important events such as birthdays and anniversaries, and also schedule appointments and everyday tasks. The default interface provides a list of all appointments for the week, as well as all your tasks in your to-do list. The notification system additionally informs…

The games we play PRICE $69.95 PLATFORM PC, PS5, XBS/X WEB tinyurl.com/APC528cs2 Cities: Skylines II is much bigger than the original, but unfortunately it’s not better – at least not yet. As in the first game, you begin with a small square of land on a giant slice of map. You start laying down roads, zoning for residential, commercial, and industrial areas, and watch as little bitty homes and businesses begin to spring up. Then the delicate dance begins as you try to balance budgets and costs while expanding from a small town to a booming city to a mega-metropolis filled with towering skyscrapers, airports and harbours, and thousands of simulated citizens. There are some big early game improvements over the original Skylines, like the ability to import electricity from…

If anyone can be called a connoisseur of videogames, it’s Frank Gasking. One of his favourites is Deadlock for the Commodore 64. “When you look at the game and its level of detail, it’s one of the best-looking titles ever seen on the computer thanks to the artwork of Robin Levy,” Gasking told us. “It was made a few years before Super Metroid came out on the SNES and it’s almost like the team from that game had seen Deadlock running. Of course, they hadn’t.” There’s a strong reason why he’s so convinced that the team behind one of Nintendo’s most iconic games couldn’t have drawn inspiration from Deadlock. The latter game was never actually released. Like so many titles over the years, it was put in limbo, with the…

FUTURES We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future Facial recognition is problematic for humans. When it works, it invades privacy and eases us into a surveillance state. When it doesn’t work, people have been falsely arrested by police. But that’s people. For bears, it’s all good – and facial recognition is now being used to help research, monitor and protect the animals using a neural network-based system called BearID. Melanie Clapham tracks grizzlies. Normally, that requires methodically examining photographs or physically tagging the animal, as the University of Victoria researcher’s work on grizzly behaviour requires being able to pinpoint a specific individual. But that’s not easy because bears have few distinctive markings – they’re all brown and fluffy – and can dramatically change appearance…

Nikon Z f From $3,499 | nikon.com.au Inspired by the Nikon FM2 camera, the Z f is a full-frame mirrorless camera that blends analogue design with Nikon’s acclaimed Z series performance. The 24.5MP camera boasts an Expeed 7 processor, 4K video (as well as 10-bit H.265), and eight-stop vibration-reduction image stabilisation. The processor enables subject detection so that the camera can automatically move its focus to follow the subject. The Z f is Nikon’s first full-frame Z camera with a fully rotatable touchscreen vari-angle monitor, and Touch FN means you can use your thumb to specify focus on the monitor while you compose your shot through the viewfinder. Thanks to Pixel Shift, you can blend up to 32 shots to create really high-res images, and there are Flat and Deep…

PRICE From $2,199 WEB apple.com/au The colourful 24-inch iMac from Apple had a major update back in 2021, when the sleek all-in-one PC was fitted out with the first Apple silicone processors. So this 2023 refresh is a much more conservative upgrade that adds a bit of processing power and modern interface specs to an already exceptional all-in-one. The new iMac features the same two or four port configurations as its predecessor, with the former starting at $2,199. This is a pretty compelling starting price when you consider you’re getting a 23.5-inch Retina display with a 4.5K resolution, a powerful 8-core M3 CPU and all the peripherals needed to get up and running, included in that price. If you look online for a 24 inch 4K screen with professional colour…

PRICE $239 WEB www.thermaltake.com.au If you’re reading this, the chances are you’re aware that the latest CPUs can get pretty hot. It’s more important than ever to invest in a good cooler. Not just to keep your CPU running at acceptable temperatures, but to keep clock speeds at their highest levels too. Thermaltake’s TH series coolers cover all price points. While the hottest chips like the i9 14900K or nearly-as-hot Ryzen 9 7950X3D require a 360mm cooler, those with less demanding chips shouldn’t have to give up the premium features and aesthetics that go with such coolers. Thermaltake’s TH240 V2 Ultra ARGB cooler is a good example. It comes with an integrated 2.1-in LCD and it’s well priced at $239. It’s a premium cooler for mainstream CPUs. As a modern…

WEB www.marticliment.com/wingetui NEEDS Windows 10 or 11 FastStone Image Viewer is one of our favourite free tools for browsing photos on your PC, with lots of useful features and support for a wide range of image formats. This latest version expands that list to include the AVIF format (which offers higher compression rates than JPEG) and adds new options that make the program even easier to use. One of the most notable changes is the addition of a ‘Search by Name’ box to the toolbar that appears above FastStone Image Viewer’s thumbnail browser (which shows all the images stored in the selected folder). This helps you quickly find a picture or video by typing a few letters of the file name, rather than sorting items by name to locate it…

“The screen-capture element of the program is quite simple, with one-click options for capturing images and videos, but we found the Snagit Editor annoying. ” Snagit 2024 WEB www.techsmith.com/store/snagit PRICE $106.84 Free trial period: 15 days NEEDS Windows 10 or 11, or macOS Snagit was one of the first tools for taking screenshots, dating all the way back to 1990. Over the years, it’s added plenty of features, but has also significantly increased in price and no longer offers a free version. With a download size of over 510MB and a slow installation process, Snagit 2024 feels bloated from the off, and you need to register with developer TechSmith just for the 15-day free trial. The screen-capture element of the program is quite simple, with one-click options for capturing images…

If you’re building the ultimate gaming rig, you’ll want to know the answer to this question: What is the best gaming processor you can buy? Is it the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D or the Intel Core i7 14900K? We’re here to answer that question. Both processors have their strengths and weaknesses, and both go about things in different ways. The 14900K goes for the brute force approach, offering clock speeds as high as 6.0GHz. Other things being equal, a higher clock speed means higher performance. The problem with the 14900K is that it runs hot and requires a lot of power when presented with a full load. AMD’s flagship incorporates stacked V-Cache, offering 128MB of on-chip level 3 cache compared to the 14900K’s 32MB. That means more data can be…

Overclocking conflict I reinstalled my old RX 570 graphics card in a rig for my brother, and wanted to give him a free speed boost as an extra present. While I can overclock the memory to 1,750 MHz with MSI Afterburner, if I install AMD’s Adrenaline on to the system, it’ll crash – black screen, followed by the PC freezing. However, if I raise the voltage controller memory setting in Adrenaline before applying the change in Afterburner, it works okay. Why is it doing this? No voltage settings are required when it’s just MSI Afterburner installed. Phil Strader APC Responds: This sounds like a classic software conflict where one application (Adrenaline) overwrites the changes of another (Afterburner), resulting in the problems you’ve experienced. Ultimately, Adrenaline is optimised for AMD cards,…

EDGE Recover lost favourites and fill forms faster In the past year, we’ve frequently complained about Microsoft stuffing Edge with unnecessary features, so we’re pleased that version 117 (released in September) removes some of this junk. The ‘deprecated’ tools include Maths Solver, Picture Dictionary, Citations and Kids Mode, and their removal makes the browser less cluttered and quicker to navigate. The two new features in Edge 117 are genuinely useful additions. One is called Microsoft Edge Sync Favourites Recovery, and lets you recover ‘favourites’ (Microsoft’s name for bookmarks) that you’ve accidentally deleted. Provided you have Sync enabled in the browser, and are signed into your Microsoft account, you can now restore deleted favourites from the past 14 days. To do so, click the Favourites button on Edge’s toolbar (this looks…

PRICE $59.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XBS/X WEB tinyurl.com/APC528pd3 Compared to Payday 2, Payday 3 dials everything back down to zero and could easily be mistaken for a reboot. Most of the original crew return from the previous games, but seem to have forgotten where Payday 2 left off. Payday 3’s eight-mission storyline is so serious and straightforward that it was hard to believe I was playing the sequel to a game where a character swaps bodies with the President of the United States after breaking into an ancient bunker beneath the White House. While playing Payday 3, I was retroactively sold on Payday 2 and disappointed by the sequel’s reluctance to embrace its predecessor’s absurdity. Despite having loads of weaponry and skills to handle waves of enemies, stealth runs in…

GAMES PRICE $73.50 PLATFORM PC, PS5, XBS/X WEB www.robocop-roguecity.com/en RoboCop: Rogue City’s combat feels like straight up murder: I totally lost it when I punched someone for the first time and RoboCop’s fist flew out with the force of a particle accelerator, instantly atomising their skull. There is a tremendous sense of physicality in Rogue City. You can pick up enemies by the neck and fling them against walls so hard that chunks of rubble will rain down on their ragdolled corpses. Bullets scatter reams of paper and turn clutter into hurricanes of plastic and metal. Environments are littered with a comical number of explosives, too, that behave in hilariously different ways. Yes, Rogue City has a skill tree system, and it’s way too bloated. My advice: get the first…

NEWS Everything you need to know from the month in tech Nvidia’s penchant for redesigning its GPUs to get around US export restrictions has seemingly been directly called out by the US Commerce Secretary, with a warning that when such redesigns are created “I’m going to control it the very next day.” Since 2022, US chip sanctions have continued to make life somewhat difficult for manufacturers looking to export their products to certain countries, chief among them on the list being China. However, that hasn’t stopped Nvidia from attempting to work its way around the export bans by releasing products that circumvent the current restrictions, introducing slightly redesigned models produced exclusively for the Chinese market. It’s been an entertaining power play, but US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo appears to have…

PRICE $629 WEB www.teamgroupinc.com DDR5 memory speeds continue to climb upwards. Nowadays, some four-slot Z790 refresh motherboards are capable of supporting 8000MHz+, and even AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series CPUs are capable of such speeds with the latest BIOS updates. One of the fastest memory kits on the market comes from Teamgroup. Its T-Force Xtreem DDR5 memory is available in speeds of 7600MHz, 8000MHz and 8200MHz. All speeds are available in either 2x16GB kit or 2x24GB capacities. We’ve got the 2x24GB 8200MHz kit on hand for review. It comes with 38-49-49-84 timings at 1.4V. At $629, this is a memory kit that’s predominantly aimed at enthusiasts and overclockers. If your PC includes anything less than a high end CPU, motherboard and graphics card, you’ll be better served with slower and cheaper memory.…

PRICE $949 (128GB), $1,199 (512GB) WEB meta.com Apple’s Vision Pro has reset expectations of what a mixed reality headset can be, but two big things stand in its way: a likely price of $3,500 and uncertainty over its release date in Australia. Until now, your best mixed reality bet was the Meta Quest 2 – but the Meta Quest 3 improves on it in just about every way. For a start, the visor is a drastic 40% slimmer than its predecessor, which makes the Quest 3 far more comfortable to wear. While I can’t claim that I ever forgot I was wearing a headset on my face, I did feel a noticeable difference from the top-heavy Quest 2. Thanks to the slimmer design, Meta ditched the spacer for users like…

PRICE Free (IAP, $36.99 a year or $5.99 a month) WEB binaryformations.com | NEEDS macOS 11.1 or later, iOS/iPadOS 14 or later Under My Roof is a household property database that’s free to download, but limited to indexing 10 items. You can remove this limitation with a yearly or monthly subscription (if you cancel, you can still access inventory you’ve already added). It’s available for Mac, iPad and iPhone, with your details syncing over iCloud and a single subscription covering the app on all platforms. “Usefully, you can also include pictures of the purchase receipt and/or warranty information, and attach documents such as electronic instruction manuals.” As you’d expect, you can index your household possessions, recording information such as make, model, price, condition, quantity, location and more. You can add…

Part 3 of 8: War and Peace The new decade is barely six weeks old when Australian scientist Professor (later Sir) Mark Oliphant is involved in development of one of the greatest inventions of the war, the cavity magnetron. It revolutionises radar, thanks to its production of 10cm radio-waves and delivers a quantum-change in radar-image resolution. TV engineer Alan Blumlein and others take the cavity magnetron and by 1942, indicator lines and points on a cathode-ray tube begin to display terrain and map-like images from the air. What’s more, while Blumlein’s contribution in British television went ‘lights-out’ for the duration of the war, television itself would still have one more vital ‘defensive’ role to play. The Battle of the Beams Even early in the war, radio played a role well…

WINDOWS 11 Swap what your function keys do Pressing the F1 to F12 function keys on laptops each perform two tasks. Which one it carries out depends on whether you hold down the Fn key at the same time. For example, pressing F5 mutes/unmutes audio, while pressing Fn+F5 refreshes a web page. If you want to reverse this, so pressing F5 refreshes web pages and documents, you’ll need to change a setting in your BIOS. You can access your BIOS when booting your laptop, though how you do so depends on your particular device – so have a look in the manual. Often pressing F10 or F12 repeatedly works. If not, try Delete or Esc. What you need to do in the BIOS also varies, but in general click the…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to tag audio files automatically and manually YOU’LL NEED Mp3tag ($39.99), macOS 10.14 or later If you’ve ever felt frustrated by the way your music collection is displayed in the Music app or by your media server, Mp3tag can help. The app makes it easy to track down the correct tags for files – from artist, album and track names to composers – along with suitable artwork, such as album covers or photos of the artist. This info is then embedded into your files in the form of ‘metadata’ that can be displayed in your music player, not just for show but to aid navigation. Tags and artwork can be manually added, or you can instruct Mp3tag to search major online…

GAMES PRICE $42.95 PLATFORM PC, MAC WEB tinyurl.com/APC528sti As you may have be aware Infinite is very much built on the chassis of Stellaris, with some appropriately Star Trek twists. Consider it the Napoleon: Total War to Stellaris’ Empire: Total War – a more focused, narrative spin off from a larger and more sprawling game. The game is set firmly in the Next Generation/Deep Space Nine era and portrays the Federation, Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians as four superpowers locked in constant competition. It’s not unlike joining a Stellaris game a third of the way in. Here’s the good news: Star Trek Infinite expresses the Federation fantasy far better than Stellaris ever did. You can genuinely expand by diplomacy here, buttering up minor species and inviting them, one by one. The…

GAME CHANGER RELEASE December 7, 1997 DEVELOPER id Software, Nightdive PUBLISHER Bethesda LINK bethesda.net Quake II has a fascinating legacy. Released only eighteen months after Quake in December 1997, it was quickly celebrated as the best game ever made. And I mean the best. A technological marvel, it offered a far more focused adventure than the original’s dimension-hopping escapades, with a distinctive setting and consistent enemy design. It even had something id co-founder John Carmack had previously dismissed as superfluous to a good shooter – a plot. Over time, however, Quake II’s reputation has diminished. The following year, its narrative ambitions were superseded by Half-Life, which told a better story in a more interesting fashion. More recently, critics have pointed out that its shooting experience is flatter and more sluggish…