Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2022 in TechLife

This is a great time of year for pottering about the house. You’ve got some holidays and spare time, so you can catch up on a lot of stuff that may have slipped during the year... especially this last year! For a lot of us, that might mean some handy home upgrades, and that’s what this issue is all about. We’ve got great gear to help you enjoy entertainment in your living room, relax with a book or a game, get creative in the kitchen, and a whole mess more. I don’t know if I’ll be dropping thousands on a coffee machine (though I know folk who would!), but that automatic pot stirrer looks mighty handy. Don’t judge! But it’s not all gadgets. After the rush of Windows 11 last…

Microsoft is rolling out a new security policy that it says will automatically enable a curated set of recommended settings and policies to ensure that all Office 365 users get at least a basic level of protection. Dubbed Built-In-Protection, the preset joins the Standard and Strict presets. However, unlike the two existing presets, the new preset is enabled by default for all new and existing users and requires no action from the administrator. Fujifilm X-H2 tipped to have smartphone-style computational photography The sweet spot between phones and full-frame powerhouses? “The goal is to provide organisations with an immediate bump in protection across The best phone cameras are now capable of aping the photographic effects of larger cameras, thanks to computational photography. So why can’t mirrorless cameras use similar tricks to…

Aurorae occur when the solar wind, intense gusts of electric particles belched out by the Sun, smash into a planet’s magnetic shield. Earth experiences aurorae near the north and south poles, where miraculous displays of colour and light streak through the sky. But this pleasant light show is only a piece of the story; astronomers know that the cosmic clash of the solar wind and magnetic fields also produces bright flashes of radio light that can be seen far across the galaxy. To an alien observer hundreds of light years away, the aurorae of Earth may look like sudden, bright explosions of radio energy. Scientists think they’ve discovered four planets within 160 light years of Earth by detecting the shimmering radio flashes of aurorae in those planets’ atmospheres. If confirmed…

From US$299, ouraring.com Smart rings are a great idea in theory – small, discreet and unobtrusive – but difficult to get right. That’s partly due to the difficulty of manufacturing them and obtaining components small enough, but it’s also down to the difficulty of creating a device that’s genuinely useful enough for people to be interested in. That’s where Oura comes in: a neat little ring that’s all about balancing activity and rest. It’s lined with sensors that collect biometric data 24 hours a day, and sync it with a mobile app where it’s processed to help you understand what’s happening in your body, and make sensible lifestyle changes. That might sound like nothing new, but the ring form factor gives Oura a real advantage. In late October 2021, Oura…

$349, nanoleaf.me Nanoleaf makes some of the best smart light systems in the business, but with the latest Nanoleaf Lines, the company has a clear winner. It has thrown the Nanoleaf Canvas off its perch as this reviewer’s favorite set, with its striking colours and beautiful backlit effects. It’s also the first Nanoleaf light set that doesn’t necessarily have to be an eyesore when unlit. Skins are available as optional accessories that can be fitted onto the bars so they look like geometric works of art on your wall (or ceiling), plus you can expand them to bend around walls thanks to new connectors that are also available as optional accessories. Even without the extras, the Lines don’t look too bad when unlit. Yes, they still resemble plastic pieces, but…

In a post on the official PlayStation blog, a number of developers working on Horizon Forbidden West at Guerrilla Games have revealed the lengths the team has gone to to make the NPCs Aloy will encounter not just authentic, but better than they were in Horizon Zero Dawn. Speaking of the tribes found in the game, Annie Kitain - who works as a senior writer at Guerilla - explains: “At the start of a project, we put a lot of thought into every tribe we’re going to encounter,” Kitain continues, “what their conflicts are, how they fit into the story, and how they interact with the world around them.” Comparing the NPC to how they appear in Horizon Zero Dawn, lead living world designer Espen Sogn explains “where you previously…

$84.95, www.jurassicworldevolution2.com, PlayStation, Xbox, Windows Dinosaurs are undeniably cool. Jurassic World Evolution 2 also proves that they are an absolute bugger to manage when you’re trying to make money in the tourist industry. This theme park management sim takes all the mechanics that made the original addictive and then adds the cretaceous cherry on top with new modes, new species of prehistoric pets, and smart tweaks to the original’s more annoying mechanics. The main campaign follows the story set out by 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. If pandemic trauma pushed the plot out of your brain, that was when various shady shenanigans resulted in dinosaurs roaming the US, and humanity is forced to reckon with a new “neo-Jurassic Age.” That means this time around you’ll need to find, capture and…

Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier MATERIA(L) GIRL IN A BR WORLD. Free with IAP, iOS/Android Final Fantasy 7 is one of the biggest cultural milestones in modern gaming. From its original release on the Playstation in 1997 the game exploded into pop culture, broadening the traditional “Japanese” style of roleplaying, as well as featuring exceptional sound and amazing cutscenes. Since then, there have been countless movies, games and spinoffs – The First Soldier (TFS) is the first one that exists wholly on mobile. Taking a lot of cues from games like PUBG and Call of Duty Mobile, TFS casts players as a nameless soldier employed by the game’s central villain (the energy corporation SHINRA) in the guise of a training simulation. Like other Battle Royale games, 100 players are…

From $3,279, www.dell.com This year, the Dell XPS 15 is now rocking an RTX 3000 GPU, a much-needed update to a well-deserving laptop. Oh, and it comes with an OLED display option as well. That’s right. The new Dell XPS 15 OLED (2021) is one of the early adopters of OLED technology in laptops. And, what a glorious adaptation it is. It’s a match made in heaven – the Dell XPS line and organic LED technology – and the Dell XPS 15 OLED (2021) is proof. In fact, it might just be the perfect notebook to convince people to jump on the OLED bandwagon: its beautiful thin aluminum chassis is just the ideal vessel for a vibrant 3,456 x 2,160 OLED display with Dolby Vision support. And, it makes the…

$175, www.amazfit.com There’s a lot to like about the Amazfit Zenbuds, which pack a remarkable amount of sleep tech into a very small space. They aren’t headphones for listening to your own music and podcasts at night, and we won’t hold that against them (for that, you’ll need something like the AcousticSheep SleepPhones). Instead, the Zenbuds work much like the Bose Sleepbuds II, playing a selection of pre-loaded sounds to help you drift off to sleep more easily and (hopefully) stay there. The Amazfit Zenbuds are far smaller than the Bose Sleepbuds – tiny gray earplugs (approximately 1cm in diameter and less than 1g in weight) that fit snugly into soft silicone covers. The covers come in four sizes, and it’s well worth spending some time choosing the right ones…

$69, www.rapoo-eu.com The Rapoo XW2K is a budget-friendly webcam that targets users wanting plug-and-play functionality at a higher resolution than most standard webcams that run at 1080p, instead offering 2K quality. The cable is a USB-A type connection and measures around 150cm in length, but this is fixed into the back of the device so you can’t remove it like you can on more luxury devices like the Razer Kiyo Pro. The camera is mounted on a swivel ball-joint style head that allows for fantastic flexibility on angles, much more so than most of the products on our favourite webcams, which tend to limit movement to a simple up-down motion. The Rapoo XW2K has a wide 85° field of view that can capture a large area of your background, but…

Malware begone! I have a very frustrating problem with some adware/malware. My pastor has an older PC running Win 10. It has the free versions of AVG and Malwarebytes installed, along with Windows Defender. A year or so ago, she started getting ads for Staples.com popping up, taking over the Chrome browser. We noticed that while she was working on a document, the Run command prompt would pop up in the lower-left of the screen and she would be taken to Staples.com. I checked the Run command history and found several variations of Staples.com in the list. Some were misspelled. I ran deep scans with AVG and Malwarebytes but found nothing. I erased the Run history, cleared the cache, ran CCleaner, and hoped for the best. Three days later, it…

1 TOO DARK? Getting an image that’s too dark is still pretty common. We often find that, when preparing an image to be printed on an inkjet printer, it needs to be much brighter than we would have it if it were just being displayed on a screen. Use File > Open to get your image in Affinity, and make sure the Layers palette is visible on the right. 2 ADJUSTMENT LAYER You can apply fixes directly to the image, but if you apply them as an Adjustment Layer you can come back later and tweak them, or turn them on and off. Click the Adjustments button at the bottom of the Layers palette (a shaded circle) and select Levels. A window should appear with a histogram and five sliders,…

Catalina and Big Sur change the way that you restore from a clone. Rather than cloning back from the copy to your internal storage, it’s better to install macOS then migrate from the copy, and that’s the only way for M1 Macs. REQUIRES macOS 10.15 or later, external storage with sufficient free space, Carbon Copy Cloner 6 YOU WILL LEARN To copy files so you can restore them IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes Whether or not Time Machine makes regular backups of your Mac, making a complete copy (a clone or mirror) of its contents is a good idea before you undertake to install macOS updates or upgrades. Carbon Copy Cloner 6 ($56.35, bombich.com) can make a one-off clone or regular backups in addition to, or instead of, Time Machine,…

1 SET UP THUMBNAIL SHEET Open PDF Mix Tool, select ‘Pages layout’ and click ‘Open PDF file’ to select the file you wish to display on your thumbnail sheet. Once imported, use the ‘Page size’ fields to select the size (and orientation) of the sheet itself. If you plan to print the sheet, then A4 or – if your printer can handle it – A3 is best. 2 CHOOSE THUMBNAIL LAYOUTS Use the ‘Pages layout’ to set how many pages will be displayed on each individual page of the sheet – use the Rows and Columns fields as shown (for A4 portrait, 2x4 or 3x6 is a good choice; for landscape, reverse it to 4x2 or 6x3). Use the Spacing field under ‘Pages Layout’ in conjunction with the Margins settings…

If you ask just about any nontechnical person on the street what they would most like the government to do in the telecommunications space, the answer probably wouldn’t involve 5G, the NBN, or cybersecurity. It would be something along the lines of “stop all these damn spam calls.” Comprising a heady mix of scams, political robocalls, surveys and marketing calls, millions of these calls are made every day and most mobile phone and landline owners are plagued by them, to the point where many people have just stopped answering calls. Unfortunately, the government has done very little to stop them; and the telecommunications providers, who are best placed to do something, have been mostly AWOL on the issue. The one notable thing the government has done is the creation of…

Oura Ring Generation 3 US$399 | ouraring.com Sure there aren’t that many people that are simply too fashionable to ever don a Fitbit, but it’ll only be a few weeks till the gold Apple Watch Series 7 becomes ‘cheugy’ (look it up on the world wide web, fam)... so how can you ensure you’re getting your Active Minutes without becoming a acutely basic? It’s called the Oura Ring Gen 3. It’s basically a Ring of Power that’ll get you cut rather than turn you into a Gollum. The water resistant heart rate monitor ring will ensure you’re getting the pump you need from your workouts for up to seven days and syncs all the info with a smartphone app. Charlotte Tilbury’s ‘Shop With Friends’ virtual store $NA | charlottetilbury.com/au/virtual-store# If…

This free repair is available worldwide for two years from the purchase of the device, but Apple may restrict repairs to the country or region that it was purchased from – so that could be a stumbling block. No phone is immune to issues, and one issue that might be affecting your iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro is a lack of sound from the receiver when you make or receive a call. Apple has determined that a small number of iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro handsets may have this issue, as a result of a component that might have failed on the receiver module. The good news is that Apple has also announced that it will repair affected phones for free. So if it’s a problem your iPhone…

Scientists previously thought that this area of ice was the Arctic’s most stable, but the giant rift signals that the ancient ice is vulnerable to melt. The polynya, or area of open water, is the first to be observed north of Ellesmere Island. But researchers deduced from old satellite data that similar polynyas may have opened in 1988 and 2004. “North of Ellesmere Island it’s hard to move the ice around or melt it because it’s thick, and there’s quite a bit of it,” said Kent Moore, an Arctic researcher at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. “We generally haven’t seen polynyas form in that region before.” The sea ice off the northern coast is typically more than four metres thick and has an average age of five years. But this ‘last…

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Level From $1,699 From bang–olufsen.com Aimed squarely at B&O’s audience of tech-savvy music lovers with an eye for design, the Beosound Level is a portable smart speaker that can be positioned on a surface upright, laid flat, or wall mounted. If you’re looking for a stylishly understated speaker that isn’t understated on audio quality, it’s an excellent choice. It takes up only a sliver of space on a shelf, but provides a bigger, richer and more enjoyable sound than your average smart speaker. Uniquely, this elite Wi-Fi speaker is made to be upgradeable. The wireless module, the sound processing and the battery can all be replaced with upgraded versions later – it’s intentionally a modular design. The idea is to try to give the Level the…

While there’s always been a vision for the future of digital community spaces held by optimistic XR enthusiasts, the dream became significantly more palpable between October and November 2021 with basically every single tech company (and even some cities) rushing to announce their own particular brand of metaverse future. If we’ve learnt anything from the Web 2.0 age it’s that platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and all the other major social media platforms were built on user contributed content. 43.2 million Roblox players are pioneering this kind of metaverse space with their popular user-built games, but we’re rooting for a decentralised Web 3.0 blockchain-based solution that isn’t owned by a particular company. If you hadn’t realised this issue (and probably the rest of the Emerging Tech sections if it keeps going…

$89.95, forzamotorsport.net, Xbox, Windows When you’re asked if you’ve ever seen an active volcano up close in Forza Horizon 5, you just know you’re in for a driving experience unlike any other. Following directions to cut across the Mexican countryside to reach the peak of the mountain, the controller vibrates and rumbles from volcanic tremors that shake the ground. A helicopter flies overhead as you speed along a winding dirt road to reach the crater of the volcano, where you’ll be met with a river of molten lava. After smashing steam vents, driving through water, and completing other optional objectives as part of an expedition at the top of the La Gran Caldera, you’ll be careening right back down the mountainside in an off-road buggy. The expansive landscapes of Mexico…

From $3,699, www.dell.com The Alienware x15 R1 proves once again that, when it comes to making the best gaming laptops, nobody makes them like Alienware. The x15 R1 packs in some of the best gaming hardware you can get into a distinctive, premium package that will surely delight anyone looking for the gaming laptop aesthetic, just different from all the rest. The laptop itself is remarkably thin for a gaming laptop this powerful, and a well-designed layout manages to squeeze in the variety of ports for the needs of just about any gamer out there. Design Do you want a gaming laptop aesthetic that doesn’t look like a Transformer? You’re in luck, since the Alienware x15 R1 stays true to the twinkly RGB gamers expect while offering the only really…

$65, www.logitechg.com Looking at the Logitech G305 Lightspeed Wireless, you wouldn’t expect it to be so cheap. Not that it’s the most impressive mouse you’ll ever see - on the contrary, it takes on a more minimalist aesthetic that’s a rarity in gaming mice. However, it also looks stylish, robust, and capable. More importantly, it’s wireless, and that feature always puts a premium, literally, on peripherals even now. There’s no denying the Logitech G305 Lightspeed Wireless is adorable. It comes in three different colourways – blue with lilac accents, lilac with purple accents, and mint with lilac – if you’re tired of the same old solid black colour and want to spruce up your gaming setup. Of course, there’s also a white and a black one for those looking to…

$79, www.lenovo.com The Lenovo Smart Clock 2 is an interesting hybrid device, sitting between an alarm clock and smart speaker. If you currently use an Android phone to rouse you in the morning it feels like a natural upgrade, with full Google Assistant integration and music streaming. The Lenovo Smart Clock 2 is a small device (measuring just 9.3cm x 11.3cm x 71cm), which can be used alone, or attached to a wireless charging base that roughly doubles its footprint. The base also has a USB-A port on the back of the dock for devices that don’t support Qi charging (like your Fitbit, for example), and is extremely handy if you don’t have multiple power outlets available for plugging in an array of different chargers. There’s a light in the…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it REQUIRES Windows 11 Windows 10 Relying on the same old passwords to secure your online accounts is not good practice. A quick trip to https:// haveibeenpwned.com will almost certainly reveal that one or more of them has been exposed in the past 20 years or so. The solution is simple, yet complicated. It’s simple because you just need to generate long, random passwords comprising letters, numbers and symbols to make them hard to guess or crack through brute force, but complicated because it’s hard to remember them all. The solution lies in employing the services of a password manager. This helps you to generate those random passwords, then stores them securely in an encrypted file (or vault) that’s locked behind a ‘master password’ –…

1 SET SOURCE VOLUME In Carbon Copy Cloner, select Tasks in the sidebar and give the new, empty backup task a name. Click on the Source icon and select your Mac’s startup disk, by default named Macintosh HD, to make it the source for your clone. 2 SET THE DESTINATION Note the used space on your source, and check the destination volume has sufficient free space to store that. Then click on the Destination icon and select the volume with enough free space to contain the clone. 3 SET WHETHER TO REPEAT Click on Automation to set the scheduling basis if you want this cloning to be repeated automatically. Normally a daily clone is best for backups, or when the disk is remounted for intermittently connected MacBooks. 4 SET SCHEDULING…

1 Annotations list The Annotations lists all the labels on the document. Right-click one to select it, delete it or tweak its properties. 2 Highlighter Both yellow and green highlighters are available (other colours can be configured). Click and drag across a passage of text. 3 Underline If you prefer to underline content, use this tool. It’s red by default, but you can choose a different hue and level of opacity. 4 Insert Text This option enables you to type – like a typewriter – on top of the document itself. You can change font, size and colour. 5 Inline notes These notes appear like sticky notes – just click where you want one to appear and start typing. 6 Pop-up notes Instead of the full text appearing on top…

Hi-fi manufacturers will be quick to tell you of their passion for music – that’s fundamentally the basis of their (and our) admiration for hi-fi, after all. And it’s easy to believe such sentiments from Sonus Faber when, upon arriving at the Italian company’s headquarters in Arcugnano, Vicenza, we are faced with a building whose roof mimics the curvature of a violin. It’s a fitting ode to an instrument that has itself played an instrumental role in the brand’s four-decade history of speaker production. It was ten years after its inception that Sonus Faber created its first high-end speakers with wooden, lute-shaped cabinets. The 1993 Guarneri Homage standmounter was the debutante for an ‘Homage’ collection (named after the most distinguished families of Cremonese violin makers in the 16th, 17th and…

Lighting has to be one of the trickiest aspects of macro photography to master. Mixing flash and natural light is a challenge in any genre, but when working on images of very small subject matter it can seem impossible to capture a balance of softness and shape. This is because the light source (even small flash, such as a speedlight) is large, relative to the subject, meaning the light spreads across the frame. If you try to limit the spread, by removing a diffuser, you create hotspots. Meanwhile if you add a diffuser the light seems to lose all sense of direction and structure. It’s the equivalent to lighting a person with a 3 x 3m scrim and attempting to introduce a spotlight effect – not an easy feat! The…

The straight vertical edges of the building can lean in towards one another, making it look as if the building is toppling inwards. This effect is emphasised the closer you are to the building – and wider lenses can result in more pronounced distortion. Converging verticals occur when we angle our camera upwards towards a building or structure. The straight vertical edges of the building can lean in towards one another, making it look as if the building is toppling inwards. This effect is emphasised the closer you are to the building – and wider lenses can result in more pronounced distortion. You may be able to avoid converging verticals while taking the shot by stepping back, finding a higher vantage point or using a tilt-shift lens. If none of…

From $3,749, www.apple.com/au The MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021) is Apple’s flagship professional laptop, launched alongside the MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021) in October 2021. As a follow-up to 2019’s 16-inch MacBook Pro, this new model brings some fantastic new features and an overhauled design. It also offers a level of performance that is no doubt highly impressive, but which not everyone will need. Apart from the screen size, resolution and battery life, the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021) is incredibly similar to the smaller MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021), offering the same hardware (a choice of Apple’s new M1 Pro or M1 Max chips) which results in pretty similar performance. Being the larger of the two, and Apple’s flagship MacBook, it’ll come as little surprise to learn that the MacBook Pro 16-inch…

$TBC, www.asus.com The Asus Chromebook Flip C536 is an absolutely gorgeous Chromebook that you’ll be proud to show off (until the scuff and dirt starts to add up, anyway). It is hands-down one of the best Chromebooks on the market today and even though it feels like a premium device, its price still keeps it in the realm of affordability. Chromebooks have a reputation for being strictly utilitarian devices running low-powered hardware and usually squeezed into a plastic chassis that looks like it was painted silver by a kindergarten class. Design The Asus Chromebook Flip C536 shows us just how far we’ve come in recent years. We can’t talk about the Chromebook Flip C536 without getting the design discussion out of the way. This is the best looking Chromebook we’ve…

The bones of a man who was unable to escape the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE have been found in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. The skeletal remains were discovered near a stone wall along the ancient seafront, the first discovery of a Vesuvius victim in Herculaneum in 25 years. The bones belonged to a man in his early 40s. He may have died in the final phase of the eruption, when gas and ash rushed through the town at more than 100 kilometres per hour and around 500 degrees Celsius in a pyroclastic flow. Researchers found the skeleton with its head towards the sea and surrounded by carbonised wood. A large roof beam found near the body may have crushed the man’s skull. It’s not clear…

Why do people care about headphone jacks so much? Emily It’s not about wired headphones, reader. It really isn’t. An eagle-eared listener may be able to tell the difference between Bluetooth and hard-line, but they must then contend with the constant rubbing of cable on clothes, the ever-present fear of snagging and having one’s buds inelegantly yanked from one’s lugs, the glaring fact that dangling wires are, in 2021, dorky as all hell. Besides, a USB-C DAC is going to output a finer signal than any headphone jack, if that’s what you’re really interested in. It’s not about wired headphones: it’s about choice. Whenever a feature gets taken away, particularly if it relates to a not-quite-dead-yet technology, people get cross. It happened with physical phone keyboards, with the tactile home…

Battlefield 2042’s 30,000+ “mostly negative” Steam reviews have seen the shooter pick up the dubious honor of becoming one of Steam’s most poorly reviewed games of all time. Of the 33,000+ reviews left on Steam, just 26 percent are positive – which means a whopping 74 percent are not. This means that from a pool of over 59,000 games, DICE’s latest Battlefield installment – which was only released on November 19 – has the eighth worse Steam score of all time. (Steam250’s Hall of Shame, via Forbes, gives the full list which – I’m sure will come as no surprise – is topped by Konami’s new free-to-play soccer game, eFootball 2022.) “I’ve played every PC Battlefield game since the original BF1942 and I can confidently say that this is the…

$89.95, www.ea.comPlayStation, Xbox, Windows Battlefield still has great comedic timing, and even though the modern FPS scene is now stacked with big maps and whimsical vehicle physics (hi, Halo Infinite), Battlefield continues to feel distinct from the milsims and battle royale games that have encircled it. With Battlefield 2042, DICE stands its ground as the king of large-scale military shenanigans much more convincingly than it did with Battlefield 5, ditching singleplayer campaigns to focus on the two original pillars of the series: objective-based multiplayer and scale. What was a 64-player game for 20 years is now a 128-player game, with proportionally bigger maps. The increased acreage isn’t an across-the-board improvement to the Battlefield experience, but if it’s wrong to make a PC game bigger and more technically complicated without designing…

$1,399, www.acer.com Acer has updated its more affordable Ultrabook line, the Acer Swift 3 (2021), and brought it in line with the Intel Evo platform. This means some considerable under-the-hood upgrades, especially where battery life is concerned. The laptop doesn’t quite fall into the same budget price range that previous Swift 3’s did, though, and that sees it face more competition from models from HP’s Envy line, like the far more elegant Envy x360 15 (2021). It even butts up against the likes of the M1 MacBook Air and the Dell XPS 13. That’s a fiercely competitive space to enter, and the Acer Swift 3 actually has a few ways it can stand out, even if it doesn’t ultimately come out ahead. Design and display The Acer Swift 3 (2021)…

$749, www.dell.com The Dell 27 Video Conferencing Monitor (S2722DZ) features a 27-inch QHD IPS screen with a 1440p resolution and a refresh rate of 75 Hz. It also comes equipped with AMD FreeSync to prevent screen tearing when gaming and doing video editing work as well as a 100 x 100mm VESA mounting interface in case you want to mount it on a wall. The monitor has very minimal bezels at its top and on either side with a larger bezel featuring the Dell logo at the bottom of the display. A height adjustable stand allows you to move the monitor up and down but it can also tilt, swivel and pivot. Visibility is quite good and the Dell 27 Video Conferencing Monitor has both a horizontal and vertical viewing…

$3,099, www.dji.com The DJI Mavic 3 is the most powerful folding drone the company has made so far – and in pure performance terms, it’s also the best. But the big improvements over the DJI Mavic 2 Pro come with a cost. This means that for most non-professionals, the smaller and more affordable DJI Air 2S is the better all-round buy. The highlight of the DJI Mavic 3 is undoubtedly its new dual-camera, which features two individual sensors and lenses. Impressively, the main camera houses a 20MP Four Thirds CMOS sensor with adjustable aperture – and this provides the best image quality in its class. The drone’s second telephoto lens is much more limited, lacking manual controls or raw shooting, but is an occasionally useful alternative for capturing distant subjects.…

$279, www.lumie.com The Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300 is a wake-up light that rouses less harshly than a normal alarm, and the daily or weekly alarms can be configured precisely to your personal taste in brightness, duration and sound accompaniments. Lumie claims the sunset and sunrise function “promotes production of melatonin”, and helps stop late night doom-scrolling on Twitter by promoting a more relaxed sunset wind-down. The Lumie Bodyclock Shine 300 looks friendly straight out of the box, a rounded smile of an alarm clock light. The flecked grey marl cloth base conceals the speaker elements and offers a touch of recognisable smart-speaker-style class, while the domed light diffuser on top makes clear there are lighting priorities afoot. Underneath the translucent light cover, there lurks an ISO 13485 Medical Devices, QMS…

Mobile devices have evolved considerably over the past decade and are now much more akin to portable computers than mere convenient communicative tools – although obviously they’re still very adept at that too. When getting started with a new device, launch the Settings app (which is applicable to both Android and Apple devices) and take time to peruse the many features and options available to give you a more rounded picture of exactly what your device is capable of. To start making the most of your device, you will have to connect it to a Wi-Fi network (you should be guided through this process when activating your device for the first time, but if not you will find a Wi-Fi section in Settings). By doing this you will be able…

iPhone battery cases/packs MagSafe Battery Pack $139 From apple.com/au Features Lightning charging port >>> This brand–new battery pack is designed to clamp to the back of your iPhone 12 or 13, using magnets, to keep its battery topped up on the go. While it’s a bit bulky, your phone should still fit in your pocket, and the magnetic connection is strong. It’s also designed to integrate into iOS, so you get a notification when it’s connected and your battery level glows green as it’s being charged. Trswyop 4.7–inch battery case Around US$37 From amazon.com Features 6,000mAh charger >>> This unofficial battery case works with any 4.7-inch iPhone from the 6 up to the latest SE model. The case features a pass-through Lightning adapter so you can still sync your phone (but doesn’t…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it REQUIRES Windows 11 Windows 10 Windows 8.1 Windows 7 Mobile phone manufacturers these days pride themselves on the quality of their cameras. The ubiquity of a camera in your pocket has all but wiped out the compact camera, and the images produced by phones, especially with new tricks like smart background blurring, cannot be denied. There are some things, however, that you just have to fix after the photo is taken. Automated settings sometimes get fooled, and produce a result that’s too dark, too bright or too yellow. Likewise, spots of dust on the camera lens or sensor can make themselves known in the final image, requiring removal in software. We’re using Affinity Photo here, Serif’s pro-grade image editing app. It’s more than enough…

1 ADD LOGIN TO VAULT Log into the Bitwarden browser extension if necessary and then browse the web in the usual way. When you log into a website, Bitwarden will pop up a message at the top of the browser window offering to save the password – click Yes, Save Now to do so. Click the Bitwarden icon, and after a short pause you should see an entry appear under logins. 2 LOG IN QUICKLY When you next visit the site, look for a number 1 appearing on the Bitwarden icon: click this and you should see your login details appear (the number corresponds to how many entries you have stored for that site, supporting multiple login profiles). Click the correct entry and the login boxes should fill automatically, saving…

The humble Portable Document Format file (PDF to its mates) is one of the most versatile formats you could ask for. It solves a very simple problem: how do you ensure that a file you share with other people looks identical on their computers even if they don’t have access to the application in which it was created? After starting off as a simple way of sharing and displaying documents in a consistent way, PDFs have evolved to become ever more useful. Armed with the right tools you can search them for specific text (then extract that text), annotate them, add comments and even use them like digital forms, filling in sections by typing text or selecting from drop-down menus. And if the PDF is a ‘true’ one (see the…

What was once the occasional feel-good #fitspo post has now become a thriving industry of coaches, trainers, and athletes actively posting content across social media platforms for others to see. While it might feel like overkill at times, I personally found fitness influencers to be a valuable resource during the latest round of lockdowns, with many offering up countless free workouts able to be performed at home. Steppen is a new app attempting to supercharge this idea by creating an entirely new social network dedicated to workouts and fitness. Born right here in Australia, Steppen was created by two young Melbournians and launched earlier this year, giving fitness influencers the ability to create and post content for fellow users to follow – all for zero cost. This month we’ll take…