TechLifeの Xmas 2021 の目次

But there’s more Microsoft can do – while it looks fresher than ever, it does seem more like a cosmetic upgrade in a lot of ways. Well, the Windows Microsoft said they’d never get to – Windows 10 was meant to be the operating system’s last iteration – is finally here, and... it’s actually pretty good! Is it perfect? Well, not quite, but it’s a smoother product than many of its brethren. But there’s more Microsoft can do – while it looks fresher than ever, it does seem more like a cosmetic upgrade in a lot of ways. The upgrades to the Microsoft Store are welcome (and they’ll come to Windows 10, too), but many other improvements are only skin-deep. But if you want to know more you can check…

Collaborating with others using Adobe’s graphic design software will soon be even easier as the company has announced that two of the most popular products from Creative Cloud will soon be available on the web. At Adobe MAX 2021, the company revealed that Photoshop and Illustrator are coming to your browser to help give others a voice in the creative process. Up until now, creative teams had to rely on other online collaboration tools to give feedback and work together online. By extending Photoshop and Illustrator to the web, even those who don’t have access to Adobe’s photo editor and graphic design software will be able to contribute. Now when a user shares cloud documents from Adobe’s software, collaborators will be able to review their creative work and add comments…

The longest known cave system just set a new record after surveyors spent hours mapping an additional 1.6km of the passageways at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. The corridors now measure a whopping 675km in length. Mapping the cave system was a huge undertaking, carried out by volunteers at the Cave Research Foundation (CRF), a Kentucky-based nonprofit, and other locals, including those from the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition. “Many of the cave trips are long and arduous, involving climbing, vertical exposure, squeezes, crawlways, water and mud,” said Karen Willmes of the CRF. “After the trip, cartographers turn the data collected on the cave trip into a map. Other volunteers provide surface support. It’s a first-rate effort for a world-class cave, and we’re proud to be a part of it.”…

Give it 12 minutes in the microwave at full power, reader, and don’t forget to add plenty of ketchup. Please send Chef Guru’s Michelin stars to the usual address. Seriously, though, it’s not rocket science. You need a good steak, enough heat to form a good sear (but not so much that you’ll burn it), and a good pan to cook it in. For the steak, you have options. If your local butcher hasn’t shut down and been resurrected as a confusingly branded vape shop (get your suspicious pink juice at ‘Meaty Clouds’), that’s a top option; the supermarket will probably do, but you may also wish to consider a mail-order butcher. GaGu has ordered some quality cuts from featherandbone.com. au, and there are plenty of other suppliers to choose…

$89.95, www.xbox.comXbox, PlayStation, PC Back 4 Blood is like post-apocalyptic puberty with the range of emotions it can elicit in one play session. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the exhausted, frantic, elated exhilaration of surviving a particularly brutal section in one piece, everyone launching themselves through the Safe Room door or into the back of a Hum-Vee to speed into the distance with barely time to catch your breath. At the other end, there’s the sheer frustration of staring at the back of a bot’s legs as they refuse to revive you… again. Turtle Rock’s spiritual L4D successor is at its most enjoyable when you gather together three friends and squad up to tackle the game’s cast of zombies – or the Ridden, as they’re known. The campaign…

$1,479, www.lenovo.com The Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 5 is a new all-in-one PC that is aimed at people working from home who are after a stylish PC that doesn’t take up too much space on a desk. It costs $1,479. That’s quite pricey for the specs on offer here, especially compared to traditional desktop PCs, though as it’s an all-in-one it does mean it comes with a screen – so you don’t need to buy an additional monitor. Design Like any good all-in-one PC, the Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 5 is a compact and convenient computer. With the components built into the base of the monitor, it means unlike normal desktop PCs, you won’t have to connect wires between the PC itself and the monitor. Not only is it easier to set…

$169, www.corsair.com At around five inches in length and two inches in width, the Sabre fills up our hand. Our thumb fits comfortably on the side, and our ring and index fingers rest neatly on the left and right buttons. Those buttons are also both spring and switch-loaded. When you hit the buttons there’s some stress, which feels nice when you hit them. It’s a good bit of feedback that often goes unnoticed. On the other hand, the side of the mouse is smooth and missing that bit of grip that many competing mice have, so it tends to feel like you’re holding this little slab of plastic instead of an actual mouse. All of the buttons are very big and hard to mindlessly press. The DPI switch is buried…

$39.99, au.renpho.com Bathroom scales have been around forever and, frequently, sit in a corner of the smallest room hidden from view and gathering dust. Not so the Renpho Smart Scale, as it’s one of a new breed of bathroom scales that actually looks very cool. The scale arrives in a pizza-shaped box containing the scale, three AAA batteries to power it, and a very small, minimalist manual. Renpho advises that you download the supporting app, where you can take a deeper dive into its innermost workings. This is a smart scale that feels like a quality purchase, and comes finished in classic black. The platform is made of tempered glass with four metal circles embedded. These contain electrodes that gather your data when you’re standing on the unit. There’s a…

1 REDUCE MOTION In System Preferences, open Accessibility and select Display from the scrolling pane. In the Display tab, turn on Reduce Motion. This replaces several macOS animations with simpler crossfades. The feature is designed to aid people with vestibular conditions but removes visual noise for every user and makes the aforementioned actions feel faster. 2 REDUCE TRANSPARENCY The Reduce transparency button takes semi-translucent elements of macOS and makes them solid. Again primarily designed to assist people with vestibular disorders, the setting also makes macOS more broadly legible and stops semitransparent elements from being a distraction if something’s moving/playing behind them. 3 ADJUST MORE SETTINGS Poke around in Display and you’ll find more goodies. “Increase contrast” is a bit extreme, but handy if you fail to locate buttons. You can…

Most people wanting truly mobile printing, meaning easy operation away from power or a network, probably need great text performance more than they do high-end photo reproduction. Of course you do want the ability to print in color too, which makes the MT800 rather limiting. And Canon’s Selphy is great fun for photos, but not really for text. The Tango X is ultra-modern and a very solid performer but lacks a battery, while the larger OfficeJet has a battery but is arguably not as portable as the others. Canon’s Pixma TR150 is also a strong contender but loses a little by not having a battery included in the box. Ultimately, Epson’s Workforce WF-110W gets the balance just right. It’s supremely portable with an integrated rechargeable battery that has good longevity…

When Windows 8 was announced, there was a concern that Microsoft would use Secure Boot, an optional feature of the then new UEFI (Universal Extensible Firmware Interface), to restrict the installation of other operating systems. Secure Boot only allows booting EFI images that have been signed by a key enrolled in the UEFI. Since almost all hardware ships with a public signing key from Microsoft, it’s easy to see where this concern came from. However, to help Linux distros (or any software that needed its own bootloader) deal with Secure Boot, Microsoft used its magic key to sign a small program (they probably wouldn’t sign something big and complicated) called Shim. Shim is a first-stage bootloader used by many distros (including Debian and Ubuntu) to launch their own (second stage)…

Owners of a modern UEFI system should (as long as you can get into the UEFI settings) be able to revert any unwanted changes caused by installing a new operating system. The UEFI boots an image from the EFI partition or live media, and userspace tools (both on Windows and through efimgr on Linux) can change the boot order and in some cases break things. It’s generally expected (but not necessarily desired) that a newly installed OS will put itself at the top of the boot ordering. Often this results in Windows booting immediately and the only way to get to the UEFI settings to revert this is to hold the Shift key while shutting down from the start menu. An option to reboot to settings should appear. Our experience…

In this tutorial, we’ll look at two big-name apps, Apple’s Logic Pro and Ableton Live. They aren’t the only options – most loop-based music apps can happily play live too – but they’re the most popular choices. REQUIRES Logic Pro X YOU WILL LEARN How to loop in Logic and export to Ableton IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes In the last few months, we’ve focused on creating and recording music on your Mac, but what about performing? Whether you’re a rock band or a bedroom techno overlord your Mac can be a really powerful tool when you want to play live. In this tutorial, we’ll look at two big-name apps, Apple’s Logic Pro and Ableton Live. They aren’t the only options – most loop–based music apps can happily play live…

REQUIRES An iPhone, an Apple Watch (optional) YOU WILL LEARN How to set up and manage Emergency SOS on your iPhone and Apple Watch IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes No one wants to be in an emergency, but if things wind up that way, your iPhone and Apple Watch can offer a lifeline in the form of Emergency SOS. This calls the emergency services when you really need them and provides vital information like your location and medical details. It’s easy to activate and could save your life. Emergency SOS usually needs a signal. If you do not have any, you must be connected to a Wi-Fi network and have Wi-Fi calling enabled in Settings > Phone > Wi-Fi Calling. Make sure this is sorted before you need it. Emergency…

While we Aussies may be missing out on the Steam Deck handheld gaming device this Christmas, that doesn’t mean we can’t play Steam games on our big screen TVs. It’s a little trickier than it used to be, since Valve stopped making Steam Link hardware, but you can get it done with a Raspberry Pi, with the added bonus that you can also install other apps, such as Kodi and retro game emulators on your Pi, making it media streaming and games powerhouse for less than $200. So, in the spirit of whiling away the Christmas break by playing games, we thought we’d take a quick look this month at how you can use a Raspberry Pi to stream your PC games to your loungeroom TV. What you need To…

The allure of street photography is in the capture of candid moments, which will never again occur in exactly the same way. The same could be said for all genres of photography, of course, but it is especially potent in street imagery. The people and the places with which they are interacting, within the shot, represent an identifiable proxy for our own lives and can stir emotions in a highly specific way. With that in mind, sometimes looking for unusual angles can be the best way to capture a story and inspire the imagination of the viewer. Being in among the action, capturing it with a wideangle, might create the feeling of inclusion and stimulate the senses, but shooting from afar, in a less ordinary position, can have the power…

$Free, www.microsoft.com Windows 11 is finally here – which in some ways is surprising, as Windows 10 was heralded as the last ever update of Windows – one that would receive updates over the years, and eventually, decades. Windows 11 is now available to download and install, and we’ve spent time with the final release for this review. There’s a saying that you either have to move with the times or the times moves you, however, which may be why we’re now seeing Windows 11, the first major update to the operating system in years. Availability Windows 11 is free for anyone who meets the system requirements set by Microsoft. The upgrade arrives in two versions; Home or Pro. The Pro version has features mainly aimed at business users, but…

Technically Bungie announced this back in August, when it revealed The Witch Queen expansion. The two dungeons are available as part of the Deluxe Edition version of The Witch Queen, listed as a separate perk from access to the year’s season passes. Nevertheless, by not outright saying that the dungeons weren’t included, many assumed the opposite to be true. The clarification finally came from Destiny 2 community manager Cozmo23 in a heavily downvoted Reddit comment. “We’ve seen some debate around the new dungeon content and wanted to clarify how it will be delivered next year,” he wrote. “If you get the Digital Deluxe Edition of The Witch Queen you will receive the expansion, all four Seasons for the next year, and the two Dungeons. If you get the Standard Edition,…

$89.95, guardiansofthegalaxy.square-enix-games.com, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC Whisper it... Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy game might be better than the movies. It’s incredibly rare for a game to make me laugh as much as it does cry, but what Eidos Montreal has created here is something rather magical, both in terms of its story and its execution. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a game where you embody everything it is to be a leader, including all the doubts and insecurities that come with it. You play as Star-Lord, the leader of a Guardians of the Galaxy team who have only been working together for a year or so. What that means is that they’re still learning to operate as a team and as an adopted family. It puts you in…

Actraiser: Renaissance REMAKING A CLASSIC. $30.99, iOS/Android Actraiser was a 1993 Super Nintendo game that was ahead of its time. By combining a side-scrolling action platformer with RPG elements with a top-down city/settlement building sim, Actraiser managed to be both genre smashing and visionary at a time when games were only slowly moving into deeper complexity. Even 30 years later, Actraiser still holds up as a phenomenal piece of game design, with a cracking story, great music and wonderful gameplay. So, it was apt that its publisher/developer, Square Enix, would celebrate this title with a remake of sorts – Actraiser: Renaissance is both a reimagining and a remaster, following closely to the original source material with several upgrades. Renaissance follows the program of the original well – the world is…

$3,576, www.lg.com/au We’ve been raving about LG’s OLED TVs for years now. Our favourite is the budget-friendly C-series, which essentially offers identical performance to its more-expensive siblings (only differentiated by form factor). In many industries, differences between current and last year’s model are negligible, but this C1 has added a host of bells and whistles to fend off the competition. First up are the gaming features, which now rival gaming monitors. HDMI 2.1 upgrades enable 120Hz refresh rates at 4K for buttery smooth, UHD gaming – even when playing fast-and-frantic shooters and slick, driving games. There’s also AMD FreeSync Premium, Nvidia G-Sync, and Variable Refresh Rate technology to reduce tearing and improve display accuracy. A Black Stabiliser setting reveals enemies hiding in shadows while a White Stabiliser does similar with…

From $399, www.samsung.com The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 is a sequel to one of our favourite smartwatches ever, and it’s the first time in a while that we’ve seen the company embrace Wear OS software. It’s not your typical Wear OS watch though; it’s called One UI Watch 3, and it’s been built by Samsung with Google’s help. On paper, the overall upgrade is limited in software and hardware, but the Watch 4 is suitable for anyone who’s looking for a top-end smartwatch that can track workouts, as well as offer a lot of other smart features that many alternative wrist companions can’t. That said, the Galaxy Watch 4’s compatibility is inexplicably worse than prior Samsung watches. If you own an iPhone, this won’t work with it, and while it’s…

> OFFLOAD WEB PAGES If you’re often distracted by clicking on interesting articles in Safari – or end the day with a dozen unread tabs – change your browsing habits. Use an RSS reader like NetNewsWire (free, netnewswire.com) to subscribe to favorite sites and peruse their headlines and articles at your leisure. And when you more randomly chance upon something interesting, send it to Pocket (free, getpocket.com). Both apps also have excellent iPhone and iPad incarnations that you can try out. > USE VIPS Email can seem like a never-ending deluge, but there are ways of coping with the flood. For any vitally important contact, click their name in an email and select Add to VIPs. Their emails will then appear in the VIPs mailbox, thereby filtering your inbox between…

ON TEST... > Canon PIXMA TR150 > Canon Selphy CP1300 > Epson WorkForce WF–110W > HPRT MT800 > HP OfficeJet 250 > HP Tango X YOU’RE NOW MORE likely to own a mobile computing device than a desktop one, with laptops, tablets, and smartphones selling in greater numbers than ever before. Printer technology however has traditionally remained largely confined to the home. But a new generation of mobile printers has evolved that’s designed to be portable, often with battery power, and free to work without a local Wi-Fi network. They also have dedicated apps for printing from a mobile device – and for device setup and management. A portable printer can be ideal for anyone working on the move, be they a freelancer or member of a business. We spend…

Getting an actual Linux desktop running on WSL 2.0 on Windows 11 proved a little tricky. In fairness, WSL was built to run applications, not to act like a conventional virtual machine. It’s not really surprising that Gnome and KDE won’t work. They rely on all sorts of daemons and services running in the background holding all the components together. Brave souls have managed to get the Xfce desktop working nicely on Windows 10 with Ubuntu 18.04, but this didn’t work for us on Windows 11 with Ubuntu 20.04. If you’re running Windows 10, then you’d be well advised to try out running Xfce via the X410 server. It should be a matter of $ sudo apt install xfce4 and then setting the DISPLAY environment variable correctly. A major change…

You’re almost certainly familiar with desktop shortcuts. Many applications will have added icons to the desktop, and by double-clicking these, you launch the associated program. But you can use desktop shortcuts for much more. Whatever you’re using your PC for there are certain tasks that you almost certainly perform time and time again. From simple things like shutting down Windows or downloading the latest updates, to ejecting USB drives and emailing the same people repeatedly. You can use desktop shortcuts to make it easier to access the parts of your computer you need most often, the settings in Windows you need to adjust most frequently, and much more. There are almost limitless possibilities, but here we introduce some of the most useful shortcuts you can create. MARK WYCIŚLIK-WILSON TOP TIP…

Most backup strategies lead to a lot of wasted space because you invariably end up making copies of the same data over and over again. In essence, data deduplication is the process of comparing chunks of data, and retaining only a single unique copy, thereby saving disk space. When deployed as a data backup strategy, this means that only changes since the last backup are stored. Backup tools for Linux are as prolific as browsers, video players or even text editors, BorgBackup, or just Borg, is a deduplicating backup utility. Released under the BSD license, the project was forked from Attic, a popular backup utility, in 2015. Thanks to the data deduplication technique, Borg is suitable as an everyday home or even enterprise backup solution, with a host of features…

You might want to know how to delete Netflix history for a a few occasions. Like most streaming services, Netflix conveniently keeps track of what you’ve previously watched. The “Continue Watching” tab gives you the ability to back jump into any series or movie from exactly where you left off. But perhaps you started a series and knew before the first episode was even finished that it wasn’t for you. Maybe a movie failed to grab your attention and you decided to bail early on. A friend or family may have used your Netflix account and filled your “Continue Watching” list with content you’ve already seen or have no interest in. You might have watched something one night that you’re a little embarrassed about now; we’re not judging. Whatever your…

Photoshop’s Blending Modes have long been one of its most useful features. Each Blending Mode uses a distinct algorithm to blend a selected layer with the layers below. If this sounds complicated, in practice using Blending Modes is simple. All you need to do is copy one image on top of another, then experiment. Blending Modes can be used for all kinds of projects, and allow you to create a near-limitless range of effects. Here we’ll look at how to give a car a vibrant psychedelic treatment by blending images of colours and smoke. This involves two of the most useful Blending Modes: Screen and Multiply. We’ll also make use of brush Blending Modes to colour our smoke. Blending Modes can be used for lots of creative projects like multiple…

Segway Ninebot Mecha Kit US$999 ($599+$400 Nine-bot S) | store.segway.com/ninebot-mecha-kit If your kid already got a Ninebot S last Christmas and it’s just gathering dust if your team of housekeepers didn’t clean their waterfront bedroom every day, then it’s time to double down and buy the US$599 Ninebot Mecha Kit. This amazing system will connect with any of the US$400+ Ninebot S range to give it a seat, joystick and a set of water absorbing BB bullets that you can shoot at the neighbour’s cat. Hell, you may as well just buy a handful for friends and family so you can shoot the shit out of each other and achieve the “New Family Bonding Experience” the marketing material promises. Thumby US$19 | tinycircuits.com Imagine being out and about and both…

From $1,649, www.microsoft.com The Surface Pro 8 is the biggest change to the Surface Pro lineup in years, bringing some design improvements we’ve been begging for along with much improved performance as well. It’s still very much recognisable as part of Microsoft’s core line of Windows tablets, but it truly feels like a new generation – just in time for the launch of Windows 11. Design The Surface Pro lineup kind of started to stagnate for the last couple iterations. Both the Surface Pro 6 and Surface Pro 7 were just spec updates of the Surface Pro 2017. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as four years ago, the Surface Pro was a pretty fresh device. But now it needs a pretty substantial redesign, especially in the face of the…

Windows 11 SE is reportedly a new flavor of Windows 11 that Microsoft has been developing. Its first real mention showed up with the rumor of a new budget-friendly Surface laptop designed for education earlier today. Not much is known about the latest version of Windows; however, leaked builds of SE were shared across the internet months prior to Windows 11’s release, giving us a better idea of SE’s capabilities and purpose. Current projections suggest a 2022 release date for Windows 11 SE alongside the new education-focused Surface laptop. We know that Windows 11 SE will be targeted specifically toward the education market (particularly for children). It will run on low-end hardware usually present on school laptops and will feature specific educational features for remote control of school laptops. This…

A beautiful phenomenon connects climate and brightness: clouds. Clouds are a notoriously complicated piece of the climate puzzle. Scientists struggle to model how clouds will respond to climate change and how those responses in turn will shape the future climate. But scientists behind a new study think that the reflectivity finding hinges on the dynamics of clouds over the Pacific Ocean. The research relies on two decades’ worth of observations of a phenomenon called ‘earthshine’, which is the light that Earth reflects onto the surface of the dark side of the Moon, combined with satellite observations of Earth’s reflectivity, or albedo, and the Sun’s brightness. Different features on Earth reflect different amounts of light: the oceans very little, and land about twice as much. Meanwhile, clouds reflect about half the…

Yes, this is the Emerging Tech section of the magazine and yes ten years is really too long for a single piece of technology to be considered ‘emerging’, but Magic Leap seems to have played its magical investment flute again… and real people put money back into it. AI projects with minimal investment, on the other hand, are recreating hidden Picasso masterpieces and providing answers to the world’s complex moral questions, albeit not necessarily the right ones. XR Magic Leap raises another $500M somehow Investors seem willing to take another leap of faith. $NA | magicleap.com There’s been a heap of dreams sold to Silicon Valley investors wanting to get in on the next hit technology, but none that have been quite so shrouded in mystery, run for as long…

$99.95, www.ageofempires.com, PC If you’re new to the series, think of it as a management sim, but one where the aim is to save your people from invaders or to crush whole nations beneath your mighty fist. Control freaks, step right up because you are about to live your best life. You’ll have worker townspeople at your disposal to build up settlements and collect resources, and an army – complete with specialised units and siege weaponry – to command. You need food, gold, wood, and stone to purchase everything you need, collect or trade enough and you can advance your civilisation through different historical ages, offering more advanced technology. Winning is about using all of the above as efficiently as possible depending on the enemy, the map, and its resources…

From $629, www.microsoft.com The Surface Go 3 is Microsoft’s latest attempt to bring its line of Windows tablets and laptops to a more budget-conscious audience, especially now that learning and working from home is becoming so prolific. And, even for people that don’t have to do much serious work from home, having a small Windows 11 device like this that you can easily take with you wherever you go is pretty appealing. However, while the introductory price of just $629 may sound appealing, you’re going to have to add at least $199 to the equation if you want the keyboard, and even then you’re left with a device that has hardware that’s barely capable of handling all the best parts of Windows 11 – 4GB of RAM is not going…

$499, store.netgear.com.au The new Orbi RBK353 is an attempt to provide a more affordable device, providing simple dual-band Wi-Fi 6 with a top speed of 1800Mbps. The Netgear Orbi RBK353 has a similar design to most of the Orbi range, with both router and satellites consisting of an upright, plain white rectangular unit, with a glowing status light located in the base of each unit. The three units look almost identical from the front, but around the back of the main router you’ll find four Gigabit Ethernet ports that set it apart from the satellites. One of these ports is marked in yellow so that you can quickly spot it and use it to connect the Orbi to your existing broadband modem or router for your Internet connection, while the…

$299, www.teamgroupinc.com Design-wise there’s nothing out of the ordinary, and barely any fancy features, concerning this drive. It looks like the gazilions of other USB drives out there with its black body and red accents. There’s a slider that pushes and pulls the USB 3.2 Type-A connector out of the drive; Teamgroup went further by patenting the mechanism as it claims it provides 10 percent extra strength. A plastic body means that the drive is particularly light, which is important to reduce stress on the USB connector. At 9g and with reasonably compact dimensions (78 x 20 x 12.2mm), it fits comfortably in the inner pocket of a pair of jeans. One could potentially pry it open and get rid of the body altogether keeping only the bare electronics but…

Mouse and trackpad tips 1 DEFINE YOUR CLICKS It can be tiring repeatedly pressing down on a trackpad to trigger actions, so don’t. Instead, head into the Trackpad pane in System Preferences and turn on Tap to click. Now, a light tap is all you need. In both Trackpad and Mouse, define whether you want secondary clicks activated (for bringing up things like context menus) and how they should appear, from the various options provided. 2 CONTROL THE WAY YOU SCROLL AND ZOOM If you’ve reasonable dexterity and are comfortable using the pointer, there’s no need to keep to the default tracking speed. In the Mouse and Trackpad panes, ramp up Tracking speed to whatever gives you the best balance between usability, accuracy and not having to swipe multiple times…

1 TURN ON iCLOUD If you’re not using iCloud, turn it on in System Preferences > Apple ID. Ideally, activate everything, including iCloud Drive, Photos, Email, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, Safari, and Keychain. This gets vital content into the cloud, making it accessible on any Apple device you’re signed into with your Apple ID. Although it’s not a backup, it provides a measure of protection, in that if you lose a device, you can sign into your account on another. 2 USE TIME MACHINE Apple makes it easy to backup your Mac – plug in an external drive and you’ll be asked if you want to use Time Machine. Mobile hard drives will do – an external 1TB one costs under $100; or you can opt for speed with an SSD,…

GIVE iCLOUD A NUDGE Apple’s iCloud is a boon on your devices – when it works. But when information won’t sync, it can be deeply frustrating. First, check there’s not a problem with the system: apple.com/support/systemstatus/. Next, assuming your devices are all up to date in terms of their operating systems and you haven’t hit your iCloud storage limit (check in System Preferences), try signing out of iCloud and then back in again. If that still doesn’t fix things, restart all affected devices. Still no luck? Ping Apple support. PRUNE LOGIN ITEMS If an app opens unexpectedly when your Mac boots, open System Preferences. In Users & Groups, select your user, and then Login Items. Select or delete any app you don’t want there. In some cases, you’ll instead need…

Back in 2015 Microsoft decided that it loved Linux. It loved it so much that it built a whole Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which enabled Linux programs and development stacks to run natively. The official statement even involved a heart emoji, which we would have reproduced here but putting in-line images in the body text apparently causes alarm bells and wisps of smoke at the printers. Anyway, heart or no, some people were sceptical of Microsoft’s intentions, with memories of the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” mantra and the 1995 Halloween papers still fresh in their minds. But it does really seem like Microsoft wants to accommodate Linux users (well, developers mostly), rather than force a mass defection. A successor, WSL 2.0, was announced in 2019, which was built around a…

re you part of the slightly sinister sounding Windows Insiders Program? Have you installed an even more sinister-sounding Preview Build of Windows 10 (at least build 20262)? Then it’s easy to run Linux as part of WSL 2.0: just open an administrator-privilege Windows command prompt and run wsl --install . This also works on Preview Builds of Windows 11. A few clicks and pops and a restart later and you’ll be in business. Actually the GUI App Support download is pretty large, so now might be a good time to make a cup of tea. On return WSL, Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Platform, their custom Linux Kernel and Ubuntu should all have been downloaded. Other distros are available and one can specify, for example, wsl --install -d Fedora , to install…

No Store downloads My current problem is with the Microsoft Store. Having read somewhere (I think) that some future Windows 10 updates will be coming through the Store, and having discovered my Calculator app had stopped working some time ago, I thought I’d remove it and reinstall it from the Store. But while it comes up OK, whenever I click the “Get” button, nothing happens. I’ve tried running WSreset.exe, which didn’t fix things, and have tried resetting the Store under “Settings > Apps > Microsoft Store > Advanced Options” but still no change. I’ve also tried PowerShell commands – which I was able to verify had removed and reinstalled the Store – but that made no difference either. I’ve also tried signing out of my Microsoft Account and back in,…

In an ideal world, our trains of thought would whoosh at high speed until they reached their destinations. Unfortunately, in the real world, trains of thought are a bit more like real trains: they’re easily interrupted and often arrive a lot later than they’re supposed to. If you’re finding it hard to focus on what you’re doing when you’re in Windows, the good news is that Windows itself can help. In this tutorial we’ll discover some of the little changes that can make a really big difference to the way Windows feels. We’ll discover how to stop Windows interrupting you with supposedly helpful suggestions, how to automatically enter a special Do Not Disturb mode and how to ensure you don’t miss anything important. We’ll also discover distraction-free writing apps as…

If you’re looking at getting hold of a new phone this Christmas, during your shopping you’ll probably have come across more than a few howlers about built-in biometric security systems. Fingerprint scanners, iris scanners and facial recognition are features on even low-cost phones now, allowing users to unlock, allegedly securely, without having to laboriously tap in their password every time, Not all phones are created equal in this regard, however. There are some pretty big differences between a cheap capacitive fingerprint scanner and an ultrasound fingerprint scanner, for example, and 3D facial recognition is a world away from 2D facial recognition in terms of ease of hacking. Unfortunately, as a consumer it’s often the devil’s own job to research a given product, since vendors of cheaper products often don’t want…